Unsurprised but Shocked Nonetheless
The liberal and
progressive civil libertarians I know who strongly supported Barack
Obama's "change" campaign last year are having a difficult time
processing some deeply disturbing recent developments in Washington.
In
one of its most horrifying acts, the Obama administration filed a
telling brief in federal court last February. In two sentences, this
brief declared that the Obama Department of Justice essentially
embraced the Bush administration's position on and against habeas
corpus. After the Supreme Court ruled last June in Boudemiene v. Bush
that Guantanamo detainees possess the right to a hearing to contest the
charges against them, the Bush administration simply started sending
so-called enemy combatants from around the world to the American prison
camp in Bagram Air Force base in occupied Afghanistan.
Since
Afghanistan is a "war zone," the Bush White House argued, prisoners
there have no constitutional rights. Never mind that many of these
captives were not prisoners captured on a battlefield in Iraq but were
people abducted from their homes and workplaces in other countries and
flown by secret U.S. jets to be indefinitely incarcerated at Bagram.
In
its February brief, the Obama justice department defended this
Orwellian policy, arguing that such prisoners can be locked up without
any constitutional rights for an indefinite period of time just as long
as they are incarcerated in Bagram instead of Guantanamo (see Glen
Greenwald, "Obama and Habeas Corpus: Then and Now," Salon, April 11,
2009, at www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/11/bagram/index.html).
Thankfully,
as Glen Greenwald notes, "last month, a federal judge emphatically
rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that the rationale of
Boudemiene applies every bit as much to Bagram as it does to
Guantanamo. Notably, the district judge who so ruled -- John Bates --
is an appointee of George W. Bush, a former Whitewater prosecutor, and
a very pro-executive-power judge. In his decision, Judge Bates made
clear how identical are the constitutional rights of detainees flown to
Guantanamo and Bagram and underscored how dangerous is the Bush/Obama
claim that the President has the right to abduct people from around the
world and imprison them at Bagram with no due process of any kind"
(Greenwald, "Obama and Habeas Corpus").
Of
all the things I've learned about the Obama administration in preparing
upcoming talks about the new president's First Hundred Days, none has
jarred me more than its position - shot down by a pro-executive,
Bush-appointed judge - on habeas corpus.
Last
Thursday (I am writing on Tuesday, April 21, 2009), the Obama Justice
Department expressed its determination to protect CIA torturers from
prosecution after it released memorandums on the Bush administration's
extreme torture practices. Those memorandums only saw the light of day
because of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. By
announcing in advance that it will not go after the direct torturers,
the Obama administration has destroyed its ability to use the threat of
prosecution as a way of getting CIA personnel to testify against the
top officials who formulated the Bush torture policy.
As
the Justice Department released the memos spelling out brutal CIA
interrogation, Obama said that "nothing will be gained by spending our
time and energy laying blame for the past" (NYT, April 17, 2009). This
from a former and supposedly liberal law professor, someone who should
be expected to understand that one investigates and punishes past human
rights crimes precisely in order to discourage and prevent their
occurrence in the present and future.
As
the New York Times reported today, citing top White House aides, Obama
"opted to disclose the memos because his lawyers worried that they had
a weak case for withholding them and much of the information had
already been published in the New York Review of Books, in a memoir by
George Tenent, the former CIA Director, and even in a 2006 speech by
President George W. Bush." (NYT, 4-21-2009, A1).
Revealingly
enough, when he went to Langley last week to reassure CIA staffers of
his safety to their interests, Obama said that his decision to release
the torture memos was the "most agonizing" call of his presidency so
far. I heard that line on the evening news and turned off my
television.
Wow.
The was his "most agonizing" decision so far - reluctantly agreeing
under legal compulsion (!) to release documents showing a previous
administration's human right crimes? Not his decision to launch
missiles and expand illegal wars certain to kill children and cause
other civilian casualties in Pakistan. Not his decision to hand out
yet more hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street
parasites while poverty rises across the nation and the world. Not his
decision to increase the war and military budget while destitution
expands at home and abroad. Pretty revealing.
Do I sound surprised? I'm not. With the possible exception of Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon over at Black Agenda Report,
no human being on Earth has done more than I have to warn U.S. and
world citizens about the deceptive, fake-progressive, and deeply
conservative nature of Brand Obama, who I have dubbed "Empire's New Clothes." My
first warnings were issued (I am not joking) in the late summer of
2004, just two days after the Democratic Convention Keynote Address
that turned Obama into an overnight national and even global celebrity.
You can look it up and read it online: "Keynote Reflections," at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/8128.
I'm
a highly politics-skeptical libertarian socialist from the South Side
of Chicago who watched Obama build his fake-progressive power-seeking
career in my home city and in Springfield, Illinois (home of the
legendarily corrupt Illinois state legislature where Obama served
between from 1996 to 2004) during the late 1990s and the opening years
of the new millennium. Speaking to a budding progressive 20-something
Democratic Iowa presidential Caucus campaign activist in late December
of 2006, I said the following: "well you can work for Kucinich. He's
the closest thing to a left candidate in the Caucus. But he won't have
any to money to hire you. Hillary will have a lot of money but she's an
evil imperialist and she murdered health care reform and her negatives
will probably make her un-electable. Edwards is the least
objectionable of the 'viable' candidates and will say some remarkable
things you can feel good about against economic inequality and poverty
and for labor rights. He can't win, of course: he talks against class
inequality like he means it. Obama will make you sick with centrist
equivocation and deception. He's an ideological twin to Hillary, but
he's the next president. If you want to work for the next president,
work for Obama. The ruling class and the liberal primary voting base
both find him irresistible for different but intimately interrelated
reasons. The power elite's got him right - they know what he's really
about. The liberal base is pretty deluded and in love with him, which,
by the way, is part of why the masters will support him. That's a
killer combination."
So nothing about Obama ever surprises me. I never had any "hope" about him.
Still,
it's one thing to know that a grisly crime is likely to occur and to
actually witness that crime's commission. Its one thing to anticipate
Obama's many nauseating accommodations with - and advance (under new
"liberal" cover) of - Empire and Inequality, Incorporated. It's another thing to watch the worst aspects of the predictable ugliness unfold.
If
it didn't sound insensitive to the untold masses who have been
subjected to U.S.-imperial water-boarding, rendition, sleep deprivation
and the like, I'd say it's a form of torture.
P.S. 6PM Tue. April 21:
Ok so I got home after sending this essay off earlier in the day and
put on the ABC evening news and the first story is that Obama has
relented somewhat and appears to be bowing to pressure for him to
perhaps let Eric Holder maybe possibly investigate John Yoo and Bybee
et al., But this twist does not surprise me either; Obama is a crafty
politician --- very tricky ---- and has apparently heard that his
nauseating position on torture non-prosecutions was just too much for
even many elite liberals to take. I heard Michael Ratner of the Center
for Constitutional Rights (I hope I have that organization's name
right) just absolutely destroy Obama's "let's look forward, not
backward" statement on the PBS Evening News yesterday night. Whether
investigations will really happen and go anywhere remains to be seen.
I'm skeptical since so many key Democrats signed off on Bush torture
practices. And of course to be really serious you'd have to go after
Cheney and Bush II. But pushing back from the grassroots and even the
grasstops (i.e. Ratner et al.) is important and good...more of it is
required; much more.
Paul
Street's first book was Empire and Inequality: America and the World
Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004). His latest book is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008)
Crossposted from Zcommunications