Obama Promises

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

There Are Really Two Questions: 1) Which Side are the Democrats on? and 2) Which Side are the Labor Unions on?

dlindorff — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:03:30 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It is refreshing to hear the new head of the AFL-CIO, former
mineworker and Mineworkers President Richard Trumka, get mad at
sell-out Democrats and make a threat not to “support” them next year.

As Trumka pointed out in a talk to the Center for American Progress
this week, for years, Democratic politicians, and the Democrats as a
Party, have counted on the labor movement to get out the vote of its
membership on Election Day, only to turn on workers after getting to
Washington, on the issues that really matter, like jobs-killing free
trade agreements, the gutting of bankruptcy law and credit law
protections, and, most recently, the undermining of needed labor law
reform.

Trumka, quoting from a famous Florence Reece mineworkers song popularized by Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, said that going
forward, Democrats will have to make it clear to labor “Which side are
you on?”

But really, that’s only half the question. Reece, in her song,
was asking that question of workers themselves. And indeed, the reason
Democrats have become such traitors to working class interests in
recent decades is that the labor movement itself has not answered Reece’s musical question resolutely or honestly.

The hard reality is that, despite years of betrayal by Democratic
politicians and by the Democratic Party, labor unions have continued
year after year to answer the call to rally their ever diminishing
members during campaign seasons to go door to door doing the hard work
of rallying voters for ever more treacherous candidates, and to do
massive “get-out-the-vote” campaigns on Election Day, as they did this
past November to assure the election of solid Democratic majorities in
both houses of Congress and the election of President Barack Obama.
Labor has also donated princely sums collected from members to
Democratic candidates and to the Democratic National Committee.

And just as predictably, Congressional Democrats, and the new
president, have been betraying their labor base. After vowing to pass
the Employee Free Choice Act this year, which as written would have
ended years of weakening of labor’s right to organize unions by ending
the cumbersome requirement for “secret ballot” elections to establish
union representation, in favor of just obtaining signed cards
supporting a union from a majority of workers, Obama and the Democrats
in Congress caved in to pressure from the business lobby, and trashed
the bill. If it passes at all in its present form (which is pretty
iffy), it will leave secret ballot elections in place—a process which
managements have long ago figured out how to delay endlessly, and to
subvert, to the point that it is now next to impossible to unionize new
workplaces.

It’s fine to say, as Trumka is doing, that labor will no longer
support politicians who sell-out labor on its issues, but what good is
that really, if those politicians simply replace labor with more money
from business interests? It doesn’t help things that once the sell-outs
get elected, instead of attacking their betrayals, labor gets sucked
into compromises. Just look at health care “reform.” For decades, the
labor movement has advocated a single-payer approach, yet when
President Obama and the Democrats began putting together a health
“reform” package this spring, most of organized labor started backing
the pathetic “public option” plan, buying into Obama’s pre-emptive
compromise approach. Now health care reform appears to be pretty much a
dead letter. The same thing is happening to labor law reform, with
labor caving in and backing a weakened version of the EFCA.

The only way to really make Democrats stop these kinds of betrayals
is for labor to decide “which side it is on” and to actively oppose those who sell labor out.

Trumka, as head of the AFL-CIO, is in a position to make a
fundamental change in labor’s relationship with the Democratic Party.
He should announce plans to encourage the formation of a new labor
party, which would run its own candidates for office in key districts.
Labor, uniquely, is in a position to do this. It has the money and the
numbers to be able to easily get on the ballot in every state even by
as early as next year.

In some states, like New York, parties are able to cross list
candidates, so instead of just endorsing a Democratic candidate who
seemed to be supportive, a labor party could nominate that person as
its own candidate. Votes for the candidate could be made either on the
Democratic line, or the labor party line. But to get on the labor party
line, a candidate would have to be a genuine labor party candidate.
Failure to back labor once in office would mean no more labor party
line.

And in states where there is not such cross listing allowed,
running candidates on a labor party ticket would be a much bigger
threat to sell-out Democrats than just running candidates in the
Democratic Primary. And with good candidates, some labor party
candidates would certainly win their races, becoming a third force in
Congress.

The time is ripe for a labor party. Polls report that more and more
people are quitting the Republican and Democratic Parties in disgust.
They have no home at this point, and labor party would offer them that
home, which would accelerate the decline of the two major
parties—basically hollowed out husks that only manage to stand up
because they are stuffed with corporate swag.

So what’s the answer President Trumka? Which side are you on?
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and long-time
labor writer and activist. A founder of the National Writers Union, he
also organized a labor union of food service workers at Sarah Lawrence
College and worked on the United Farmworkers Union grape boycott in New
York City. He is author of “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s
Press, 2006) and his work can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Say 'Good-bye' to the Nice Health Care Reform, Kids

dlindorff — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:31:01 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Of course I could be wrong. Congress could turn around and pass
some cockamamie scheme to kick the issue of health care reform down the
road, offering some kind of minimal insurance coverage to a few million
more people, and cracking down on this or that particularly egregious
health provider rip-off, and then staging a “mission accomplished”
photo op.

But real health care reform of the kind that Democratic candidates
were promising during last year’s presidential campaign is dead, killed
by the timidity of the promiser-in-chief, President Barack Obama (and
by the massive corruption of the Democrats in Congress, who hav e
accepted the tainted coin of the health care industry).

Obama could have come to the American people as a newly elected
leader and addressed us as adults, saying: “Look, we know what needs to
be done. Plenty of countries in Canada, Europe and elsewhere have
figured it out already. They set up the government as the single payer
to health providers—doctors and hospitals, etc.—and the government
bargains and sets the prices those private providers of health care can
charge. Of course that means you’ll all pay higher taxes to finance
such a plan, but the record of all those countries shows that you’ll be
saving money over all, because you won’t be paying for health
insurance, your employer won’t be paying for health insurance, you
won’t be paying co-pays and deductibles, and you won’t be getting
gouged for drugs or hospital stays or doctors’ bills. You won’t be
paying state taxes for Medicaid either, nor will your insurance and
local property taxes have to subsidize the hospital care of indigents.
On balance, you’ll all be saving money, and you’ll never have to worry
about disease or injury bankrupting you. Nor will employers be able to
hold you hostage any longer. The reality is that the countries that
have a single-payer plan are spending half of what we spend per capita
for health care, they have no uninsured citizens, and their health
overall, as measured by such things as longevity, infant mortality,
etc., is better than ours.”

The president could have said all this and rallied the tens of
millions of Americans who desperately want a health care system modeled
on the single-payer idea to his side, forcing Congress to go along or
pay the price in 2010.

Instead...

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

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of
“Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains”
(Bantam Books, 1992), and 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

Using the Economic Crisis to Attack Workers: Employers Undermine Stimulus Program

dlindorff — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:21:47 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Reports are starting to appear suggesting that laid-off or
underemployed Americans, and the long-term unemployed, are losing
patience with the Obama administration’s and Congress’ economic
stimulus plan, which thus far has not done anything to arrest the
growth of unemployment, now at close to 20 percent of the US workforce,
at least as unemployment used to honestly be counted in the 1970s and
early 1980s.

While millions of jobs have been lost since the beginning of this
year alone, the number of jobs that have been created as a result of
the Obama administration’s signature $780-billion stimulus spending
package is under 150,000—a far cry from the 3.5 million that were
promised when the bill was being put before Congress.

There has been a lot of hype from Washington sources, dutifully
reported with little analysis or criticism in the corporate media,
suggesting that the recession is bottoming out. One example was a
report last week that the number of people receiving unemployment had,
for the first time in six months, dropped slightly. Unmentioned was the
hard reality that the reason for this drop was that many laid-off
workers are now reaching the end of their 26 weeks of unemployment
benefits in states that do not offer any extended benefits program. On
inspection, that is hardly good news.

There is also a mantra, trotted out regularly by administration
officials, that unemployment figures are a “lagging indicator,” and
thus are no indication that the recession is continuing to worsen. The
problem with this sleight-of-hand is that unemployment itself, when it
is rising rapidly as it has been now for a year, is a cause of
deepening recession. When one in five workers is unemployed or
unwillingly underemployed, that represents not only a huge drop in
consumer demand for everything from basic necessities to luxuries, but
also a huge dark cloud of anxiety that hangs over most of the rest of
the public, leading everyone to cut back on their spending, thus
dragging down the economy further.

But there is another factor at work, which is not getting much
attention, and that is the negative role being played by employers,
both public and private, in worsening the recession and undermining the
stimulus effort, such as it is, by actually using economic crisis as an
excuse to further attack and undermine workers and their incomes.

Take Temple University, where I live. The university, a largely
publicly-funded institution, has received $10 million in federal
stimulus funds, largely replacing the state funding that it lost when
the state cut back on its educational budget, and though those funds
were specifically intended by Congress to be used to improve student
achievement and to put people to work quickly, Temple, which has also
seen student admissions and tuition revenues increase during the
recession, has done the opposite—laying off staff, including
departmental staff and other personnel. The university for the past
year has also been engaged in a classic union-busting campaign against
one of its staff unions, which has been working 0n an expired contract
for a year, and its faculty union, which has been working on an expired
contract since last October. The school last year hired an outside law
firm, Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, that on its website touts
its expertise in “union avoidance,” to handle the school’s “bargaining”
with faculty.

In this, Temple is hardly alone. Across the country, companies and
public institutions have been taking brutal advantage of the economic
crisis as an opportunity to attack their workers, slashing employment,
demanding pay cuts (the New York Times, for example, has cut
employee paychecks by 5%), reducing long-held benefits, and generally
contributing to the impoverishment and insecurity of the broader
American workforce. According to a recent report, 29 percent of
employers who had historically been offering their employees a match
for their own contributions to 401(k) retirement plans have eliminated
that matching money over the last year.

These cutbacks and layoffs are bad enough when made by private
firms, many of which are still quite profitable and which have
benefited over the years and recently from tax incentives aimed at boosting
employment, but they are particularly obscene when they are made by
institutions that are receiving public stimulus money, like schools,
public transit agencies, and state and local governments. Indeed, it’s
probably the case that much of the potential stimulus of the
taxpayer-funded stimulus plan has been negated by job cuts and pay cuts
being made by the state and local entities that have received the bulk
of that money. If a state, for example, uses $50 million in stimulus
funds to repair a bridge, in the process providing jobs to perhaps 100
construction workers, and then lays off 200 state workers, that
stimulus money is completely wasted in terms of boosting the economy.

So far, most of the frustration and anger over this undermining of
the economic stimulus program is coming from the unemployed. Taxpayers,
who will end up paying for this stimulus (all of which was borrowed
money) in future years, have so far not raised a fuss, perhaps because
they have not gotten the news that employers are busy undermining the
program. That could change if unemployment, as expected, keeps rising
inexorably. Maybe at that point people will start demanding that their
taxes be used by the federal government to directly employ people,
instead of trusting employers to pass it through to their workers, or
that at a minimum, organizations receiving stimulus program funds be
barred from laying workers off or cutting their pay.

______________

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

Holder Refuses to Call Warrantless Spying Illegal

davidswanson — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:20:44 -0400

By David Swanson

In probably the most disturbing testimony to hit Capitol Hill since Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Judiciary Committee in May and refused to rule out lawless detention or to agree that government officials can sometimes be prosecuted for their crimes, on Wednesday Holder appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and, among much else, refused five times to agree that warrantless spying is illegal and unconstitutional. I spoke to Holder in April, and he assured me that I would be proud of my country. When?

Over the months that have passed since Holder last testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearings, it has become clear that most, if not all, of the major criminal activities of the Bush Administration will be covered up and protected, and in fact continued, by the Obama Administration -- yes, including torture. Most recently in the media, including in Wednesday's New York Times, are accounts of ongoing warrantless spying. At Wednesday's hearing, liveblogged here, illegal spying was the subject of a dramatic exchange.

Chairman Patrick Leahy was the first to raise the topic and to complain that he had to learn about the executive branch's crimes from the New York Times. I'm not sure who he would prefer or expect to hear such things from. Holder, in response, claimed not to know anything about it, because he hadn't "reviewed in any detail" the New York Times article. Senators Tom Coburn and Diane Feinstein both claimed that the New York Times article was not accurate.

But whether that article is accurate or not misses the broader question that was then raised by Senator Russ Feingold. He pointed out that executive "opinions" asserting the legality of torture have been overturned, but that those asserting the legality of warrantless wiretapping have not been. Senator Feinstein asked whether the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) "opinion" announcing that the 4th Amendment did not apply in the "war on terror" had been withdrawn. Holder said he did not know. Feingold pointed to past statements by Barack Obama and Eric Holder denouncing the warrantless wiretapping. And he asked Holder directly whether the warrantless wiretapping programs set up during Bush's presidency were illegal. Holder replied that they were "unwise". So Feingold asked again, and a third, fourth, and fifth time. Holder would go so far as to say "inconsistent with FISA" and yet explicitly refused to say "illegal." Holder said he hoped to someday release secret "opinions" on spying. But releasing something is not the same as overturning or "withdrawing" it. After five unsuccessful attempts to get Holder to call illegal spying illegal (even though Holder would, later in the same hearing, indicate his reliance on legislation that provided immunity for the crime), Feingold gave up and moved to another topic.

Feingold asked Holder about abuse of the "state secrets" privilege. Since February, Feingold said, he has sought a classified briefing from the executive branch to explain three cases in which Holder's department has used the "state secrets" excuse to try to block court cases. Feingold asked Holder to get him that briefing. Holder refused twice, but did claim that within "a matter of days" he would make some proposals public. The Senate Judiciary Committee plans on Thursday to mark up the State Secrets Protection Act, a bill to restrain executive abuse. Holder told the committee on Wednesday that the executive branch would release its position on the matter within days, and that then no legislation should be needed. Leahy appeared to agree to that outrageous assertion of power, saying that unless the position was released, his committee would mark up the bill.

Senator Dick Durbin asked Holder about the endlessly delayed report from the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), within the Department of Justice, on Jay Bybee's, John Yoo's, and Steven Bradbury's complicity in torture. Durbin pointed out that it has been six weeks since the comment period for the subjects closed (that is to say, Yoo and Bybee and Bradbury concluded their unprecedented and outrageous opportunity to submit edits to a report on their own wrongdoing). Holder told Durbin that changes are being made to the report as a result of those responses. He said that part of the report might be released in "a matter of weeks", but that other parts will be classified. Holder added that he believed the unclassified portion alone would give wrong impressions. He said that he would want to get more of the report declassified, but that doing so would take more time.

It's worth noting that leaders in both houses of Congress, including Leahy and his House counterpart Chairman John Conyers, have long since made clear that they will not seek to hold anyone accountable for torture until the OPR report is released. Presumably they mean the full report. And that could apparently be months or never. No doubt the assurances that all action will wait for the report is strong motivation to delay the report.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse ran through the chronology of delays and stalling tactics thus far. He said that on February 18, 2008, he had been told the OPR report was underway, that a draft report had been delivered in December 2008, that on May 4, 2009, the comment period from the torture lawyers had ended, and that the CIA was given an opportunity for substantive comment and classification review. Whitehouse asked whether the CIA was the current logjam. Holder said No. He said that the OPR is still working on the report in light of the responses it received from the torturers six weeks ago. Whitehouse focused on the CIA and asked Holder (a number of times) if he had any assurances from the CIA that those giving input to the report were not themselves involved in the torture. Holder made clear that the answer was no. He has no such assurances and isn't interested in them.

Wednesday's hearing also featured an amicable exchange in which Holder and Senator Lindsey Graham discussed the creation of a "review" procedure that might amount to "due process" for prisoners who would be held forever without trial. Graham also asked for an assurance from Holder that the President would decree torture photos to be classified before (or after) the next court order to release them. On that point, Holder refused to make such a commitment. But then, he's not the president.

Holder did say something encouraging about the nature of OLC opinions. Senator John Cornyn, who is concerned to prevent the residents of Washington D.C. from having voting representation in Congress, said that an OLC opinion that a proposal for DC voting rights was unconstitutional had not been released. Pressed repeatedly, Holder ended up saying that OLC opinions are just recommendations that he has the power to ignore. Of course, this should be true, but then Ashcroft, Gonzales, and Mukasey, not to mention Bush, had the same power and responsibility to reject absurd "opinions" that torture and warrantless spying and wars of aggression were legal.

Obama Has 3-Point Plan for Gitmo

Bob Fertik — Thu, 21 May 2009 08:54:05 -0400

During his speech today at the National Archives, President Obama is expected to present a 3-point plan for Gitmo detainees:

when feasible, try those who have violated American criminal laws in federal courts
when necessary, try those who violate the rules of war through Military Commission
when possible, transfer to third countries those detainees who can be safely transferred

Will this persuade Congressional Democrats to stop hiding under their beds? Not likely as long as Republicans are all over TV screaming "Obama Will Release Bloodthirsty Terrorists At Your Front Door!"

Judge Bybee and the Challenge of Removing a Stain on the Legal System

dlindorff — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:54:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In December 2001, an appellate judicial panel in the state of New
York ruled that Yonkers City Court Judge Edmund G. Fitzgerald had to
step down from his bench and leave his position following his
disbarment for allegedly “misusing” $9000 in a client’s account prior
to his election as a judge. In 2007, the North Carolina courts faced
something of a dilemma when state judge James Ethridge, who had been
disbarred the prior October by the North Carolina State Bar for
“swindling an older woman of her house and savings” as an attorney six
years earlier, refused to quit his judicial position. Under state law
in North Carolina, judges are required to be licensed lawyers, so Judge
Ethridge was barred from holding court or signing court orders, but he
continued to collect his salary. Only the state’s Judicial Standards
Commission, or the state legislature, through an impeachment, could
remove him from his job.

Judge Bybee, who sits on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in
Nevada, could eventually present the federal judicial system with a
similar dilemma. Bybee, prior to his short tenure as an Appellate Judge
which began in 2003, was assistant attorney general in the Department
of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, where he wrote a lengthy memo for
the White House justifying the use of torture techniques such as
waterboarding, sleep deprivation, body slamming and other measures on
captives in the Bush/Cheney so-called “War” on Terror.

It is now being reported that the Justice Department is about to
release a review the department’s ethics unit, the Office of
Professional Responsibility, which will report on that memo, as well as
other memos written by Bybee’s then colleagues in the Office of Legal
Counsel, John Yoo, now a professor of law at Berkeley University’s law
school, and Steven Bradbury, and that the report will recommend
disbarment for the three men. That would put the matter in the hands of
the states where each man is licensed to practice law—in Bybee’s case,
the state of Nevada. According to the New York Times, the 220-page
internal review of Bybee’s, Yoo’s and Bradbury’s actions as counsel to
the White House amounted to “serious lapses of judgment” that could
warrant reprimands or disbarment.

What sets Bybee apart from the other two men is that after his work
in the Bush/Cheney administration, he went on to become a federal judge
with a lifetime appointment. Furthermore, unlike North Carolina, and
many other states, there is no requirement that a federal judge have a
law degree or be a lawyer , much less be a licensed one. While every
judge on the federal bench is, in fact, a lawyer in good standing with
their state bar, technically they do not have to be.

Judges in many state courts can be removed from office by the
judicial conduct committees operated by those states’ supreme courts,
but federal judges can only be “disciplined” by the federal judicial
system’s office of judicial conduct, not removed from office. A
disciplined judge might be prevented from hearing cases or from signing
court orders, but removal from office, under the Constitution, requires
impeachment by a majority of the House of Representatives, and
conviction by a two-thirds vote of the US Senate.

At the same time, it would likely be a huge embarrassment to the
judicial system if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred for ethical lapses
and for what the forthcoming Justice Department investigation is
reportedly calling “serious lapses of judgment,” and then continued to
serve as a judge in one of the second highest courts in the land.

Prof. Deborah Rhode, director of the Center for the Legal
Profession at the Stanford University School of Law, commented, “I
would imaging that anything that would be enough to disbar you would be
enough to remove you from the bench,” when asked what the impact of a
disbarment of a judge would be in the federal courts.

Certainly, if Judge Bybee were to be disbarred by the Nevada court,
there would be mounting calls for his impeachment by Congress. It is
certainly possible too, that if Bybee didn’t simply resign at that
point, the House, heavily Democratic, could initiate impeachment
proceedings and that he would be impeached, since not only would he
have been disbarred and criticized strongly by the Justice Department
Office of Professional Responsibility, but his actual memo, released by
the Obama White House, has him offering legal cover for clear
violations of the US Criminal Code and the Geneva Conventions, to which
the US is a signatory.

Whether House prosecutors could convince all Senate Democrats, plus
independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and seven Republicans to reach
the required 67 votes needed to convict (assuming no abstentions), is
an open question.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson Law School in
San Diego, who is head of the National Lawyers Guild, notes that while
the Constitution says judges may only be removed from office by the
process of impeachment, it also says: “The Judges, both of the supreme
and inferior courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior.”

Bybee in his 2002 memo (actually largely written by his subordinate
at the time, John Yoo, but approved and signed by Bybee), tries to
argue that what the Geneva Conventions and the US Criminal Code define
as torture—namely “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,”—actually is
only “torture” if it is “equivalent in intensity to the pain
accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment
of bodily function, or even death,” a patently absurd interpretation
since it would be impossible to imaging “degrading treatment” rising to
that level of pain. Bybee’s memo went on to say that even if US
personnel did actually torture a captive, it would not be a violation
of the law or the conventions if the torturer didn’t have a “specific
intent” to cause pain. Going even further, he wrote that even if the
torturer had a specific intent to cause pain, “a showing that an
individual acted with a good faith belief that his conduct would not
produce a result that the law prohibits negates specific intent.”

As I wrote in an article on April 20 on my website ThisCantBeHappening.net,
Judge Bybee himself, in an opinion written in 2006, mercilessly mocked
this kind of legal sophism, saying: “The only thing we have to enforce
our judgments is the power of our words. When these words lose their
ordinary meaning—when they become so elastic that they may mean the
opposite of what they appear to mean—we cede our own right to be taken
seriously.” (Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1309 v. Laidlaw Transit Services, Inc.)

It seems clear that acting as a “mob attorney” for the White House,
artfully misinterpreting a criminal statute (Sections 2340-2340A of
title 18 of the United States Code implements the provisions of the
Geneva Conventions, making them an integral part of US law) outlawing
any form of torture in order to provide legal cover for criminal
behavior by American forces and the CIA towards captives in the “War”
on Terror would meet the definition “Bad Behavior,” warranting
impeachment.

Whether Democrats in Congress, who in recent years have
demonstrated an astonishing lack of courage and respect for the
Constitution, will rise to the occasion is another matter, especially
with a new Democratic president who has made it clear he is loath to
hold the prior administration to account for any of its crimes or
clearly unconstitutional behavior.
____________________
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

Foolish Employment, Health Policies Leave US Wide Open for Pandemic

dlindorff — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:58:17 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The outbreak of a new swine flu in Mexico, and the potential threat
of a new global pandemic, shines a bright light on a major weakness in
the United States—an employment system where most workers are not paid
or even face getting let go if they get sick and have to stay home from
work, combined with a broken healthcare system where roughly one in six
people have no ready access to a doctor.

What the American failure to mandate employer-paid sick-days means
is that most Americans who don’t feel well go to work anyway, in part
for fear of losing their jobs, and in part because they are already
living so close to the margin that they cannot afford to miss a few
days’ pay.

The result of this is that offices, buses, subway cars and
elevators in coming weeks will be full of highly infectious people who
really should be home trying to recuperate. So even if your employer
does offer you sick leave, you will be placed at risk by other
employers who do not offer that benefit to their workers, or even by
lower-status workers at your own company who don’t get the same
sick-pay benefits you do. (At Temple University where my wife works, it
was only recently, after a long struggle backed by student activists,
that contractor-service guards on the campus received sick pay. Before
that, they had to come to work, sick or not, putting students and
faculty at risk of infection.)

Add to this the fact that nearly 50 million Americans earn too much
to qualify for Medicaid, yet work for employers who don’t provide them
with any health insurance. For such people, going to a doctor is a
serious problem. They probably don’t have the $50-$100 in cash to pay
for an office visit—much less the $200-400 it would cost to bring all
four members of a family—and going to an emergency room at a local
hospital and asking for charity care for something like flu symptoms
could mean a half day in a waiting room (with a lot of other sick
people!). Not to mention that many hospitals cheat on their free care
provision mandate and then dun patients for $2000 for seeing a
nurse-practitioner and getting the advice to take two aspirins and
drink a lot of fluid. And then of course, there’s coming up with the
money to buy a costly drug like Tamiflu.

Who’s likely to do any that without health insurance?

And so, as this latest round of flu starts to spread inexorably
northward from Mexico, we can expect to see it sweep through our
workplaces, and on into our schools, causing misery and no doubt a
large number of deaths that never should have happened.

The joke here, though it is hardly funny, is that businesses will
end up suffering as their workforces are sidelined for weeks, and as
the larger economy, already in a deep recession, suffers a further
blow. Sick workers don’t earn money, and thus have less to spend, and
besides, when whole families are laid up and feeling miserable, they
are not likely to go out on shopping sprees even if they do have money
in their pockets.

It doesn’t have to be like this. An enlightened country would
mandate that all employers offer their employees a minimum of one
week’s paid sick leave per year, so that people could stay home if they
came down with something. This benefit could be made cumulative, so
that a worker would be incentivized not to abuse the benefit, and could
use it in the event of a longer illness or injury.

An enlightened country would also see the self-interest for all in
having a health system that provided care for all. It’s not just a
matter of human decency, though one would hope that would be enough.
It’s also in our own interest that the person who sits next to us in
the office or on the bus have health insurance and ready access to a
doctor when needed.

At a bare minimum, the federal government should set up free
neighborhood clinics able to provide primary health care in every
community where it is determined that there is a lack off access to
physicians.

While we’re at it, school systems should also not be penalized if
students miss days at school because of illness. At present, having
students stay home for medical reasons reduces a school’s federal
funding, as grants are based upon a formula that counts student days
per year. This formulaic approach may lead school administrators to
avoid calling for school cancellations at a time of a possible epidemic.

Hopefully this outbreak of swine flu will turn out to be nothing
serious. But it should nonetheless serve as a wake-up call to the
American public. The next crisis could be a serious outbreak of
human-to-human bird flu, or a dramatic increase in drug-resistant
Tuberculosis or who knows what other communicable disease.

And when it comes to communicable diseases, we had better accept
that we have to be our brothers’ keepers or we will become their
vectors instead.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). He is
also author of “Marketplace Medicine” (Bantam, 1992). 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