Obama’s Illegal Assaults

How once-controversial ‘war on terror’ tactics became the new normal.

Anti-torture activists demonstrate June 23, in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. (Photo by: Karen

Barack Obama has continued virtually all of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s once-controversial terrorism and civil liberties policies, a fact now recognized across the political spectrum. Even the right wing acknowledges these policies have continued under the Obama presidency, which is interesting, because for decades Republicans have made political hay by accusing Democrats of being weak on national security (or “soft on terrorism” in this age of terror).

For example, Jack Goldsmith, a right-wing ideologue and a high-ranking Justice Department official in George W. Bush’s first term—when “enhanced interrogation techniques” (what the civilized world calls “torture”) were frequently employed—has criticized Dick Cheney’s daughter and Irving Crystal’s son for claiming that Obama has abandoned these policies. In a 2009 article for The New Republic, he writes:

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Obama losing chance to reshape judiciary

Liberals had hoped he would counter a slew of conservative appointments in federal courts made by his Republican predecessors. But that hasn't happened.

President Obama's appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is one high-profile success. UC Berkeley professor Goodwin Liu has been nominated to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, but he is expected to meet significant GOP resistance. (Dilip Vishwanat, Getty Images; Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images; Laura Morton, For The Times)

By James Oliphant

An early chance for the Obama administration to reshape the nation's judiciary -- and counter gains made in the federal courts by conservatives -- appears close to slipping away, due to a combination of White House inattention and Republican opposition.

During President Obama's first year, judicial nominations trickled out of the White House at a far slower pace than in President George W. Bush's first year. Bush announced 11 nominees for federal appeals courts in the fourth month of his tenure. Obama didn't nominate his 11th appeals court judge until November, his 10th month in office.

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Justice Denied: Eight Years and Counting

By Suzanne Ito Monday Jan 11, 2010 7:00pm

Eight years ago today, a Department of Defense C-141 transport plane carrying 20 prisoners arrived in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. On that day, January 11, 2002, the naval base began operating as a detention center for men captured in President Bush's so-called "war on terror."

Since that day, nearly 800 prisoners, men as old as 98 and boys as young as 13, have passed through Gitmo. The notorious prison camp has seared into the mind of the world images of hooded, goggled, orange-jumpsuit-clad prisoners shackled in cages. Guantánamo has become synonymous with torture and abuse. Its very existence is a symbol of disregard for the rule of law.

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Bench Press: Are Obama’s judges really liberals?

by Jeffrey Toobin

The Obama Administration wanted to send a message with the President’s first nomination to a federal court. “There was a real conscious decision to use that first appointment to say, ‘This is a new way of doing things. This is a post-partisan choice,’ ” one White House official involved in the process told me. “Our strategy was to show that our judges could get Republican support.” So on March 17th President Obama nominated David Hamilton, the chief federal district-court judge in Indianapolis, to the Seventh Circuit court of appeals. Hamilton had been vetted with care. After fifteen years of service on the trial bench, he had won the highest rating from the American Bar Association; Richard Lugar, the senior senator from Indiana and a leading Republican, was supportive; and Hamilton’s status as a nephew of Lee Hamilton, a well-respected former local congressman, gave him deep connections. The hope was that Hamilton’s appointment would begin a profound and rapid change in the confirmation process and in the federal judiciary itself.

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New Justice Could Hold the Key to Presidential Power

By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: May 24, 2009

WASHINGTON — As President Obama prepares to replace Justice David H. Souter on the Supreme Court, conventional wisdom says his nominee will have little chance to change the court because all the contenders appear to share Justice Souter’s approach on social issues, like abortion rights.

But the effect on presidential power could be pivotal. Important rulings on executive authority — striking down military commissions and upholding habeas corpus rights for Guantánamo detainees — have been decided by a five-vote majority, including Justice Souter, on the nine-member court.

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The Torture Memos, Obama and the Banality of Evil

by Richard Kim

Even as President Obama acted in the name of transparency and accountabilty in releasing the Bush administration's OLC's torture memos, he made assurances that the CIA agents who used the "enhanced interrogation techniques" meticulously detailed within would not be subject to criminal prosecution. Glenn Greenwald at Salon, Jeremy Scahill on his blog, David Bromwich at Huffington Post and Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic all have good takes on why Obama's decision is wrong. I concur. However politically expedient, Obama's nearly carte blanche absolution of torture was morally wrong, and his justification of it, from a professor of constitutional law, is intellectually dishonest.

Obama's rationalizations were artfully made to the point of being obfuscatory, but they can be boiled down to three points:

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Obama's Bad Bank Plan Could Destroy His Promising Presidency -- How Do We Push Him in the Right Direction?

By Robert Kuttner, Huffington Post. Posted April 14, 2009.

It ain't easy to play the role of loyal opposition to a progressive president who seems determined at times to be captured by Wall Street.


"Part of the Way with LBJ" --Students for a Democratic Society button, circa 1964

Progressives now find themselves in an awkward position of simultaneously wishing Barack Obama well, but feeling dismayed by his policies on some key issues, most notably the banking bailout. If this were a normal economic situation, the posture of semi-opposition would not be that big a deal. We would simply gratefully accept the decent policies and keep pressing for bolder ones. But a failure to revive the banking system would be Obama's Vietnam. It would wreck everything else.

It's a too-familiar position for progressives, one that winds back through all of the postwar Democratic administrations of my adulthood. We wanted Lyndon Johnson to push harder for civil rights and anti-poverty and not ruin it all in Vietnam. We were appalled at Jimmy Carter's attacks on government, his failure to use his large Democratic majority in Congress to press for progressive legislation, his refusal to lift a finger on behalf of labor law reform. The memories of Bill Clinton are sufficiently recent that we need little reminder of the needless tilt to the right on economic issues from NAFTA to welfare reform to financial deregulation.

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I'm afraid I have zero confidence in Obama's financial rescue plan. He's just trying to keep the Ponzi Scheme going. Hoping for a miracle. Tom

Obama to Expand Bush Faith Program

by Carrie Budoff Brown

President Barack Obama, who has been reversing course on a host of Bush administration policies, Thursday will make a bid to expand and strengthen one of the programs most closely associated with his predecessor.

George W. Bush created the White House faith-based grant program, and Obama intends to keep the same structure. But Obama is going a significant step further, with the creation of a new board of advisers whose recommendations will be woven directly into his policy-making apparatus.

Under Bush, a White House-based program to encourage grants to faith-based social service programs began with high hopes and a barrage of publicity. But over time this Bush hallmark suffered amid complaints from many of its backers that it had become marginalized and used for partisan purposes by White House political aides.

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How is this change? Tom

The confusion over renditions

By Richard Clarke January 29, 2009

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S order to close the Guantanamo prison provoked comments from the right about the risks of bringing terrorist prisoners to the United States. His order banning torture, but not outlawing "extraordinary renditions," caused some on the left to complain. Both groups of critics, though, either overlook relevant parts of recent history or simply get that history wrong.

Before George W. Bush, there was no real question about what the United States should do with people who broke American anti-terror laws. It did not matter whether they were arrested in the United States or overseas. In the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, for example, one suspect, Muhammad Salameh, was caught in New Jersey. Another, Ramzi Yousef, was caught in Pakistan. Upon arrest, both were given their Miranda rights, arraigned before a US magistrate, given a free lawyer appointed by the court, tried and convicted before a jury, and sentenced to the "Supermax" prison in Florence, Colo.

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This all seems kind of sensible. The kind of sensible that has been absent for 8 years. Tom

Bush's 'War' On Terror Comes to a Sudden End

By Dana PriestWashington Post Staff Writer Friday, January 23, 2009; Page A01

President Obama yesterday eliminated the most controversial tools employed by his predecessor against terrorism suspects. With the stroke of his pen, he effectively declared an end to the "war on terror," as President George W. Bush had defined it, signaling to the world that the reach of the U.S. government in battling its enemies will not be limitless.

While Obama says he has no plans to diminish counterterrorism operations abroad, the notion that a president can circumvent long-standing U.S. laws simply by declaring war was halted by executive order in the Oval Office.

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It will be interesting to see if Obama's new take on the war on terror can survive a terrorist attack. A recent Rand study recommended fighting the war on terror as a police action, not as a war. Obama's first steps,including shutting down the military tribunals are encouraging. Tom

On Roe v. Wade's Anniversary, Obama to Begin Mopping Up Bush's Misogynistic Mess

By Emily Douglas, RH Reality Check. Posted January 22, 2009.

The Obama administration has women's reproductive rights and health high on its agenda.

President Obama took office just 48 hours ago, and the world is already a very different place for women and their reproductive health.

Global Gag Rule, Conscience Rule, and Ban on Stem Cell Funding on the Chopping Block

Word is that the administration will repeal the global gag rule today, on the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. "This is a big victory for women overseas," said Tod Preston, vice president for government relations at Population Action International, told the LA Times. "We know their health has been severely impacted by the cutoff. If you want to reduce unintended pregnancies, abortion and women dying from high-risk pregnancies because they don't have access to family planning, you don't do it by cutting off U.S. assistance."

The LA Times reportsthat the new administration also plans to "freeze" many of the midnight regulations promulgated by the Bush administration, including the Department of Health and Human Services's provider conscience expansion, which would enable health care providers to deny access to critical health care, including forms of contraception, to women. But the New York Times says addressing this regulation may take more time, as it went into effect January 19: "A 1983 Supreme Court decision suggests that the new administration would need to go through a formal rule-making process, with an opportunity for public comment, if it wanted to revoke this rule."

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Is America's Love Affair with Stupidity Finally Over?

By Liz Langley, AlterNet. Posted January 14, 2009.

Americans' embrace of the Obamas and other intelligent public figures may be part of a much-needed cultural shift.

"There was a time in this country when smart people were considered cool -- well not cool, but they did things like build ships and pyramids and they even went in the moon ... I believe that time can come again."

That's an abridged quote from Idiocracy, the 2006 scarily spot-on parody film about what life will be like on Earth in 500 years if we don't throw a Stop Stick under the tires of the dumbing-down process. Written and directed by Mike Judge ("Beavis and Butthead," "King of the Hill") in Judge's world of tomorrow, the top TV show is "Ow! My Balls!" on the Violence Channel, and the U.S. president is an ex-porn star and pro-wrestler.

Idiocracy is supposed to be a comedy, but it's hard not to get a little chill after you see it and realize that this world is closer to us than Russia is to Sarah Palin's breakfast nook. Every time an ad screams "EXTREME!", every time we glimpse the failures of abstinence-only education (like the teen pregnancy rate going up in 2006 for the first time in 15 years), every time an SUV that amounts to a panic-room-on-wheels slops its grotesque bulk into more than one parking space, every time a cadre of degreed journalists report on what Suri, Shiloh and Apple are wearing to each other's birthday parties, every time Paris Hilton is in our line of vision, we inch closer to Judge's future.

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Inauguration - Timeline

9:00 AM VIPs begin arriving
Former Presidents
Governors
Members of the House of Representatives
United States Senators
Cabinet designees
9:45 AM Platform seating begins
11:03 AM Former Presidents announced and seated
11:12AM Biden family announced and seated
11:14AM Obama family announced and seated
11:16AM Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Cheney announced and seated
11:18AM Mrs. Obama and Dr. Biden announced and seated
11:20AM President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney announced and seated
11:22AM Vice President-elect Joe Biden announced and seated
11:25AM President-elect Barack Obama is announced and seated
11:30 AM Senator Feinstein delivers opening remarks
11:34 AM Senator Feinstein introduces Pastor Rick Warren
11:35 AM Invocation by Pastor Rick Warren
11:37 AM Senator Feinstein introduces Aretha Franklin
11:38 AM Aretha Franklin – ―My Country Tis of Thee‖
11:42 AM Senator Feinstein introduces Senator Bennett
11:44 AM Senator Bennett introduces Associate Justice Stevens
11:46AM Vice Presidential Oath administered by Associate Justice Stevens
11:47AM Senator Feinstein introduces performers
11:48AM Yo-Yo Ma, Anthony McGill, Gabriela Montero, Itzhak Perlman –
―Air and Simple Gifts‖ composed by John Williams
11:53AM Senator Feinstein introduces Chief Justice Roberts
11:54AM Chief Justice and President-elect Barack Obama move to podium
11:56AM The Presidential oath is administered.
11:57AM Herald Trumpets perform 4 ―Ruffles and Flourishes‖ and the U.S. Marine Corp
Band plays ―Hail to the Chief.‖ Twenty one gun salute.
11:58AM Senator Feinstein introduces the President
12:01PM Inaugural address
12:21PM Senator Feinstein introduces poet Elizabeth Alexander
12:27PM Benediction given by Reverend Joseph Lowery
12:31PM Presidential party departs from platform
12:32 PM Departure ceremony
12:36 PM President and Mrs. Bush depart from the East plaza in helicopter
12:52 PM President’s Room signing ceremony
1:05 PM Statuary Hall luncheon
2:32 PM Review of the troops
2:36 PM President and Mrs. Obama, and Vice President and Dr. Biden leaves with parade

Inauguration Special

Just to let everyone know, the Centre is showing live tv feed of the Inauguration in the faculty/student lounge.
2nd Floor. Centre of Criminology.
Tom

Senator Whitehouse to investigate BushCo even if Obama doesn’t

by markthshark
Thu Jan 15, 2009 at 03:25:30 AM PST

As diaries go, this isn’t much of one but the information herein is, I believe, both newsworthy, and (for many of us progressives) very heartening. It certainly made me smile this mornin'
It seems hope does spring eternal.

Over the past week or so, President-elect Obama, Vice President-elect Biden, various cable news pundits, and a slew of progressive bloggers have all weighed in on whether the outgoing Bush administration should/will be investigated for ordering the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and other U.S. run detainee facilities around the world.

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This sounds good but the Senate and the House hasn't even been able to enforce subpoenas against the Bush Whitehouse. And its entirely possible the the Supreme Court will side with the Unitary Executive and say Bush and his pals don't have to respond to the Subpoenas. Tom

Obama on Torture: Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

posted by Ari Melber on 01/12/2009 @ 11:22am

The Obama administration will not focus on prosecuting government officials who practiced illegal torture or war crimes, the president-elect said on Sunday, though he added that prosecutions and independent commission have not been completely ruled out. This was Obama's first major statement on the issue since April; over the past few weeks, Obama's aides have repeatedly ducked questions about what, if anything, the administration will do to enforce laws violated by officials under President Bush. The question topped the list of citizen concerns on Change.gov last week, out of over 70,000 submissions, but Obama aide Robert Gibbs refused to respond, leading ABC's George Stephanopoulos to press the question during an interview on his Sunday show.

"My orientation's going to be to move forward," Obama said. The attorney general has to stay above politics and "uphold the Constitution," Obama added, but his administration will focus on "getting things right in the future as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past."

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Ignoring war crimes isn't focusing on the future. Nor is it staying above politics. Of course the media hardly questioned Bush about torture for eight years. And the media accepted Bush's lame use of semantics to deny that the U.S. used torture. Looks like widespread criminal behavior is just going to get ignored. On Wall St. and in the Whitehouse. Tom

Change They Can Litigate

The fringe movement to keep Barack Obama from becoming president.

By David WeigelPosted Thursday, Dec. 4, 2008, at 4:25 PM ET

If you want to stop Barack Obama from becoming president, there's still time. But you have to act right now. Go to RallyCongress.com, and you can be the 126,000th-odd American to demand "proof of citizenship" from the president-elect. Follow the instructions at WeMustBeHeard.com, and you can join a sit-in outside the Supreme Court of the United States, starting at 8 a.m. Friday, as the justices decide whether to consider a suit filed by a professional poker player that challenges the presidential eligibility of Obama, John McCain, and Socialist Workers candidate Roger Calero.

Can't make it to Washington, D.C.? Too bad—you missed your chance to FedEx a letter to the justices for only $10, sponsored by the venerable right-wing site (and Chuck Norris column outlet) WorldNetDaily. "There is grave, widespread and rapidly growing concern throughout the American public," writes WND Editor Joseph Farah, "that this constitutional requirement is being overlooked and enforcement neglected by state and federal election authorities."

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Chuck Norris is a great American. Tom

SCOTUS Procedures and the "Citizenship Case"

by profmatt Thu Dec 04, 2008 at 08:05:17 AM PST

What with all the brouhaha about the (moronic) "Obama Citizenship" cases, time for a primer about how the Supreme Court and lawsuits work.

A federal case begins in a Federal District Court. The trial court hears the case and ultimately makes a final decision on it. Until there is a final decision, you cannot appeal (with very few exceptions). Common final decisions are:

A) A grant of a motion to dismiss, finding that the allegations in the complaint are not enough to state a cause of action. A subset of this is how the "Citizenship" cases were decided--in order to bring a case, you must have "standing"--this means you must show that you, personally, are being or will be harmed. If you lack standing, you can't pursue the case.

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In case you're wondering what this is about, someone is claiming Obama isn't a naturally born American and therefore can't be president of the United States. Its a nuisance suit that Justice Thomas has, at the very least, kept alive for no obvious reason. Here is some more info on the case. Tom

Indian Crisis "Tests" Obama

by John Nichols

This transition period was supposed to be all about getting a grip on the financial crisis -- and it looked this week as if Barack Obama has succeeded sufficiently to take the Thanksgiving holiday off. But on Wednesday, the president-elect was reminded that he is inheriting messes far beyond Wall Street.

The devastating attacks in Mumbai -- which have left more than 100 dead and three times that number seriously wounded -- have put the war on terror back in competition for Obama's urgent attention. And the reported focus of the attackers in U.S. and European visitors to India makes this anything but a foreign affair.

Wednesday's developments do not quite qualify as the "test" famously anticipated during the fall campaign by Joe Biden, the outgoing Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair who will now serve as Obama's loose-lipped vice president. But Obama and his aides are scrambling to refocus after a key American ally suffered a devastating attack that John McLaughlin, the former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency refers to as "India's 9-11."

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Just because someone says this is "India's 9-11" doesn't make it so. Just because someone says this validates Obama's choices of Clinton and Gates doesn't make it so. And just because someone says this is a test of Obama doesn't make it so. The U.S., Obama, and the world need a whole new approach to "terrorism". Everyone should re-read the Rand Report on fighting terrorism before embracing more of the same. And notice how even a progressive publication like The Nation can't help themselves from furthering the meme about Biden's loose lips. Tom

If Obama Doesn't Prosecute Bush's Torture Team, We'll Pay a Big Price Down the Road

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted November 28, 2008.

Obama isn't likely to pursue torture atrocities during the Bush era, but this is one problem you simply can't wish away.

How did it come about that American military personnel stripped detainees naked, put them in stress positions, used dogs to scare them, put leashes around their necks to humiliate them, hooded them, deprived them of sleep and blasted music at them? Were these actions the result of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own? It would be a lot easier to accept if it were. But that's not the case."

-- Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, June 17, 2008
***
It was a short but significant report in Newsweek last week, and it began like this:

Despite the hopes of many human rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration. But one idea that has currency among some top Obama advisers is setting up a 9/11-style commission that would investigate counterterrorism policies and make public as many details as possible. "At a minimum, the American people have to be able to see and judge what happened," said one senior adviser, who asked not to be identified for talking about policy matters. The commission would be empowered to order the U.S. intelligence agencies to open their files for review and question senior officials who approved "waterboarding" and other controversial practices.

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Obama needs to do something about torture and a whole lot of other things. Tom