Obama's Legacy

Upon the occasion of his second term inauguration, there has been much talk of Obama's likely legacy, the theory being that he is now better able to decide what it will be than he was in his first term. It leads to the question of what his legacy is shaping up to be so far.

One item frequently mentioned is not really of Obama's own doing. Being elected while black is not to Obama's credit but that of the electorate. Moreover, this particular racial barrier fell for the Whitehouse much later than it was broken in Congress or the Supreme Court. As an "Obama legacy" I expect it to amount to no more than a footnote in the end.

Obamacare? Setting aside that its actual content is much more a product of Congress than of Obama's authorship it comes after Medicare, Medicaid and the Bush Administration's drug benefit. Much will undoubtedly also follow if only in correction of Obamacare's flaws and deficiencies. In context it will not seem that big a step -- not necessarily even a step forward.

No, as of this moment the central feature of Obama's legacy as it will be seen in the long view taken by history is, in my opinion, his "look forward, not back" policy regarding torture and other likely war crimes. By this will he join the Bush Administration in the annals of infamy.

Torture, assasination and who knows what else?

Rights groups sue over U.S. authority to use terror kill list

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal lawsuit Monday challenging the U.S. government's authority to target and kill U.S. citizens outside of war zones when they are suspected of involvement in terrorism.

Obama reaped a harvest of praise when he ordered an end to torture, ("enhanced interrogation"), but he left loopholes: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12041
Neither has he done anything at all to inhibit the un-banning of the full torture regime by a successor Administration -- or even his own. The ban has the earmarks of mere expedient political posturing as opposed to an act of either moral principle or fidelity to the rule of law. It therefore comes as no surprise to this observer that the President, like many a shabby third world despot, is also comfortable with the deployment of death squads.

Comforting delusions

If waterboarding is not torture then chocolate isn't fattening, smoking is not hazardous to ones health, cops never arrest the wrong person and that nice fellow offering to sell it to us has a genuine deed to the Brooklyn Bridge. We are talking about comforting delusions here folks. They happen because there are always some things that we would prefer to believe even when they are ridiculous. Well trained legal professionals offering legal advice should be above crude delusional errors of this kind. When they pretend not to be it is another comforting delusion that they would like us to believe in.

Not only should Yoo and Bybee have been held to account instead of perpetuating the expedient fiction that they commited only innocent errors but so should the CIA and other governmental lawyers to whom their torture memos were addressed. As legal professionals themselves they are responsible for exercising independent critical judgment. They have no excuse for not rejecting the memos as the frauds they clearly were.

Who are the DOJ lawyers really protecting

By his forbearance to seek prosecutions as well as his continuation of many Bush-Cheney polices and claims to "unitary executive" style authority President Obama has made himself complicit in the subversion of international treaty law and the Constitution. The main legal protection that Bush-Cheney officials, and now President Obama, have are the distorted DOJ analyses that what was done or condoned was not technically illegal. This defense relies strongly on the notion that the DOJ opinions were not deliberately contrived in conspiracy with officials who otherwise might face war crime charges. Protecting Yoo and Bybee by asserting their good intentions is a necessary part of a broad defense strategy that apparent violations of humanitarian law were only innocent mistakes of judgment. Make no mistake, the main object is to protect not the CIA interrogators but the Presidents who are ultimately responsible. If it were just the CIA interrogators they might well be thrown to the wolves much as some of the military ones were. DOJ lawyers in both cases are not really judging government employees who are without influence in the DOJ. They are being asked, indirectly, to indict Presidents. An independent Judiciary, if we have such, might produce a more honest result but I am not hopeful that it would or could take jurisdiction.

It is official: sanctioning torture is not punishable.

Late Friday is when government officials make announcements that they hope will go little noticed. Here is today's, found first not on the NYT or WaPo websites but in the British Guardian's:

An inquiry by the US justice department last night reprimanded two senior Bush era lawyers who approved the use of torture at Guantánamo Bay. The department found the two lawyers, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, guilty of poor judgment but not professional misconduct.

Either this is yet more politically motivated deliberate and disgraceful misinterpretation of the law or the seemingly clear laws against torture, including the Geneva Conventions, are absolutely useless. I can see no possible third alternative. Evidentally an Administration willing to politicize the DOJ can do whatever it pleases with impunity and even count on a successor Administration to acquiesce to its malfeasance.

Getting back to Dick Cheney, former Veep and winner of the Grima Wormtongue lifetime achievement award for deceptive governance, I sincerely hope that he continues to press for vindication of the Bush/Cheney "enhanced interrogation", (i.e., torture), policy. I believe the likely result, unintended by Mr. Cheney, will be closer examination not only of whether those policies "worked" in the narrow sence of certain items of information gained, (if they really were), but in the broader context of over all effect.

Anyone who wonders what I mean by that should see CNN political commentator Paul Begala's excellent arguments on the Huffington Post today: "Mr. Cheney, You Did Not Keep Us Safe".

Dick, if you can read this, you've been warned.

I don't have much time for watching television, not even the Sunday morning political interview shows. Fortunately, reporting on the Web keeps me well informed so I see that Dick Cheney was defending "enhanced interrogation" on CBS's Face The Nation. What can't be pointed out enough is that he is basically claiming that the threat of terrorist attack is so mortally dire that we cannot afford to retain the moral priciples we fought for as recently as WWII.

This is only incidentally about partisan politics. This is only incidentally about military strategy. The main issue is even more serious than the very serious question of rule of law. This is ultimately about whether we as a nation are an agent and defender of civilization or a decadent mob of barbaric cowards.

The chance that any one of us might physically fall victim to a terror attack is quite small. The danger of being mentally terrorized is much greater, but there is a cure for that. We must remind ourselves of who we are. Courage come from what we believe in -- in what we would die for if neccessary since to live without it would be unbearable. I believe I must love my neighbor as myself. No, I am not talking about loving the terrorists. I am talking about loving my fellow citizens enough that I would not sacrifice their lives for my safety. I cannot, in good conscience ask brave soldiers, sailors and Marines to leave their families and face death to protect me from such a small risk. I cannot ask goverment intelligence agents to brutalize themselves, hardening themselves to the pain they inflict upon others so that I can feel ever so slightly safer. I cannot stand to think myself such a coward. The threat of terrorism is sufficiently acute to justify legal and moral counter-measures. The "war" on terror was from the start a panicky over-reaction. I ask my fellow Americans to get over thier fear so that we can stand tall once more.

This morning there was an item in the Washingto Post, ("WaPo"), about what Speaker of the House Pelosi knew or may have known about the CIA "enhanced interrogations".

Republicans have accused Pelosi and other Democrats who attended the earliest classified briefings of knowing what CIA operatives were doing and offering their support for the methods, including waterboarding. They argue that Pelosi, who served as the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee until January 2003, objected only after the use of the techniques became public several years later.

Pelosi admits to understanding from her 2002 briefing that the Bush Administration had prepared legal opinions by which waterboarding would be legal.

"We were not -- I repeat -- were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used. What they did tell us is that they had some . . . Office of [Legal] Counsel opinions, that they could be used, but not that they would," she told reporters on April 23.

Yeah sure, no cause for alarm here. OLC just figured the CIA folks had a lot of time to kill and could use some purely academic legal opinions to decipher in case they ran out of crossword puzzles.

Pelosi never filed any official letter of protest, but some lawmakers said such objections to the Bush administration at that time were pointless.

If even a protest over a possible war crime is "pointless" then Congress has a very serious Constitutional issue with the Executive independent of the also terribly serious torture issue. It takes a real coward to do absolutely nothing about either problem.

At WaPo I posted a comment to this article using a login obtained from Bugmenot. I quote myself here:

Anyone who wants to understand the real nature of this scandal should at least glance over two texts. Both are treaties, "supreme law of the land" under the Constitution and both are in very clear non-legalese because they are intended for a much broader audience than just lawyers.

Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions
http://www.amnestyusa.org/war-on-terror/torture/common-article-iii-of-the-geneva-conventions/page.do?id=1351086

Convention Against Torture
http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm

Does it seem reasonable that waterboarding could be legal if the above are the law? Even if we suppose that there could be a valid interpretation, however improbable, that waterboarding was consistent with these laws wouldn't you wonder how that could be? If you had official responsibility either as an agent of law enforcement or in an oversight capacity and had formally sworn to defend the Constitution would you simply take the word of the same organization that was proposing possible use of the waterboard or would you want an impartial second opinion? Would it not even occur to you that you are possibly being invited to acquiesce in a war crime?

I can't help but feel that once politicians, most of whom are lawyers, become either the supreme drafters of law in Congress or the supreme enforcer of law in the Whitehouse they start assuming they are above the law, or perhaps more accurately, that politics supersedes law.

One can certainly get the impression that politics trumps law if one relies on the opinions of WaPo editors and their gang of neocon columnists who consistently avoid mention of the law and are determined to depict the issue as a fight over a policy difference instead of one of criminality in high places, (as they might if it were a simple bribery scandal).

Please bookmark the links I have provided and as new developments are reported be sure to ask yourself if this is just politics going on or something even more sinister.

A Wealth of Notions Begins

Welcome to my brand new blog. Please be patient with me while I learn the controls.

My current major concern is with the torture authorized by the George W. Bush Administration and what must be done about it. That so many right-wingers, partisan Republicans and even some Democrats can claim with a straight face that the "harsh interrogations" were not torture is public denial of a magnitude I had hardly thought possible.

I believe that a so-called "Truth Commission" would be a bad idea -- a swindle, actually. Its real purpose would be damage control; i.e., keeping as many of the politically powerful guilty as much in the shadow as possible while using grants of immunity to shield most of the rest. There would be a lengthy report loaded with such names as can't be concealed, dates and quotations of who said what and did what but when it comes to saying who broke the law the commissioners will claim that is outside of their charter and their competence. What laws were identifiably violated would have to be a judicial determination, you see. However, the quest for "truth" will have made prosecutions largely impossible. A few minor actors could face charges, or cop to pleas, of obstruction or perjury perhaps but not of the statutes enabling enforcement of treaty law against torture; e.g., Torture, U.S. Code, Title 18, Chapter 113C or War Crimes, U.S. Code, Title 18, Chapter 118. We will not have established that we have honored our treaty obligations and those most guilty will be home free.

I am not a lawyer, but I have seen enough politics to know what to expect.


For more of my thoughts see my posts as "Adam_Smith" at Politics Forum