George W. Bush

WTF? Obama Gets the Nobel Peace Prize?

dlindorff — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:13:53 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It’s not as much of a travesty as when Henry Kissinger, a war criminal of the first order who was an architect of the latter stages of the Indochina War, and was personally responsible for the slaughter of well over a million innocent people, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, while that war was still raging, but the awarding of the latest Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is travesty enough.

We’re talking about a man whose practically first act upon taking office early this year was to escalate the ugly and pointless war in Afghanistan with the addition of some 20,000 troops, and who, even as the Nobel committee was discussing his award, was meeting with his military and political advisors to consider expanding that war even further, both in Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan.

The Nobel Committee claimed that during Obama’s short period as president, the US “is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened."

Well, certainly when compared to the prior presidency of George W. Bush, that statement is correct, but that’s not saying much. After all, under President Obama, Guantanamo’s terrorist prison is still in operation and is holding people whom even the government admits are guilty of nothing. Under President Obama, the US has also blocked the Goldstone Report which condemns Israel of war crimes in its recent assault on Gaza. And under Obama, the US military in Afghanistan has continued to slaughter disproportionate numbers of civilians through its wanton use of aerial bombardment, pilotless Predator drones, and antipersonnel weaponry.

President Obama may have, as the Nobel Committee states, put forward a vision of nuclear disarmament, but his administration at the same time continues to refuse to sign the international anti-landmine treaty (putting America in the wretched company of just Russia, India and China). And under Obama, the US continues its role as not only the leading producer and exporter of arms, but also as the major initiator of wars in the world. Under Obama the US continues to outspend the rest of the world’s nations combined on its military. And don’t forget, Obama, like President Bush before him, continues to threaten to attack Iran, over that nation’s alleged nuclear weapons program—a program the very existence of which remains highly debatable.

As for climate change policy, President Obama in practice has taken a largely hands-off approach to getting Congress to act, not using his considerable political clout to force action on climate change legislation. It is now conceded that the US will go to the international climate conference in December with no bill passed to limit or reduce the nation’s CO2 emissions. Nor is the Obama administration likely to push for any significant program of CO2 reductions in the future.

Nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize closed on Feb. 1, less than two weeks after Obama took the oath of office as President, but the Nobel Committee in Norway had a good nine months since then to observe this president’s actions—and his lack of actions—on the key issues weighing on the decision. In the end, committee members were bamboozled by this president’s rhetoric of hope just as were the American people during the election campaign. As the committee wrote in announcing its decision: "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future."

If Nobel Peace prizes are being awarded to people who are simply giving the world hope, surely the judges could have found any number of worthy speechifiers. Hell, even the dictatorial leaders of China and North Korea can make flowery speeches about peace and human dignity. More to the point, the committee had under consideration at least two far more deserving nominees for the award who were actually acting at great personal risk to further peace and human rights: Chinese freedom-fighter Hu Jia and Afghani women’s rights advocate Simi Samar. It is an insult to the memory of former award winners like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jody Williams, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, and others who put their lives and careers on the line to struggle for peace and human dignity to give this award to a man who has accomplished so little, and who, in fact, in his short time in office, has managed to expand one war, to block the international condemnation of the brutality of another, and who has done nothing to reverse his own country’s leading role as a promoter of war and international violence.

Henry Kissinger hung his blood-drenched Nobel Peace Award on his office wall on Wall Street and continued to make obscene sums of money off human suffering in his dotage. One can only hope (ah, that intoxicating word!) that President Obama will take his award seriously, and will use his new status as official man of peace to halt America’s campaign of violence in Afghanistan, calling a regional peace conference to settle that conflict instead of simply expanding the war, that he will announce a major cut in American military spending and a halt to arms exports, that he will sign the landmine treaty and voluntarily end the production and use of antipersonnel weapons of all kinds, and that he will finally have the US join the International Criminal Court of Justice.

Right. Now that’s the audacity of hope.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

American Justice Is Not Blind, It's Sick

dlindorff — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:45:32 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Federal District Court
Judge Fernando Gaitan of the Missouri Western District Court have at
least two things in common: they are both appointees of President
Ronald Reagan, and they both think it’s just fine for the US to execute
innocent people. The same can be said for Judge C. Arlen Beam of the
8th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In a recent dissent in a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling ordering a habeas
hearing in federal court for South Carolina death row inmate Troy
Anthony Davis, a man slated to die after being convicted for the murder
of an off-duty Savannah police officer, Scalia wrote, “This court has
never held that the constitution forbids the execution of a convicted
defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to
convince a habeas court that he is `actually’ innocent.”

For his part, Judge Gaitan, in Missouri, had two shots at
considering the case of Joseph Amrine, a death-row inmate slated to die
for the killing of a fellow prisoner in a Missouri state prison. Amrine
(see my article Dead Man Walking Home
in Salon, May 1, 2003) had been convicted of the knife slaying on the
basis of the testimony of three alleged eyewitnesses—all of them fellow
prisoners. When two of those witnesses later recanted (suggesting that
it was the third witness who had actually been the killer), Judge
Gaitan rejected the habeas appeal, arguing that the two recantations
couldn’t be believed, because the third witness had not changed his
testimony. Later, when the third witness also recanted, Amrine’s
attorney brought the case back to Judge Gaitan, but this time, the
Judge again rejected the appeal, claiming that none of the witnesses
was credible “because they are all criminals.” (Which of course begs
the question of why Amrine should have been convicted in the first
place based upon the testimony of the same three witnesses.).

Amrine didn’t get any help from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals,
which is also apparently packed with Scalia-like vampires. A
three-judge panel on that court, which included Reagan-appointee Judge
Beam, as well as Clinton appointee Diane E Murphy and George H. W. Bush
appointee Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold, unanimously upheld Judge Gaitan
declaring that even if the three recantations might suggest Amrine was
innocent, he could not get a new hearing or trial because his attorneys
should have been able to discover the evidence earlier through “due
diligence.” The judges, in rejecting Amrine’s appeal, wrote that, “even
though convinced that had it been sitting as the trier of fact, it
would have weighed the evidence differently,” an appellate court had to
defer to the determination regarding credibility of recanting witnesses
made by a lower court judge.

That is, procedural issues and rules trump facts, even in a death penalty case.

Happily for Troy Davis, a frighteningly narrow majority on the US
Supreme Court disagreed with Justice Scalia’s view of the Constitution.
Happily for Amrine, who is now a free man, the Missouri State Supreme
Court disagreed with both Judge Gaitan and the 8th Circuit Court of
Appeals panel, concluding that "a showing of actual innocence acts as a
'gateway' that entitles the prisoner to review on the merits of the
prisoner's otherwise defaulted constitutional claim."

Justice Scalia’s pinched view of the Constitution is that if it
ain’t written down in the document, it doesn’t exist. So even though
there is a clear outlawing in the Constitution against “cruel and
unusual” punishment, he purports to be unable to see how that could be
construed to include being executed for a crime you did not commit.

It should sicken every American that our judicial system could
condone execution of people that even the judges themselves concede are
likely or even certainly innocent, because of procedural rules and
politically imposed deadlines and appeals limitations, such as those
imposed by former President Bill Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act, passed in 1995 in the hysteria following the
Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Federal Office Building.

I once had the grisly experience, back in 1995, of watching several
doomed men being carted off by armed police in the back of a flat-bed
truck for a date with a bullet to the back of the head on the execution
in Xian China. I remember thinking at the time what a monstrous and
uncivilized act this was. The trials in China are in name only, with
the verdict pre-ordained, and any appeals, if they happen, perfunctory.

Yet how different are things here in the US? There is the same
bloodthirsty slathering for public execution by the ghouls on the
right, the same quiescence among the broader population. There is,
perhaps one difference, and that is the political pandering to the
death-obsessed by politicians who should know better. Those
Reagan-appointed judges—Scalia, Gaitan and Beam—and the many like them
on federal and state benches across the country, were appointed
precisely because they wanted to grease the skids to the execution
chamber, and President Reagan, like Nixon before him and the Bushes
after him, have made advocacy of state-sanctioned execution a lynch-pin
of their campaign efforts. But President Clinton was no different. He
cut short his campaign for president so he could rush home to Arkansas
to sign the execution warrant for a mentally impaired man, and later,
pushed through the EDP Act to make appeals of death-row inmates much
more difficult.

President Obama is not much better. While he has not yet signed on
to any efforts to make executions easier, neither has he acted, as
president, to correct the current abysmal situation, which has seen
many people spend years or even decades on death rows, often coming
within days or hours or even minutes of execution before finally being
found innocent, and which has surely led to many executions of innocent
people over the years. Disturbingly, Obama has use the argument of
“public vengeance” to justify the death penalty, writing in his memoir,
that while he believes the death penalty "does little to deter crime,"
he nonetheless supports it for crimes "so heinous, so beyond the pale,
that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its
outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment."

Surely Obama is smart enough to recognize that when a community is
so enraged, that is precisely when the fairness of a trial becomes
hardest to assure, and thus, when the chance of a wrongful conviction
becomes the most likely. And yet he finds it safer to politically
pander to those base instincts for vengeance.

At times like these, I am sorry I’m an atheist. It would be nice to
think that there would be some special grim level of hell in store for
the likes of Justice Scalia, Judge Gaitan, and Judges Beam, Arnold and
Murphy—perhaps a row of cells from which they would be marched every
few days to be strapped onto gurneys and administered an intravenous
death potion, or into electric chairs through which a surge of high
voltage would be sent, only to return to their cells for another round
of waiting. Also for the likes of Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes
and, yes, Obama, who would be case before howling mobs of the wrongly
executed, who would call for their execution, after which they could be
marched off to the same fate over and over.

Unfortunately, there is no such divine justice. Only the hope that
one day, a more civilized and compassionate public will demand better
of itself, its political leaders, and its judges.

There is no greater crime than the killing by the state of an
innocent person, and yet, in America, such atrocities are not just
happening, they are condoned by judges in the highest court of the land.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of
“Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia
Abu-Jamal,” (Common Courage Press, 2003) and more recently of “The Case
for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

CIA’s Lies About Secret Program Should Have Congress In Open Revolt

dlindorff — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:04:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

If this were the democracy that the Founding Fathers thought they
were creating, word from CIA Director Leon Panetta that his agency had
lied to Congress and specifically that it had lied repeatedly from
9-11-2001 through the end of 2008 concerning an as-yet undisclosed
secret program, would have virtually every member of Congress in a
state of rebellion, demanding answers.

After all, the CIA is required by law to report to at least the
majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees and to the majority and minority leaders of both houses of
Congress about such things.

But not only did the spy agency not report on what it was up to; it lied about what it was up to.

Now, given what we do know about the Bush/Cheney
administration—that it initiated a massive campaign of spying on
Americans by the Defense Department, the FBI, and the National Security
Agency, as well as other intelligence agencies, that it initiated a
campaign of torture of captives, including American citizens, while
asserting that the President didn’t even need to notify the courts or
the public about the arrest, detention, torture or even execution of an
American citizen if he, acting on his own, deemed that person to be an
“enemy combatant,” and given that we also know that Bush and Cheney
lied repeatedly about the justification for their invasion of Iraq, and
refused to be put under oath in their “interviews” by the 9-11
Commission, you would think the members of Congress, which was
railroaded into supporting everything from the USA PATRIOT Act to the
Iraq War invasion based on all these lies and deceptions, would be
demanding answers regarding this mysterious program.

For the rest of this story, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Free John Walker Lindh, Bush's and Cheney's First Torture Victim!

dlindorff — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:47:31 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy
for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s “War on Terror,”
and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture.

Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for “carrying a
weapon” in Afghanistan and for “providing assistance” to an enemy of
the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all,
it’s what almost everyone in Texas does everyday). The second is
actually a violation of a law intended for use against US companies
that trade with proscribed countries on a government “no trade” list
like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for
the executives involved.

As I wrote in an article in the Nation back in 2005 (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050214/lindorff),
Lindh was put away for so long on these minor charges not because he
was a traitor or terrorist, but because he was living proof, back at
the time of his trial in 2002, that the US had begun a program of
brutal torture in the so-called “War on Terror.”

Lindh, in fact, was never really an enemy of the US. Son of
middle-class white parents in suburban San Francisco, he had developed
an interest in Islam which, following his graduation from high school,
he decided to pursue by traveling to Pakistan. In 2001, still just 18,
he began studying at a madrassa, or religious school. There he learned
about the struggle of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan to free
that nation of the influence of warlords who had collaborated with a
brutal Soviet occupation. Attracted by what he saw as the nobility of
that struggle, and with a youthful sense of adventure, Lindh
volunteered. In August of 2001, at a time that Bush administration
officials were negotiating about a possible oil pipeline deal with
Afghanistan’s Taliban government, and talking about providing funds for
a program to get farmers to shift away from opium cultivation to more
useful cash crops—a time, that is, when the Taliban were not considered
America’s enemy—Lindh crossed the border and started training to be a
fighter.

A month later, of course, the World Trade Center in New York, and
the Pentagon in Washington, were struck, and the US launched a war
against both Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Lindh, who was
still just in training, found himself suddenly in the wilds of the
Hindu Kush, with American planes bombing and with US Special Forces
troops firing at him and his companions. Whether he wanted to be there
or not, he was in no position at that point to change sides. You don’t
just walk away from a group like the Taliban—especially if you are an
American to begin with, and you’re deep in the bush.

Eventually, a malnourished, dehydrated, and wounded (in the leg)
Lindh was taken prisoner along with a group of Taliban fighters by
American forces.

At that point, when the Americans discovered they had an American
amont their captives, Lindh’s situation worsened dramatically. Stripped
naked and duct-taped, blindfolded, to a gurney, he was then placed
inside an unheated metal shipping container. Left there for days in the
cold and dark, Lindh was removed once daily and interrogated. His
interrogators allegedly tortured him, as well as threatening him
repeatedly with death. His pleas to see an attorney were mocked, and
word that his parents had already arranged for representation was
withheld from him (a situation that led a government lawyer involved in
his case to protest and ultimately resign).

At some point during this abuse, Lindh caved in to his fears of
death at the hands of his captors and signed a “confession” to being a
traitor to America. At that point he was flown back to the US, where
Attorney General Ashcroft touted him as the “American Taliban,”
initially vowing to try him for treason (which carries a death
sentence).

What changed things dramatically, as I reported in 2005, was a
decision by Federal District Judge T.S.Ellis to permit Lindh and his
defense team—over strenuous government objections--to challenge that
confession letter by introducing evidence that Lindh had signed it will
being subjected to torture at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. The judge
ruled that Lindh would be able to call witnesses from Guantanamo and
from among the soldiers where he had been held in Afghanistan.
Suddenly, the Justice Department, in the person of Michael Chertoff,
then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division and in charge
of terrorism prosecutions, offered a one-day-only, take-it-or-leave-it
a plea deal. Chertoff (acting with an alacrity that stands in marked
contrast to his sluggish response time several years later when faced,
as secretary of homeland security, with the Katrina disaster in New
Orleans) offered to drop the serious charges in return to a guilty plea
to the two minor charges, but only if—and this is the key—Lindh would
cancel the scheduled evidentiary hearing into torture. Under the
offered deal, Lindh would also have to sign a letter stating that he
had “not been intentionally mistreated” by his American captors, and
waiving any right to claim such mistreatment or torture any time in the
future. Lindh agreed, but following sentencing, Chertoff also added a
gag order, technically a “special administrative measure,” barring
Lindh from even talking about his experience for the duration of his
sentence.

It is now clear why Chertoff went to such hurried great lengths to
completely silence Lindh. His wasn’t just the first trial in the “War
on Terror.” Lindh was the first victim of the secret Bush/Cheney
torture program.

Now that we have the trail of memoranda that set that wretched
torture campaign in motion, it’s time for the Obama Justice Department
to free Lindh. If President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder
think Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens suffered from malicious prosecution and
were willing to drop charges against him, they certainly should toss
out the case against Lindh, who besides being innocent of the original
serious charges leveled against him, was a victim of war crimes
perpetrated by his own fellow Americans, and authorized by his own
government. His arrest, conviction and sentencing are a travesty of
justice, and perhaps, given that torture is a criminal offense in the
US Code, even constitute a crime of cover-up. He should be the first
witness in any official investigation by Congress or the attorney
general’s office into the origins of the Bush/Cheney torture campaign.

Free John Walker Lindh!
_______________
(Note: This article was offered to the Nation magazine, and
rejected. It was also offered to Salon magazine, which never responded.)
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama, Seeing Darkness, Conjures Up the Mists of Time

dlindorff — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:56:59 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Back in 1965, as a 15-year-old kid, I had a chance to spend half a
year as a student at a boy’s gymnasium (high school) in Darmstadt, the
cultural capital of the German state of Hesse, which had the
distinction of having been one of a handful of cities in Germany
(Dresden was another) that were selected by the Allies to test out the
terror tactic of firebombing. The town was chosen for incendiary
bombardment precisely because it had no military value and thus, no air
defenses (and because it consisted mostly of wooden structures). With
Germany still wreaking horrific damage on the Allied bomber fleet, this
made it an inviting target.

Friends and teachers recounted to me the terrors of that night,
when the entire city of several hundred thousand, built mostly of wood,
went up in a giant bonfire so hot and powerful that it sucked people
into it with a 200 mph vortex of inward rushing air. People who hid in
shelters were asphyxiated by the lack of oxygen, while those who tried
to flee sank knee deep into asphalt streets. Two mountains outside town
were man-made piles of rubble left over from the city’s ruins, which
were for the most part just carted away. There was little left to
rebuild.

While I was stunned by the horror of it, I at the time still felt
that after all, Germans had brought this disaster on themselves. After
all, they had allowed the Nazi monsters to gain control of the nation
and then proceeded with a genocidal campaign of extermination of
Jews—even German Jews who were their own neighbors--of Gypsies, of
gays, and of course, of Communists, and had launched a war that
ultimately killed 10s of millions of people around the world.

I mention all this because one thing I noticed back then, not among
young people in Germany, but among adults my parents’ age and older,
was a widespread denial about what Germany had done. And I remember
feeling, as many Americans and Europeans still do, and as many Chinese
and other Asians still feel about Japan, that these two countries have
never been willing to face up to the crimes that they, as a nation,
permitted to happen in their names.

Older and wiser now, I am well aware that our own country has
committed many crimes, some on a scale approaching those of Germany and
Japan: the near extermination of Native Americans, the mass,
centuries-long enslavement and cultural and physical destruction of
millions of African slaves, the use of nuclear bombs on civilian
targets, the decade-long saturation bombing and herbicidal poisoning of
most of Indochina…

It’s a long and terrible list, and for the most part, in our
schools, in our politics, in our histories, we don’t talk about, and
even justify and deny our own atrocities.

Now we have a president who is perhaps doing something worse.
Admitting that the last administration of President George Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney ordered up a program of illegal and inhuman
torture of captives in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and in the
so-called War on Terror that was launched by them in the wake of the
9-11 attacks in 2001, and offering up documentary evidence of the chain
of command that set the country on this criminal course, President
Obama now says that to move beyond this “dark and painful chapter in
our history,” he will not seek or permit any prosecution of those who
committed torture of captives.

“Nothing will be gained,” Obama said, “by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

I’m not that concerned about whether individual torturers in the
CIA or the military get prosecuted. If the president had said he would
not prosecute people who “thought” they were acting under proper
authority and behaving legally, but then added that he would pursue
those who authorized and ordered them to torture, I would not have
fussed. But that is not what he said. The implication of his statement,
and the fact that he has not, this far into his term, ordered his
Attorney General to appoint a prosecutor to investigate those who were
responsible for the crime, given what he clearly knows about its
authors, is the worst possible of travesties, and rises to the level of
a war crime itself.

Now I don’t want to equate America’s torture of a few hundred or a
few thousand captives by making them endure waterboarding or by placing
plastic neckbands and leashes on them and slamming their heads into
walls, with what the victims of Buchenwald or Auschwitz endured, but
that is really not the issue. The issue is, do we as a nation now
subscribe to the idea that the way to deal with evil perpetrated by
ourselves is to bury it?

Isn’t that precisely what we have been for decades accusing the
Germans and the Japanese of doing: burying in the mists of time their
criminal behavior as a people and as a nation?

And now our president—whose own wife and daughters are descendants
of slave victims of another era of American atrocities—is telling us we
should do the same thing as Germany and Japan: forget and move on.

But the president is wrong. Darkness does not go away when the fog comes. It just gets darker.

Let's shine a light. Sign the petition: No Amnesty for Torturers!

____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest work
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama and Holder Must Prosecute War Crimes or Become Guilty of Them Themselves

dlindorff — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:26:08 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

The dithering and ducking going on in the Obama White House and the
Holder Justice Department over the crimes of the Bush administration
are taking on a comic aspect.

On the one hand, we have President Obama assuring us that under his
administration, there will be respect for the rule of law, and on the
other hand we have this one-time constitutional law professor and his
attorney general declaiming that there is no need for the appointment
of a prosecutor to bring charges against the people in the last
administration, in the CIA, in the National Security Agency and in the
Defense Department and the military who clearly have broken the law in
serious and felonious ways.

What gets silly is that America is either a nation of laws…or it
isn’t. It is either a place where “nobody is above the law”…or it isn’t.

There is really no middle ground here.

The latest solid and incontrovertible evidence of outrageous and
criminal behavior by the White House is the discovery—and the public
release by the Obama administration—of documentary evidence that the
CIA committed not just torture but willful obstruction of justice by
destroying video tapes of some 92 interrogations of terrorism suspects
and captives in the so-called Bush “War” on Terror. Plus the release of
a stack of nine legal opinions by White House and Justice Department
lawyers providing legal cover for torture, including executive orders
from President Bush and directives from then Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld authorizing torture.

We now know that those legal opinions were so blatantly illegal and
simply designed to provide cover that the authors--former Deputy
Assistant Attorney General John Yoo (now ensconsed in a tenured faculty
position at the law school of UC Berkeley where he teaches, with a
straight face, constitutional law, and writes a syndicated opinion
column on similar topics), and his then boss, Jay Bybee, then Assistant
Attorney General for the Office of White House Legal Counsel, and now
an appeals court judge for the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals
in San Francisco—had them classified, simply to hide them from public
inspection. For those memos alone, Yoo should be fired from his
teaching post and disbarred, while Bybee, who failed to mention his
activities during his judicial confirmation hearings, should be
impeached. That would just be for starters.

Setting aside the many other crimes of the Bush administration for
a moment—the authorization of a massive warrantless electronic spying
program on Americans, the use of military personnel to actively spy on
groups engaged in lawful First Amendment activities, the lying about
reasons for going to war in Iraq, etc.--the issue of officially
sanctioned acts of torture by American forces, which we know occurred,
is not just a crime under the US Criminal Code, which since 1996 has
incorporated the Geneva Conventions specifically as US law. The
planning and sanctioning of torture, as well as the covering up of
torture, and the failure to punish torture are also crimes.

The Obama administration may, on the basis of whatever twisted
political logic it is operating under, not want to appoint a prosecutor
and indict the war criminals of the Bush administration. But this is
not a question of whether or not to push for health care or labor law
reform, where the Obama administration has a right to consider what the
political pros and cons are of moving forward. Here, we’re talking
about enforcing the law. There are no options but acting. Not only does
a commitment to the rule of law require prosecution here, right up to
the president and vice president. The failure to prosecute
war criminals is in itself a crime, meaning that there is a narrow
window of time to act before Obama himself, and his attorney general
Eric Holder, will be open to charges that they too are war criminals.

If we don’t get a prosecution going of Bush administration
officials responsible for war crimes, the day will come when not only
will George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld
be unable to travel abroad. Barack Obama and Eric Holder will also be
confined to US soil.

To join the campaign to make the Obama Administration obey the law and prosecute war crimes by the last administration, go here.
__________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in signed collector’s edition hardcover or in paperback
direct from the author). Order from ThisCantBeHappening.net, where you can also read other work by the author.

Gloomy Outlook from Business Experts

dlindorff — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:50:43 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Amid the news that retail sales have fallen for the fourth straight
month, that housing prices continue to slump, and that another 600,000
workers were laid off in the month of January—the largest number in one
month since 1974—comes word from some experts in the business community that things are not going to be getting better soon, and that when they
do, they will not get back to the way things were in 2006 or early
2007, before the recession began.

In an interview I did for the trade publication Investment Management Weekly
on Thursday, Putnam Investments’ global asset allocation head Jeffrey
Knight said that while the stimulus could “help to prevent a Great
Depression sequel,” at the same time “Those who measure prosperity
against the Faustian opulence of the last 10 years may find that
stability, equilibrium and even recovery will still feel like a deep
depression.”

Another fund manager, Ron D’Vari, co-founder and CEO of a new fund
management firm that specializes in so-called distressed assets—the
very things that have the nation’s banks reeling on the edge of
failure—says the economy has fallen into “an L-shaped recession where
it’s hard to say how long it will be down at the bottom.” D’Vari also
told me, “We think we will have a sort of subsistence economy—not like
North Africa, but it could look like just getting by for some time
before you see the start of a real recovery.”

Now these guys were all talking about how things look to them assuming passage
of the so-called stimulus package. In other words, the stimulus package
is not going to turn things around. In fact, D’Vari pointedly referred
to the close to $1-trillion package as ‘just a pain-killer, not a final
cure.”

President Obama would do well to heed these kinds of hard-nosed
views. He’s not likely to be hearing them right now. To date, he has
chosen for his economic team mainly retreads from the Bush and Clinton
administration—people like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner who helped
set the nation on its current disastrous economic course by promoting
globalization and the flight of jobs overseas as well as the
deregulation of Wall Street, by advocating a shift of the tax burden
from the wealthy to the working classes, by urging the gutting the
safety net for those who lose jobs or can’t find them, and by
advocating measures to artificially pump up asset values, whether real
estate or the stock market.

These are clearly not people who are going to want to call
attention to the economic and social train wreck that their own
policies have produced.

Nor does Obama’s latest announcement of his new Council of Economic
Advisers look much better. Headed up by Paul Volcker, the Carter and
Reagan choice for Federal Reserve Chairman, and a close associate of
the Rockefeller family and the Chase banking empire who helped bring us
the heretofore worst recession since the ‘30s during the early 1980s,
that panel includes Jeffrey Imelt, chairmen of mega-defense contractor
General Electric, Jim Owens, chair of Caterpillar (a firm that just
sacked 20,000 employees and during it’s recent contract disputes with
the UAW hired scabs and locked out employees, racking up a huge number
of labor law violations), William Donaldson, President George W. Bush’s
SEC chair, who had to resign that position in disgrace in 2005 after
his agency missed the Enron and Worldcom meltdowns and collapses as
well as some early hedge fund disasters, Martin Feldstein, the head of
Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers and an adviser to Obama’s
opponent, John McCain, and Austan Goolsbee, a senior economist with the
Democratic Leadership Council, a strong proponent bank deregulation and
of the job-killing NAFTA and the World Trade Organization treaties.
True, the panel does include some token labor representatives like
former Mineworkers Union president Richard Trumpka of the AFL-CIO and
Anna Burger of the SEIU, but wholly absent are more progressive
economists in line with the likes of Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and
Joseph Stiglitz, or former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich, much
less left-leaning economists like James Galbraith or Dean Baker.

Before Obama was inaugurated, there was much blather in the
mainstream press about his selection of conservative Democrats and
Republicans for his cabinet, as a strategy of having a “team of
rivals.” But clearly, where economic policy is concerned, those
“rivals” are pretty much all on the same side of the fence. (The same
can be said, by the way, of his defense department and state department
teams.)

What the country really needs at this point is straight talk and
creative new ideas—not returns to policies of the ‘90s, ‘80s, ‘70s or
perhaps even the ‘30s.

Obama needs to hear from experts who know that the economy of the
United States is not going to rebound to anything like where it was in
the last few years, and that drastic new programs and approaches are
needed if the US is not to continue a slow slide into third world
status. And the American public needs to hear the same honest news.

An economic “team of rivals” is a great idea, but to get that,
Obama would have to be willing to reach over to the left side of the
spectrum, not just the right.
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available
in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Generals' Revolt Threatens Obama Presidency

dlindorff — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:57:14 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

If an article by Gareth Porter in run by InterPress
is correct that CentCom Commander Gen. David Petraeus and Iraq
Commander Gen. Ray Odierno, backed by a group of lower-ranking
generals, are planning to mount a public campaign to try and undermine
President Obama’s plan for a withdrawal from Iraq in 16 months, Obama
needs to act fast and nip this dangerous act of insubordination in the
bud.

It was a similar act of insubordination on the part of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff that effectively destroyed the Clinton administration
almost from day one. Recall that one of President Clinton’s first acts
following his inauguration was to make good on a campaign promise to
end discrimination against gays and lesbians in the military. His
initial order was to simply end the ban on homosexuality in the
military. But the Joint Chiefs publicly rebelled, and Clinton caved,
coming up with the ridiculous and unworkable “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
policy, under which gays and lesbians could serve in the military, but
had to hide their sexual orientation or face ouster.

When Clinton, as commander in chief of the armed forces, allowed
his generals to defy his orders, and, instead of sacking them all for
insubordination and stripping off their stars, left them in their
offices and surrendered to their objections, he didn’t just cave in to
the military. He also alerted the Republican opposition that he was a
political pushover.

Obama, on a much more serious issue—the conduct of and termination
of a war—is now apparently being more or less openly defied by his top
generals, who after all get their glory and power by having troops in
battle, and who are also worried that a collapse of the puppet regime
in Iraq could leave them looking like losers. They are thus opposing a
pullout from Iraq (and a hardly precipitous one at that!) out of
self-interest and self-preservation.

If Commander in Chief Obama allows this insubordination and
political opposition to exist among his senior generals, his presidency
is toast. He will be a prisoner to a militarist policy in Iraq and
Afghanistan that will drag down his presidency in the same way that
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was destroyed by the generals running the
Vietnam War. Furthermore, just as Republicans in Congress saw Clinton’s
weakness in his dealings with the Joint Chiefs and began dogging his
every move, they, and Obama’s opponents among the Blue Dog Democrats in
Congress, will see weakness and move against him.

There is only one answer to this challenge to presidential
authority: President Obama must sack both Petraeus and Odierno, and any
other general who tries—openly or behind the scenes--to move
politically against his military strategy and orders. The model for
this action is President Harry Truman—widely viewed, whatever his
faults, as a forceful leader—who fired the popular Gen. Douglas
McArthur when McArthur went behind his back to Republicans in Congress
to push for a wider war in Korea.

This is not just a matter of salvaging an Obama presidency. It is
also a profound constitutional issue. There is no greater threat to
democratic freedom than a military that refuses to accept, or that
actively works to undermine civilian authority. Generals and admirals
certainly have a right to object to the decisions made by their
commander in chief, but they cannot act in defiance or those decisions
while in uniform. Admiral William Fallon took the right course of
action. Opposed to Bush/Cheney administration plans to attack Iran, he
chose to resign his post as CentCom Commander and to resign from the
military. If Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Odierno oppose Obama’s plan for a
pullout from Iraq, they should do the same and then speak out if they
wish.

For the past eight years, the biggest threat to American democracy
was that a president and vice president attempted to convert the office
of president into a military dictatorship, with the position of
commander in chief subsuming and replacing the position of president.
Now the danger is that the nation’s top generals are trying to
eliminate or emasculate the president’s role as commander in chief,
making the generals the leaders of the nation’s military. Both dangers
are equally threatening to constitutional government.
___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The Ugly Truth: America's Economy is Not Coming Back

dlindorff — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:12:46 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama and his economic team are being careful to
couch all their talk about economic stimulus programs and bank bailout
programs in warnings that the economic downturn is serious and that it
will take considerable time to bounce back.

I’m reminded of an experience I had with Chinese medicine when I
was living in Shanghai back in 1992. I had come down with a nasty case
of the flu while teaching journalism at Fudan University on a Fulbright
Scholar program. <!--break>A Chinese colleague suggested I go to the university
clinic. When I told him there wasn’t much point since doctors couldn’t
do much for the flu besides recommend fluids and bed rest, he said,
“That’s Western doctors. You could go to the Chinese medicine doctors
at the clinic. They can help you.” I figured, what the hell, and we
went. The doctor inquired into the lurid details of my illness—how my
bowel movements looked, the color of the mucus in my nose, etc. He
didn’t really examine me physically. Then he prescribed an incredible
number of pills and teas and sent me home with a huge bag of stuff, and
instructions on the regimen for taking them through the course of each
day. I followed the directions dutifully, and my colleague came by each
day to check on my progress. By the fifth day, when I was still running
a fever and feeling terrible, I told him I didn’t think the Chinese
medicine was working. He replied confidently, “Chinese medicine takes a
long time to work.”

I laughed at this. “Sure,” I said. “But the flu only lasts a week
or so, and now, when I get better, you’ll say it was the Chinese
medicine, right?”

He smiled and agreed. “Yes. You are right.”

Obviously the Obama administration recognizes that it needs to keep
the finger of blame for the current economic collapse squarely pointed
at the Bush administration, which is certainly fair in large part
(though the Clinton deregulation of the banking industry played a major
part in the financial crisis and its enthusiastic promotion of
globalization began the massive shift of jobs overseas that has left
the nation’s productive capacity hollowed out). But it also seems to
recognize that it cannot tell the bitter truth, which is that our
national economy will never “bounce back” to where it was in 2007.

America, and individual Americans, have been living profligately
for years in an unreal economy, propped up by easy credit which
inflated the value of real estate to incredible levels, and which led
people to spend way beyond their means. Ordinary middle-class working
people have been encouraged to buy obscenely oversized homes at 5%
down, or even no down payment. They have been lured into buying cars
the size of trucks, one for each driving-aged member of the family (in
our town, so many high school kids drive to school that the school ran
out of parking spaces and the yellow school buses, largely empty on
their runs, are referred to by the students as the “shame train,” an
embarrassment to be seen riding). They’ve installed individual
back-yard swimming pools, unwilling to share the water with their
neighbors in community pools. Boring faux ethnic restaurant franchises
of all kinds have befouled the landscape, filling up with families too
stressed out to cook, and willing to endure over-salted, over-priced
and tasteless cuisine and tacky plastic décor night after night.

Now this is all crashing down. Property values are in free-fall.
Car sales have fallen off a cliff. Joblessness is soaring (At present,
it’s approaching an official rate of 8%, but if the methodology used in
1980, before the Reagan administration changed it to hide the depth of
that era’s deep recession, were applied, it would be 17% today, or one
in seven workers).

Eventually, the economic slide will hit bottom and begin its slow
climb back, as all recessions do, but there will be no return to the
days of $500,000 McMansion developments, three-car garages and a new
car every two or three years for both parents plus a car for each
highschooler. Not only will banks no longer be able to offer such
credit to clients. People, having been burned, will not be willing to
borrow so much. Company health care benefits, pension programs or
401(k) matching programs that were slashed during this downturn will
not be restored when the economy picks up again.

Over the last 20 years, America has degenerated into a nation of
consumers, with 72 percent of Gross Domestic Product (sic) now being
accounted for by consumer spending—most of it going for things that are
produced overseas and shipped here.

That is not an economic model that is sustainable, and it is a model that has just suffered what is certainly a mortal blow.

What we are now seeing is the beginning of an inevitable downward
adjustment in American living standards to conform with our actual
place in the world. As a nation of consumers, and not producers, with
little to offer to the rest of the world except raw materials, food
crops, military hardware and bad films (none of which industries employ
many people), we are headed to a recovery that will not feel like a
recovery at all. Eventually, productive capacity will be restored, as
lowered US wages make it again profitable for some things to be made
here at home again, but like people in the 1930s looking back at the
Roaring 20s of yore, we are going to look back at the last two decades
as some kind of dream.

It would be better if the new administration would be honest about
this, because with honesty, we could have a recovery program that would
actually address the real critical issues facing the country—the
decline of our educational system, the irrationality of official
promotion of home ownership that has led to the proliferation not just
of suburbs but of exurbs, the over-reliance on the automobile for
transportation, the unprecedented waste of resources, the pillaging of
the environment, not to mention the decimation of the retirement system
and the creation of a vast medical-industrial complex that is sucking
the life-blood out of families and businesses alike.

With honesty, we could also confront the other big obstacle to
national recovery—the nation’s obsession with militarism and foreign
wars. The honest truth is that the US is technically bankrupt and in a
state of chronic decline, and yet the nation persists in spending a
trillion dollars a year on war and preparations for war, as though
America were in mortal danger from foreign enemies.

The truth is that we are not threatened by Communism, by drug
lords, or by Muslim Jihadists in any serious way. Rather, we have
become our own worst enemy.

The administration could start by telling us all this straight up,
but the problem is, most of us probably don’t want to hear it, which
explains why we’re not hearing it. It also explains why we’re about to
blow another trillion or so dollars on propping up failing banks,
funding pointless highway and bridge construction, and blowing up
illiterate peasants in remote places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in paperback edition). Lindorff spent five years reporting on China and Hong Kong for Business Week magazine. His current work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Obama Wake-Up Call: Afghanistan is No Threat to US

dlindorff — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:15:12 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

American foreign policy is moving from the absurd to the ludicrous.

Back in 2002, President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney
managed to snooker the people of the United States, or at least a large
number of us, into believing that Iraq, a pathetic Third World country
ruled by a corrupt tin-pot dictator, was a grave danger to America,
akin to Hitler and Nazi Germany in 1940. We learned how absurd that
claim was when two hundred thousand American troops backed by the
mightiest air force the world has ever seen, slammed into the country
in March, 2003, and the Iraqi military simply folded up, and the Saddam
regime along with it.

Now, President Obama appears ready to make an even more absurd
claim, namely that the gravest threat facing this nation is posed by
the country of Afghanistan. Now I’ll grant that Afghanistan, with a
population of 33 million, is at third bigger than Iraq, which had a
population of 24 million, at least until the US invasion and occupation
led to the death of over a million of Iraqis. But aside from that,
Afghanistan, a land-locked nation that lies between Iran and Pakistan,
is far weaker and more primitive even than Iraq.

By any measure except population, Afghanistan suffers in comparison
to Iraq. It has no air force at all. It barely has an army. Most of its
people are illiterate and live in rural areas. Its people are extremely
poor—among the poorest in the world. In many ways, Afghanistan is
actually less a country than a region populated by a variety of feuding
tribes—tribes that have different languages and cultures and even
different racial backgrounds.

Do we really believe that this desperately poor and war-torn nation poses an existential threat—or any threat at all—to the US?

Oh please.

Okay, we know that there is a gang of mostly Arab terrorists going
by the name of Al Qaeda that is hiding out in eastern Afghanistan, and
that its leaders have allied this organization with the Taliban—the
ousted rulers of Afghanistan who were pushed out of the capital of
Kabul by US forces in 2001 following the 9-11 attacks. But since that
relatively easy military incursion, all the US and its 34,000 troops in
Afghanistan have managed to accomplish, besides installing a crooked
puppet regime in the capital city, has been to create more and more
hatred for the US as an occupying power, by killing large numbers of
Afghan civilians through brutal raids on villages and by use of
overwhelming and inherently indiscriminate airpower and
remote-controlled missile-equipped drone aircraft.

Based upon the ludicrous premise that Afghanistan is the biggest
military threat facing the US today, our new president, Barack Obama,
is preparing to send another 30,000 US troops to that country,
effectively doubling the number of American soldiers already there.
Inevitably, this will mean more killing and more anger towards America
among the local population.

Al Qaeda members, meanwhile, have largely moved away from the battle
to Pakistan, a much larger nation to the east of Afghanistan, which
raises the question: What the hell are we trying to do in Afghanistan?

Let’s get it straight. No Afghan has ever, to my knowledge, harmed
the United States. I’m not sure most Afghanis, if they could scrape
together the money to go to the US, would even know where this country
is. (Okay, most Americans probably couldn’t tell you where Afghanistan
is, either, but at least we have libraries, and computers, which the
geographically challenged can turn to in order to locate the place.
That’s not true for the people of Afghanistan, who have neither.)

For eight years, America has been attacking and destroying a country
that is about as dangerous a threat to America as is Mali, or Haiti, or
the Comoros Islands. If Obama follows through and doubles the number of
troops fighting over there, it will just make this whole policy twice
as stupid.

I’m sorry. I know Al Qaeda is a nasty gang, well funded by sources
in Saudi Arabia, and well trained in the fine arts of terrorism by the
CIA, which back in the day saw the group as a good proxy for harassing
Soviet troops that were occupying Afghanistan. But if eight years of
constant war by US troops in Afghanistan has been unable to stop or
even seriously undermine Al Qaeda, I cannot understand the logic of
doubling down on the bad bet.

If the US wants to defeat Al Qaeda, it needs to enlist the support
of the governments of the countries where Al Qaeda is operating, and it
needs to eliminate the outside financial support for Al Qaeda. The
first prong of this strategy would require convincing the governments
of Afghanistan and Pakistan to get serious about driving out Al Qaeda.
That should not be difficult. If we stopped killing Afghanis, and if we
stopped firing rockets into the sovereign nation of Pakistan, killing
innocent Pakistanis in the process, and massively insulting the
government of Pakistan, and if we instead offered aid to both
countries, contingent upon their taking serious action to eliminate Al
Qaeda, we would quickly see these foreign intruders in both countries
driven out. As to the second prong, why is the US continuing to treat
Saudi Arabia as a valued ally if it continues to allow wealthy Saudis
to sent financial support to Al Qaeda? Yes Saudi Arabia is a major
provider of oil to the US, but the US is the major supplier of arms to
the government of Saudi Arabia. It’s easy to see where the US could
tighten the screws to end the flow of money to terrorists.

And then there is this: The Vietnam War destroyed the presidencies
of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. The Iraq War destroyed the
presidency of George Bush. Obama, if he orders an expansion of the war
in Afghanistan, and thus takes ownership of that conflict, will be well
on the way to destroying his own presidency.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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