Liberty Under Obama’s Watch

| Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal-Constitution (12/30/2011)

President Obama’s shame now codified in law.

[via:randomactsofchaos]

(Source: blog.ajc.com)

President Obama’s presidential trajectory:

Transformation Candidate -> Transitional President -> Traditional President

Folding to business and GOP, Obama continues to show he is as corporatist, inside-the-beltway, as all his predecessors.

There will be no green economy here. EPIC. FAIL.

Dear President Obama,

You cannot kill an ideology with bullets. It only multiples its fervor. Assassination will not end terrorism.

-daniel extra

[via: waronidiocy]

Osama bin Laden : cold war veteran

Al-Qaida’s mastermind knew only too well how to manipulate US foreign policy to make America behave like an imperial tyrant

By Mark Weisbrot

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 May 2011

The killing of Osama bin Laden is being celebrated by the US media and government officials who spin it as one of the most important events since 11 September 2001. To the extent that it weakens al-Qaida, that would certainly be a gain. But it is worth taking a sober look at the reality behind all the hype.

Bin Laden, who – like Saddam Hussein and other infamous mass murderers – was supported by the United Stated government for years before he turned against it, changed the world with the most destructive terrorist act ever committed on US soil. But the reasons that he was able to do that have as much to do with US foreign policy at that particular juncture as with his own strategy and goals.

Bin Laden’s goal was not, as some think, simply to bring down the US empire. That is a goal shared by most of the world, who – fortunately for us – would not use terrorist violence to further this outcome. His specific goal was to transform the struggle between the United States and popular aspirations in the Muslim world into a war against Islam, or at least create the impression for many millions of people that this was the case. As we look around the world 10 years after the attack, we can see that he had considerable success in this goal. The United States is occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, bombing Pakistan and Libya, and threatening Iran – all Muslim countries. To a huge part of the Muslim world, it looks like the United States is carrying out a modern-day crusade against them, despite President Obama’s assertions to contrary Sunday night.

This situation, along with the United States’ continued role of supporting the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, pretty much guarantees a steady stream of recruits for any terrorist movement of the kind bin Laden was organising, for the foreseeable future. In that sense, bin Laden was successful.

This is somewhat remarkable considering that, as many observers have pointed out, bin Laden at first appeared to have made a tactical blunder with the attacks of 11 September 2001, since this caused him to lose his base in Afghanistan – the one Islamic state that was at least sympathetic to his organisation. But after President Bush decided to use 9/11 as a pretext not only for invading Afghanistan, but also Iraq, these wars combined to put bin Laden and his movement back in business on a larger scale.

Could bin Laden have known that the US response to 9/11 would have made his movement even stronger, even if he lost his base in Afghanistan? I would say it is likely. While it was not predictable that President Bush would necessarily invade Iraq – although it was a strong possibility – it was foreseeable that the US government would seize on 9/11 to create a new overarching theme for its interventions throughout the world.

For a decade prior to the 9/11 attacks, Washington was without such an overall ideological framework. Until 1990, there were four decades of a “war against communism” that was used to justify everything from the overthrow of non-communist democratic governments in the western hemisphere (Guatemala, Chile, etc) to large-scale warfare in Vietnam, as well as hundreds of military bases throughout the world. The Soviet Union collapsed, the cold war ended, but the military bases and interventions continued. Prior to 9/11, the military interventions had to be done on an ad hoc basis (for example, “enemy-of the-month” as in Panama or the first Iraq war). But this is a weak basis for mobilising public opinion, and, in general, Americans have to be convinced that their own security is at stake in order to acquiesce to most sustained military adventures.

The “war on terror” was made to order for the post-cold war era, and enthusiasts such as then Vice President Dick Cheney noticed this immediately, before any wars were launched. Within five days of the 9/11 attacks, Cheney was on television proclaiming that the war against terrorism was “a long-term proposition”: the “kind of work that will take years”.

Indeed, it has, and with US drone strikes in Pakistan killing civilians and generating more hatred weekly, a cycle of violence is perpetuated that can go on for many years to come.

Of course, this was not inevitable. Ironically, the killing of bin Laden confirms what the left has maintained since 2001: that the occupation of Afghanistan was not necessary or justified in order to go after bin Laden. The killing of bin Laden was mainly an intelligence operation – the US did not have to invade or occupy Pakistan in order to carry it out. The same would have been true while he was in Afghanistan.

And now that he is gone, calls in Afghanistan for the US to leave are already intensifying; and they are picking up in the US, as well.

Since bin Laden is now dead, we will never know what he was thinking when he planned the 9/11 attacks. But as someone who was Washington’s ally during the cold war, he could easily have understood how these attacks would likely lead to a “war on terror” that would strengthen his movement. Despite being a fanatical terrorist, bin Laden knew his enemy.

[Photo: Osama bin Laden smiles as he sits in a cave in Afghanistan’s Jalalabad region while fighting in the Afghan-Russian war in 1988. (AFP)]

[via:androphilia]

Kai Wright’s excoriation of President Obama in his editorial in COLORLINES, lays bare and clear how POTUS’ rhetorical maneuvering belies what makes America great. Wright’s piece is so terrific, I’ve included it in its entirety below.

Osama Bin Laden, evil incarnate, has justified so, so much American violence in the 21st century. We have launched two wars and executed God knows how many covert military operations in the ethereal, never-ending fight he personafies. We have made racial profiling of Muslim Americans normative, turned an already broken immigration system into an arm of national defense, and reversed decades worth of hard-won civil liberties while pursuing him, dead or alive. We have abandoned even the conceit of respect for human rights in places stretching from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay in the course of hunting him down. Now, finally, the devil is dead.

Upon the news of this victory, crowds gathered in front of the White House and at Ground Zero to chant “U.S.A.! U.S.A!” It was as if we’d just won an Olympic hockey game, rather than capped a decade worth of war and recession with a singular act of violence.

“Today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people,” the president declared. “We are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to,” he concluded, after insisting that the execution represents justice. “That is the story of our history, whether it’s the pursuit of prosperity for our people, or the struggle for equality for all our citizens; our commitment to stand up for our values abroad, and our sacrifices to make the world a safer place.”

How perverse. President Obama is the leader of a nation in which justice is but a distant dream for millions of residents. He leads a nation that can afford billions of dollars annually for war but cannot feed the nearly 18 million children who lived in homes without food security in 2009. And yet, the Nobel Peace Prize winner can fix his mouth to say that killing a man on the other side of the globe provides proof of America’s exceptionalism.

The gap between rhetoric and reality has long been a defining trait of American life. Lies about our values have shielded us from the brutal facts of our nation ever since we built it on the back of genocide and slavery. But it is in times like these that the dissonance becomes unbearable.

The president says we can do anything we want because we can kill. We could not stop poverty rates from spiraling upward to a record-setting 14.3 percent of Americans in 2009, but we can kill so we are exceptional. One in four black and Latino families live below the poverty line now, and as a result America’s child poverty rate—one in five kids—is the second worst among rich nations, behind Mexico. But we can kill, so we are great.

Fourteen million Americans are out of work, nearly a third of them for more than a year. The Depression-like jobs crises in black neighborhoods around the country have become so acceptable as to be literally unremarkable in national news media. When overall joblessness inched downward in March, the fact that black unemployment increased, again, was greeted with callous shrugs from the White House to CNN. But America is exceptional because we can kill.

Our economy is defined by greed. The top 1 percent of earners take home a quarter of income in this country. Wall Street banks are logging record profits while the Treasury Department professes helplessness at the fact that tens of millions of people are still losing their homes to those banks. Because of that foreclosure crisis, the stunning racial wealth gap—the typical black family has a dime for a dollar of wealth held by its white counterpart—will surely grow worse. The White House is paralyzed with inaction in the face of all of these challenges. But it can kill, so we are great.

We have the world’s most expensive health care system, and yet in 2009 infant mortality in the U.S. was higher than in 29 other countries and the worst among rich nations. Why? In large part because the infant mortality rate is so high among black and Latina women. We cannot find justice for them, but we can kill and call it justice.

We have a $14 trillion deficit. A massive giveaway to defense contractors lurks inside that number—a transfer of public funds that has been justified, in ways both explicit and implicit, by the evil visage of Osama Bin Laden. And now, Washington is as likely as not to make up the loss by taking apart the safety net that once created something like economic justice in America. But the president would like us to agree that we are great because we can kill.

“May God bless the United States of America,” Obama declared last night, a sentiment echoed by so many today. Indeed. But the familiar refrain feels to me more like an urgent plea for forgiveness than the triumphant war cry that it is.

(c) Kai Wright/Colorlines

[Photo credit: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais]

Obama’s Birth Certificate Through The Eyes Of A Birther

Marvelous mockery!

Trump Unable To Produce Certificate Proving He’s Not A Festering Pile Of Shit (via The Onion)

Glenn Greenwald’s post today properly excoriates President Obama for what started as a perversion of rule of law through his and his administration’s actions to its mockery in his rhetoric. Below is an excerpt but is a must-read for progressives who cannot and should not turn a blind-eye to this kind of disregard of rule of law that harks back to his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Protesters yesterday interrupted President Obama’s speech at a $5,000/ticket San Francisco fundraiser to demand improved treatment for Bradley Manning. After the speech, one of the protesters, Logan Price, approached Obama and questioned him. Obama’s responses are revealing on multiple levels. First, Obama said this when justifying Manning’s treatment (video and transcript are here):

We’re a nation of laws. We don’t let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.

The impropriety of Obama’s public pre-trial declaration of Manning’s guilt (“He broke the law”) is both gross and manifest. How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt? Numerous commentators have noted how egregiously wrong was Obama’s condemnation. Michael Whitney wrote: “the President of the United States of America and a self-described Constitutional scholar does not care that Manning has yet to be tried or convicted for any crime.” BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza interpreted Obama’s declaration of guilt this way: “Just so you know, jurors subordinate judging officers!” And Politico quoted legal experts explaining why Obama’s remarks are so obviously inappropriate.

It may be that Obama spoke extemporaneously and without sufficient forethought, but it is — at best — reckless in the extreme for him to go around decreeing people guilty who have not been tried: especially members of the military who are under his command and who will be adjudged by other members of the military under his command. Moreover, as a self-proclaimed Constitutional Law professor, he ought to have an instinctive aversion when speaking as a public official to assuming someone’s guilt who has been convicted of nothing. It’s little wonder that he’s so comfortable with Manning’s punitive detention since he already perceives Manning as a convicted criminal. “Sentence first - verdict afterward,” said the Queen of Hearts to Alice in Wonderland.

But even more fascinating is Obama’s invocation of America’s status as a “nation of laws” to justify why Manning must be punished. That would be a very moving homage to the sanctity of the rule of law — if not for the fact that the person invoking it is the same one who has repeatedly engaged in the most extraordinary efforts to shield Bush officials from judicial scrutiny, investigation, and prosecution of every kind for their war crimes and surveillance felonies. Indeed, the Orwellian platitude used by Obama to justify that immunity — Look Forward, Not Backward — is one of the greatest expressions of presidential lawlessness since Richard Nixon told David Frost that “it’s not illegal if the President does it.”

But it’s long been clear that this is Obama’s understanding of “a nation of laws”: the most powerful political and financial elites who commit the most egregious crimes are to be shielded from the consequences of their lawbreaking — see his vote in favor of retroactive telecom immunity, his protection of Bush war criminals, and the way in which Wall Street executives were permitted to plunder with impunity — while the most powerless figures (such as a 23-year-old Army Private and a slew of other low-level whistleblowers) who expose the corruption and criminality of those elites are to be mercilessly punished. And, of course, our nation’s lowest persona non grata group — accused Muslim Terrorists — are simply to be encaged for life without any charges. Merciless, due-process-free punishment is for the powerless; full-scale immunity is for the powerful. “Nation of laws” indeed.

One final irony to Obama’s embrace of this lofty justifying term: Manning’s punitive detention conditions are themselves illegal, as the Uniform Code of Military Justice expressly bars the use of pre-trial detention as a means of imposing punishment. Given how inhumane Manning’s detention conditions have been — and the fact that much of it was ordered in contradiction to the assessments of the brig’s psychiatric staff — there is little question that this is exactly what has happened. The President lecturing us yesterday about how Manning must be punished because we’re a “nation of laws” is the same one presiding over and justifying Manning’s unlawful detention conditions.

Read the complete post here.

This great piece at HuffPo does the due diligence of fact checking President Obama’s rhetoric. The most damning in my eyes is this below:

OBAMA: “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

THE FACTS: Mass violence against civilians has also been escalating elsewhere, without any U.S. military intervention anticipated. More than 1 million people have fled the Ivory Coast, where the U.N. says forces loyal to the incumbent leader, Laurent Gbagbo, have used heavy weapons against the population and more than 460 killings have been confirmed of supporters of the internationally recognized president, Alassane Ouattara. The Obama administration says Gbagbo and Gadhafi have both lost their legitimacy to rule. But only one is under attack from the U.S. Presidents typically pick their fights according to the crisis and circumstances at hand, not any consistent doctrine about when to use force in one place and not another. They have been criticized for doing so – by Obama himself. In his pre-presidential book The Audacity of Hope, Obama said the U.S. will lack international legitimacy if it intervenes militarily “without a well-articulated strategy that the public supports and the world understands.” He questioned: “Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma? Why intervene in Bosnia and not Darfur?” Now, such questions are coming at him.

[Photo credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times]

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