The Many Faces of President Obama

Dear Friends,

After the last midterm elections when President Obama was free to do what he truly wanted to do, he began to do things that I thought were great, e.g. the climate change deal with China and his actions on immigration reform.  Unfortunately, it appears that he is unable to chart a clear course.

Yesterday, Jeffrey Sterling was convicted of violating the Espionage Act by disclosing a secret plan to damage the Iranian nuclear program by providing intentionally misleading documents to the Iranians.  On its face it seems like a rather strange idea and has been characterised as a poorly conceived and executed plan.  Mr. Sterling went first through the chain of command to object to the program and then according to prosecutors went to the press, James Risen in particular.  The prosecutors tried for years to force Mr. Risen to divulge his source, and he refused.

Eventually, right before Mr. Sterling's trial, Attorney General Holder dropped his attempt to get Mr. Risen to testify.  So here is the first reversal.  Under President Obama's watch, Mr. Holder and the Justice Department have been very aggressively attempting to force journalists to reveal their sources.  Now that Mr. Holder is considering his Justice Department legacy, he reversed course on demanding that Mr. Risen divulge his source.  That is a good thing.  However, the Justice Department continued to prosecute Mr. Sterling.

President Obama is all about prosecuting the people that are responsible for letting all of us know the terrible things that our government is doing in our names, including Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and John Kiriakou.  Chelsea Manning and John Kiriakou have both been convicted.  Edward Snowden will never be able to come home without being prosecuted.  These whistleblowers are prosecuted, but the people that committed the crimes that were disclosed by these whistleblowers and others have never been prosecuted - the people that ordered torture, the people that carried out torture, the people that lied about and covered up the torture, the people that destroyed evidence of torture, the people that hacked into the Senate staff computers over the torture investigation, the people that ordered, carried out and hid the illegal spying on Americans, etc., etc., etc.

On another front, a couple of days ago President Obama indicated he would seek further protection of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve which would make it impossible to drill in this area.  That protection would be great.  Unfortunately since it requires Congressional approval, it will never happen so long as the Republicans control Congress.  In support of President Obama, one could argue that he was forcing the Republicans to demonstrate once again that they really do not care about the environment if there is money to be made by big companies.  I am afraid there is another reason.

Yesterday, President Obama indicated that he would permit drilling off virtually the entire Atlantic coast of the United States.  Big oil has been after this area for a long time, but has been unsuccessful at getting any administration to permit it.  The problem here is that President Obama does not need Congressional approval to open the Atlantic coast offshore area to drilling.  He can just do it.  So perhaps the more realistic, even if somewhat cynical, explanation for the ANWR move is to provide President Obama with cover to open up the Atlantic coast.  I can find no logic for denying drilling in ANWR and then permitting it off the Atlantic coast.

Someday President Obama has to make up his mind what he believes in, what he stands for, how he views the Constitution and for whom he is working.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Justice and the Powerful

Dear Friends,

Justice and fairness are sorely lacking in the world today.  Perhaps they always have been, but now it is just so evident.  You have to be intentionally ignorant not to see this lack of justice.  The manner in which our criminal justice system deals with the powerful and the weak is a perfect example

This dichotomy was starkly present in the opinion section of The New York Times yesterday.  One of the lead editorials was entitled "Prosecute the Torturers and their Bosses" (here).  While the editorial calls for the prosecution of the people in power who approved/ordered torture, it admits

as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.

I completely support the call to prosecute those who planned, ordered, condoned and carryout torture.  Unfortunately, the lack of justice in the United States makes it impossible for me to believe that there will ever be any prosecution of these powerful criminals.

Charles Blow's column "Pursuing Justice for All" (here) discusses the complete lack of justice for those who lack power and particularly those persons of color.  The column relates the case of a 14 year old black boy convicted of killing two white girls in South Carolina in 1944.  He was tried, convicted and executed within three months of the killings.  The story is grotesque.  He was 95 pounds, received a completely inadequate defense, was found guilty by an all white, all male jury, and electrocuted.  He was so small he had to sit on a book to fit in the electric chair.  The story says either a telephone book or the Bible.  Recently a South Carolina judge threw out the conviction.

This was a victory of sorts: a 70-years-too-late admission that the justice system failed that black child, and that the failure culminated — in short order — in the taking of his life. Yet something about it feels hollow and discomforting, like the thunder that rolls long after the lightning has cracked the sky and split the tree.
It boldly announces itself in all its noisy nothingness. It was the white flash that did the damage and produced the splinters.
That is all too often what “righting” racial injustice looks like in this country: a hollow pronouncement that follows the damage but doesn’t prevent its recurrence. 

The last sentence of the above quote says it all about justice in my country.  The lack of prosecution of the powerful for torture and the racially biased prosecution of black Americans, no matter how we might talk about them at the time or later, clearly instructs future generations that the powerful can commit crimes without fear of accountability, but the weak must fear prosecution whether they have done anything wrong or not.  No nation that lacks equal justice under the law can call itself civilized.  The United States tortures people and executes often innocent people.  What is civilized about that?

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Torture and Hypocrisy

Dear Friends,

The torture conducted by the United States, in our names, was not only illegal and morally despicable, it has demonstrated the incredible hypocrisy of the United States.  Two items in The New York Times this morning clearly demonstrate this hypocrisy.

The first was an article entitled "Obama Favors Sanctions for Abuse of Venezuela Protestors" by William Neuman (here).  

President Obama plans to sign into law a bill that would impose sanctions on Venezuelan government officials responsible for human rights violations or violence against protesters who took part in antigovernment demonstrations here this year, a White House spokesman said in Washington on Thursday.

How hypocritical is it for President Obama to refuse to prosecute important and powerful people who tortured while sanctioning other countries for their human rights violations?

The second is a letter to the editor.

To the Editor:Is it not incumbent upon President Obama, now that the torture report has at last been released, to pardon the heroic C.I.A. officer who refused to participate in torture and instead revealed its use?
The officer, John C. Kiriakou, was sentenced last year to 30 months for leaking information to the news media. He remains in prison and was stripped of all that he had earned in a distinguished career at the C.I.A., while those who dishonored the agency and the nation continue to be seen on the Sunday talk shows defending the indefensible — torture.
BEATRICE WILLIAMS-RUDE
New York, Dec. 10, 2014

President Obama is willing to jail people who bring to light torture but not the people who condoned, ordered and carried out torture.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Torture

Dear Friends,

International and domestic law contain absolute bans on torture.  Any civilized and moral society must ban all torture - no exceptions.

United States law defines torture as follows:

(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;(2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from—(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality;

There can be no doubt under this definition that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques used by the United States are torture.

Under International law, it is clear that the "just following orders" defense is invalid.  That rule was clearly established in the Nuremberg trials.

Vice President Cheney has admitted that he either ordered or condoned waterboarding and is therefore guilty of violating United States and International law and should be prosecuted along with all the others that condoned torture, ordered torture and carried out torture.

Failure to prosecute and hold torturers accountable for their action will reduce the moral authority of the United States, put us in the category of regimes that torture and be a clear signal to future Presidents and CIA Directors that torture is ok and will not be punished.

CIA Director John Brennan in his speech yesterday defending the CIA when questioned about the future indicated that the future use of torture is left to policy makers.  He was very clear that the CIA will carry out torture if directed to do so by the policy makers.  President Obama should immediately remove him from his position, clearly repudiate torture and prosecute all who ordered, condoned and engaged in torture.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

President Obama's Mixed Messages

Dear Friends,

There have been a couple of items in the news that have made clear the mixed messages and double standards applied by President Obama (and I am afraid most Americans).

First, I and many others are awaiting the release of the long overdue Senate report on torture, rendition, etc. by the United States.  While President Obama has said on numerous occasions that torture is wrong and the United States was wrong when it did it and while on his second day in office he banned torture (who would have thought that we needed an executive order to ban torture), President Obama seems willing to permit the CIA to redact the Senate report so as to make a mockery of transparency.  For a great report on this issue, please read Mark Mazzetti's article in The New York Times (here).  The last paragraph of that article reads:

On Monday, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said that “it is important that a declassification process be carried out that protects sources and methods and other information that is critical to our national security.”

The White House misses the point, there needs to be a balance between transparency and national security and the CIA has proven over and over again that it is not the agency that should be doing the balancing.

But the real problem is that President Obama refuses to hold the ones who ordered the torture accountable for their illegal and immoral actions.  There is a great op-ed piece in The New York Times by retired Major General Taguba, the Army general who did the report on Abu Ghraib and was eventually forced to retire because he told the truth and believed in accountability (here).  In a true understatement he writes, "accountability for the architects of torture has proved elusive".

The message being sent by President Obama is very clear to future leaders, political, military and CIA, that even if you do things that are clearly illegal and immoral you do not have to worry about being held accountable either by open disclosure of what you did or prosecution for the war and other crimes that you committed.

Second, President Obama continues to deport and try to deport unaccompanied minors and parents with children who are fleeing violence, poverty and death in Central America.  These people are refugees many of whom are entitled to asylum under our laws and certainly our values.  Yet despite his statements about due process, President Obama continues to fast track deportation without giving these refugees appropriate legal representation or due process.

Just as I was embarrassed to be an American when President George W. Bush was torturing and rendering people, I am embarrassed that today in my name, President Obama is sending child refugees back to Central America to face violence and in many cases death.  I commend to you an article in The New York Times by Julia Preston (here).  It is a heartbreaking account that saddens me to think that our country and this President could be so heartless.

The White House has said over and over again that its heartless behavior is necessary to send a message to other children and parents in Central America that they should not make the treacherous journey to the United States to save their lives because they will be sent right back.

So the two messages that President Obama is sending are contradictory and despicable.  If you are a powerful United States President or other leader, feel free to break the law with impunity, but if you are a child refugee fleeing Central America to save your life, stay home and die because there is no room for you in the United States.

What has happened to the country I love?

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

[R] Redaction

Dear Friends,

The Obama Administration is at it again.  Not only do they not want to hold people accountable for their misdeeds, they do not want to permit anybody to talk about the mistakes that our government has made.  The New York Times published a story entitled "C.I.A. Demands Cuts in Book about 9/11 and Terror Fight" by Scott Shane (here).   The facts are very straight forward, Ali H. Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who spent years fighting terror wrote a book which details among other things how the C.I.A. failed to follow up on intelligence that might have prevented 9/11 and how the C.I.A.'s torture (for some reason everybody including The New York Times calls it harsh interrogation techniques) really did not work. Well surprise surprise the C.I.A. redacted significant parts of the book supposedly based on national security and the disclosure of classified information.  Not true says the article.

Some of the scores of cuts demanded by the C.I.A. from Mr. Soufan’s book, “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,” seem hard to explain on security grounds.
Among them, according to the people who have seen the correspondence, is a phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available both as video and transcript on the Web. Also chopped are references to the word “station” to describe the C.I.A.’s overseas offices, common parlance for decades.
The agency removed the pronouns “I” and “me” from a chapter in which Mr. Soufan describes his widely reported role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator and training camp boss. And agency officials took out references to the fact that a passport photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers who later lived in San Diego, Khalid al-Midhar, had been sent to the C.I.A. in January 2000 — an episode described both in the 9/11 commission report and Mr. Tenet’s book.

It is clearly true that history is written by the victors, but I thought that President Obama was going to at least try to transform Washington but alas he seems able to out do even President George W. Bush when it comes to protecting those in power.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

[A] Accountability and Torture

Dear Friends,

The Obama Administration is defending Donald Rumsfeld in a law suit brought by an American citizen who claims he was tortured by the US.  Here is a summary of the case from NPR (here):

The lawsuit lays out a dramatic tale of the disappearance of the then-civilian contractor, an Army veteran in his 50s whose identity is being withheld from court filings for fear of retaliation. Attorneys for the man, who speaks five languages and worked as a translator for Marines collecting intelligence in Iraq, say he was preparing to come home to the United States on annual leave when he was abducted by the U.S. military and held without justification while his family knew nothing about his whereabouts or even whether he was still alive.
The government says he was suspected of helping pass classified information to the enemy and helping anti-coalition forces get into Iraq. But he was never charged with a crime, and he says he never broke the law and was risking his life to help his country.
Court papers filed on his behalf say he was repeatedly abused while being held at Camp Cropper, a U.S. military facility near the Baghdad airport dedicated to holding "high-value" detainees, then suddenly released without explanation in August 2006.
Two years later, he filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington arguing that Rumsfeld personally approved torturous interrogation techniques on a case-by-case basis and controlled his detention without access to courts in violation of his constitutional rights.

I certainly would not be surprised to learn that Mr. Rumsfeld had done exactly what the plaintiff is alleging that he did.  What I find revolting is that the Obama Administration is claiming that legally Mr. Rumsfeld can not be held accountable for his actions.

The Obama administration has represented Rumsfeld through the Justice Department and argued that the former defense secretary cannot be sued personally for official conduct. The Justice Department also argued that a judge cannot review wartime decisions that are the constitutional responsibility of Congress and the president. And the department said the case could disclose sensitive information and distract from the war effort and that the threat of liability would impede future military decisions.

 I bet you thought that President George W. Bush had an overblown view of the powers of the executive branch of government.  He does not hold a candle to President Obama's view of the Imperial President.  Fortunately, at least one Federal court judge is unwilling to let the Obama Administration get away with this injustice.

But U.S. District Judge James Gwin rejected those arguments and said U.S. citizens are protected by the Constitution at home or abroad during wartime.
"The court finds no convincing reason that United States citizens in Iraq should or must lose previously-declared substantive due process protections during prolonged detention in a conflict zone abroad," Gwin wrote in a ruling issued Tuesday.

President Obama promised to end torture because it was wrong.  Instead of defending the people responsible for authorizing torture, he should be holding them accountable.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal