Published on Saturday, November 28, 2009 by Salon.com

Is Obama's Civil Liberties Record Understandable?

by Glenn Greenwald

Earlier this week, Kevin Drum said that "nine times out of ten" Obama's policies are "pretty much what [he] expected" but that "the biggest one-time-out-of-ten where he's not doing what [he] expected is in the area of detainee and civil liberties issues." Similarly, Andrew Sullivan cited "accountability for war crimes and civil rights" as among the very few issues on which he finds fault with Obama. Matt Yglesias objects to those observations as follows:

Both Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan say they think most people are too hard on Obama, but express disappointment at his record on civil liberties issues. I agree that the civil liberties record hasn’t been exactly what I would have wanted, but I'm continually surprised that people are disappointed in this turn. Of all the things for an incumbent President of the United States to take political risks fighting for, obviously reducing the power of the executive branch is going to be dead last on the list. If you want to see civil liberties championed, that’s going to have to come from congress.

It's interesting how what was once lambasted as "Constitution-shredding" under George Bush is now nothing more than: Obama's "civil liberties record hasn’t been exactly what I would have wanted." Also, the premise implicitly embedded in Matt's argument is the standard Beltway dogma that there would be serious political costs from reversing the Bush/Cheney abuses of the Constitution and civil liberties. The success of Obama's campaign -- which emphatically and repeatedly vowed to do exactly that -- ought to have permanently retired that excuse.

Even more important, Matt seems to be implying that he knew all along that Obama never really intended to fulfill his multiple campaign promises to restore civil liberties and dismantle the Bush/Cheney war on the Constitution. So all of those righteous speeches and commitments and campaign positions were nothing more than dishonest instruments for manipulating and placating the people who supported his campaign? I don't necessarily disagree with that assessment. I neither believed nor disbelieved what Obama said during the campaign, but instead intended to wait for the evidence before deciding. And particularly once I watched Obama -- once his party's nomination was secure -- flagrantly violate his pledge to filibuster any bill containing telecom immunity, I had no expectations that he'd feel at all compelled to adhere to his other promises.

But is it really that surprising that many people did believe that Obama actually meant what he said, given that the entire campaign was predicated on his self-proclaimed uniqueness as a candidate and his over-arching intent to rid our political culture of corroding cynicism and to restore hope and faith in the political process? If Obama ran a campaign which purposely elevated the hopes of so many people -- particularly younger and new voters -- while secretly harboring the knowledge that he did not feel at all bound by what he was promising, isn't that a fairly serious indictment of his character, as well as a dangerous game to play for the Democratic Party? And during the time he was vigorously supporting Obama's candidacy last year, did Matt ever point out that Obama didn't really mean what he was saying when he spoke about these matters -- a fairly significant point to make when commenting on the election? If Obama had no intention of "reducing the power of the executive branch," why did he repeatedly proclaim that he would?

But what strikes me as the most significant aspect of Matt's commentary is that this mitigating analysis was rarely, if ever, applied to Bush. I've been reading many arguments from Obama supporters over the last couple of weeks insisting that Obama can't possibly give civilian trials to all Terrorism suspects because having to free detainees whom they can't convict in court would be politically catastrophic; but doesn't that same reasoning justify Bush's decision to open Guantanamo and hold terrorist suspects without charges? After all, how could Bush afford to risk acquittals any more than Obama?

Similarly, if Matt's argument is true that it's natural and inevitable that Presidents will try to maximize their own power -- and that it's Congress' responsibility to check that -- doesn't that mean that Bush and Cheney got a bad rap all these years for their so-called "Constitution-shredding," and that the ultimate responsibility for their abuses lies not with Bush, Cheney David Addington and John Yoo, but rather with Tom Daschle, Bill Frist, Harry Reid, Denny Hastert and Nancy Pelosi? If it's the responsibility of Congress to check presidential abuses -- since, as Matt argues, no rational person would ever expect the President to voluntarily impose or even accept limits on his own power -- then the real controversy should be about why Nancy Pelosi and company didn't do more to publicize Bush/Cheney extremism and impose limits on what they were doing. Matt, however, seemed to argue the opposite in the past -- as he when he insisted that the controversy over what Pelosi knew about torture was irrelevant because she was just a "bit player" in the whole affair. If complaints about Obama's civil liberties abuses are overheated because it's unreasonable to expect him to do anything different, shouldn't the same be said of Bush and Cheney?

I agree with Matt's explicit point that Congress has an important role to play in checking presidential abuses -- a role they've clearly abdicated no matter which party was in control. He's also right that Presidents don't easily relinquish power. But it's hardly unreasonable to object when someone runs for high political office based on clear and repeated promises that they have squarely violated. Whatever else is true, watching Obama embrace extremist policies can still be "disappointing" even if one isn't surprised that he's doing it. I could understand and accept a lot more easily this blithe acquiescence to Obama's record if it weren't for the fact that progressives and Democrats spent so many years screaming bloody murder over Bush's use of indefinite detention, military commissions, state secrets, renditions, and extreme secrecy -- policies Obama has largely and/or completely adopted as his own. One can't help but wonder, at least in some cases, how genuine those objections were, as opposed to their just having been effective tools to discredit a Republican president for partisan and political gain.

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.

Obama's Unhappy Thanksgiving for Progressives

Unhappy Thanksgiving

Thursday 26 November 2009

by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Photo: anjan58 / Flickr)

The calendar has come around again to Thanksgiving, and families all over the country will be gathering around dinner tables to celebrate. Or try to, anyway. With unemployment above ten percent, and with actual unemployment closer to twenty percent, with foreclosures all over the place, with wages dropping and food prices rising, with the economy improving only for those who have lots of money, there will be millions of people without a whole hell of a lot to feel thankful for.

Ten months after the inauguration of Barack Obama, those "Yes We Can" and "Hope" slogans have begun to ring more than a little hollow. Of course, the man inherited a vast array of ongoing catastrophes from his predecessor, and it is a dead-bang certainty that ten months under a McCain administration would have left us in far worse shape than we find ourselves in today, but the realization that matters are only slightly better than they would have been under the worst-case scenario doesn't go very far anymore. Some things are better, but the fact of the matter is that some things are worse, and most things are exactly the same.

The news on Tuesday was filled with reports that Obama intends to announce his decision regarding America's ongoing war in Afghanistan on December 1, and the early word is "expansion." McClatchy News reported, "President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional US troops over the next year to what he's called 'a war of necessity' in Afghanistan. Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on December 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the US Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire, the officials said."

So, there it is. The US military is in terrible shape after two wars, and sending more troops into the Afghan conflict will only add to the damage. The cost of sending additional troops will further undermine our economy and make Obama's domestic agenda all the more difficult to achieve. The Afghan people, already deeply resentful after eight years of American occupation and warfare, will not greet a new investment of troops gladly. We can all hold hands around the Thanksgiving table and pray to whatever God may be listening that Obama will provide some sort of coherent exit policy, but the fact remains that no occupying force in more than a century has employed any effective exit strategy from Afghanistan beyond utter defeat.

Speaking of domestic policy, the much-ballyhooed push to reform America's health care system has gone completely sideways in the hands of Congress people bought off by insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and in the hands of a president who demanded change but has taken three steps back for every one step forward. The result looks to be a watered down farce of a bill that could very well make matters even worse than they already are. Economist Robert Reich recently wrote about the current state of affairs in the health care debate:

So the compromise that ended up in the House bill is to have a mere public option, open only to the 6 million Americans not otherwise covered. The Congressional Budget Office warns this shrunken public option will have no real bargaining leverage and would attract mainly people who need lots of medical care to begin with. So, it will actually cost more than it saves.

But even the House's shrunken and costly little public option is too much for private insurers, Big Pharma, Republicans and "centrists" in the Senate. So, Harry Reid has proposed an even tinier public option, which states can decide not to offer their citizens. According to the CBO, it would attract no more than four million Americans.

It's a token public option, an ersatz public option, a fleeting gesture toward the idea of a public option, so small and desiccated as to be barely worth mentioning except for the fact that it still (gasp) contains the word "public."

Our private, for-profit health insurance system, designed to fatten the profits of private health insurers and Big Pharma, is about to be turned over to ... our private, for-profit health care system. Except that now private health insurers and Big Pharma will be getting some 30 million additional customers, paid for by the rest of us.

Upbeat policy wonks and political spinners who tend to see only portions of cups that are full will point out some good things: no pre-existing conditions, insurance exchanges, 30 million more Americans covered. But in reality, the cup is 90 percent empty. Most of us will remain stuck with little or no choice - dependent on private insurers who care only about the bottom line, who deny our claims, who charge us more and more for co-payments and deductibles, who bury us in forms, who don't take our calls.

Pretty much says it all right there.

With public attention focused on the economy, Afghanistan and health care, the White House is moving in stealth to renew some of the worst Patriot Act provisions enacted by the Bush administration. Specifically, the administration seeks to renew three parts of the Act that are set to expire on December 31, according to the Inter-Press Service:

National Security Letters (NSLs)

The FBI uses NSLs to compel Internet service providers, libraries, banks, and credit reporting companies to turn over sensitive information about their customers and patrons. Using this data, the government can compile vast dossiers about innocent people.

The 'Material Support' Statute

This provision criminalizes providing "material support" to terrorists, defined as providing any tangible or intangible good, service or advice to a terrorist or designated group. As amended by the Patriot Act and other laws since Sep. 11, this section criminalizes a wide array of activities, regardless of whether they actually or intentionally further terrorist goals or organizations.

FISA Amendments Act of 2008

This past summer, Congress passed a law that permits the government to conduct warrantless and suspicion-less dragnet collection of US residents' international telephone calls and e-mails.

All we as Americans can do is work to push these elected officials away from the abyss they have us teetering over, and hope that there will be something to be thankful for next year. For now, however, just about everything before us is either worse or exactly as bad as it was before. Not much to be thankful about here.

Published on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Obama: Profile in Courage, or Cave-In?

by Ray McGovern

"It took a lot of courage on Kennedy's part to defy the Pentagon, defy the military - and do the right thing," said Col. Larry Wilkerson, USA (ret.), according to Robert Dreyfuss in his recent Rolling Stone article "The Generals' Revolt."

Wilkerson, who was chief of staff at the State Department (2002-2005) and now teaches at George Washington University, was alluding to President John F. Kennedy's courage in 1962, when he faced down his top generals and refused to bomb Cuba and risk nuclear war. That was as close as we came to nuclear calamity during the entire Cold War.

Despite the urgency of the threat posed by the Russian military buildup in Cuba (we now know the Russians had already placed nuclear weapons on the island), Kennedy's deliberate decision-making style allowed enough time for cooler heads to prevail and yielded a peaceful solution.

A hallmark trait of John Kennedy was his ability to listen and learn. At the same time, he did not hesitate to challenge conventional wisdom.

Call that "dithering," if you wish. I, for one, applaud President Barack Obama for following Kennedy's calm, deliberative style, as Obama faces similar pressure from the military to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan.

Kennedy: Out of Vietnam

The Cuban crisis was not the only time JFK found himself at loggerheads with generals who thought they knew better and who verged on the insubordinate. Kennedy's sustained arm wrestling with his senior generals over whether to send more troops to Vietnam was just as tense, and much more sustained.

In the end, he concluded that they had it wrong and he decided against them. In short, he opted to behave like a president-a "decider" (pardon the odd word). His overruling of the U.S. military brass on Vietnam had huge implications, both short- and long-term. This "real history" is highly relevant today.

The 46^th anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination passed by last Sunday virtually unnoticed. The unfortunate thing is this: his legacy on Vietnam is so widely misunderstood that it is easy to miss the relevance of his decision making in the early Sixties to the dilemma faced by President Barack Obama today as he decides whether to stand up to-or cave in to-the Pentagon's plans for escalating another misbegotten war in Afghanistan.

Faux history has it that President Lyndon Baines Johnson's infusion of hundreds of thousands, up to 536,000, combat troops into Vietnam was a straight-line continuation of a buildup started by his slain predecessor. Kennedy did raise the U.S. troop level there from about 1,000 to 16,500 "advisers" - a significant increase.

But as he studied the options, cost, and likely outcomes, Kennedy came to see U.S. intervention in Vietnam as a fool's errand. Few Americans are aware that, just before he was assassinated, Kennedy had decided to pull all troops out of Vietnam by 1965.

The Pentagon was hell bent on thwarting such plans, and Defense Secretary McNamara found it an uphill struggle to enforce the President's will on the top brass. Senior military officers were experts at "slowrolling" politicians who favored a course that the Pentagon didn't like. When in May 1962 Kennedy ordered up a contingency troop-withdrawal plan, it took more than a year for the military brass to draw one up.

As the President encountered continuing resistance, he paid increasing attention to more levelheaded military and civilian advisers as well as to his own intuition and instincts. Kennedy asked the Marine Commandant, Gen. David M. Shoup, "to look over the ground in Southeast Asia and counsel him." Shoup told the President:

"Unless we are prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before the war expands beyond control."

Kennedy concluded that there was no responsible course other than to press ahead for a phased withdrawal regardless of the opposition from his senior national security advisers. He decided to pull 1,000 troops out of Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the rest by 1965.

How To Do It

My Irish grandmother called Kennedy "a clever lad" and she was right.

Realizing that he had to exercise the utmost care in navigating choppy military and political waters, Kennedy employed the artifice of sending Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor on a "fact-finding" trip to Saigon. At the end of the trip they would "recommend" the course the President had already chosen.

Stopping in Hawaii en route back to Washington, McNamara and Taylor were given "their" report, which had been written by John and Robert Kennedy. It was instantly named the "McNamara-Taylor report" and the two travelers presented it to the President on the morning of Oct. 2, 1963. Wasting no time, the President convened a National Security Council meeting that evening to discuss the report.

The senior military saw through the subterfuge and strongly opposed the key recommendations of the report. In his memoir, In Retrospect, McNamara wrote that the NSC meeting saw "heated debate about our recommendation that the Defense Department announce plans to withdraw U.S. military forces by the end of 1965, starting with the withdrawal of 1,000 men by the end of the year." In McNamara's words, there was "a total lack of consensus."

However, there is only one "decider" on the National Security Council - the President. Kennedy stepped up to the plate and decided, bypassing the majority opposed.

Thirty-two years later in a Sept. 12, 1995 letter to the New York Times, McNamara took strong issue with a charge in an earlier op-ed that "the groundwork was being laid for our tragic escalation of the war" before President Kennedy was killed. McNamara described the President's reasoning in deciding to go ahead, despite the lack of consensus:

"...[T]he President nonetheless authorized the beginning of withdrawal, believing that either our training and logistical support led to the progress claimed or, if it had not, additional training would not change the situation and, in either case, we should plan to withdraw."

His decision made, Kennedy wasted no time in acting, well, like a President. He told McNamara to announce it immediately in order to "set it in concrete," according to McNamara. As the defense secretary was leaving the NSC meeting to tell White House reporters, the President called to him, "And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots, too," according to Kenneth O'Donnell and David Powers in their book, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye.

Action Memorandum

The President's policy was formalized nine days later in his National Security Action Memorandum Number 263 of October 11, 1963. That document put into effect the McNamara-Taylor recommendations, which provided that:

"A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time....[and] the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963."

Whether Kennedy truly believed that the U.S. training program would succeed in helping the South Vietnamese prevail is doubtful. Clearly, he wanted out. He carried around in his conscience, and from time to time spoke of, the number of American troops already killed. (Eight died under Eisenhower; about 170 during Kennedy's tenure.)

Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff, to whom fell the task of announcing President Kennedy's death on Nov. 22, 1963, told James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, that Kennedy's mind was fixed on Vietnam the day before. Instead of rehearsing for a press conference that day, Kennedy told Kilduff:

"I've just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam. We're losing too damned many people over there. It's time for us to get out. The Vietnamese are not fighting for themselves. We're the ones who are doing the fighting.

After I come back from Texas, that's going to change. There is no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life."

A month before, during his last visit to Hyannis Port, Kennedy told his next-door neighbor Larry Newman, "I'm going to get those guys out [of Vietnam] because we're not going to find ourselves in a war it's impossible to win.

Kennedy understood that decisions on Vietnam were far too important to be left to myopic generals. They were still chafing at what they considered Kennedy's failure in 1962 to seize the moment and obliterate Cuba-and perhaps also the U.S.S.R., while we were at it. Add Kennedy's clear desire to work closely (often secretly) with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in a priority effort to prevent another Cuba-type crisis, and then letting generic "Communists" take over Vietnam-with dominoes likely to fall all over the place-and the military brass became convinced they needed to strongly oppose such "appeasement."

"Best and Brightest"

And it was not only the generals. Far from it. The "best and the brightest," first and foremost McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security adviser, were also strongly opposed to Kennedy's decision to pull troops out of Vietnam. Bundy disagreed with the recommendations in the McNamara-Taylor report. He also resisted Kennedy's frequently expressed doubts that foreign troops, even in large numbers, could prevail in guerrilla war, and Kennedy's determination never to send combat troops to Vietnam.

Bundy thought he knew better, refusing to believe that the President would ever "let South Vietnam go." Years later, Bundy's memoirs defended his views and advice to Kennedy on Vietnam.

However, after McNamara published In Retrospect in 1995, in which he concluded that "we were wrong, terribly wrong" on Vietnam, Bundy went back to the drawing board to rethink his assessment.

Bundy hired a man half his age, Gordon Goldstein, as research assistant to help him in what turned out to be Bundy's personal quest to discover the roots of his own mistakes which, for the most part, were the result of hubris, pure and simple.

Early this year, author William Pfaff reviewed what started out as the Bundy Memoir Part II (McGeorge Bundy died in 1996), but ended up as Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam by Goldstein. In his review, Pfaff highlights Bundy's pedigree: tops at Groton, professor of government at Harvard and youngest dean of faculty; his mother a Boston Brahmin, his father a diplomat. Pfaff is ruthlessly on point in describing Bundy's attitude:

"American had to ‘win' in Vietnam because America always wins. America knows better than everyone else because of that intellectual firepower deployed at Harvard and other elite universities. America does not have to know about other people because other people are not worth knowing.

"Goldstein's decisive clue to why Bundy failed came by accident. He found a note written in 1996, when Bundy was asked what had been most surprising about the war. He answered, ‘the endurance of the enemy.' Goldstein writes: ‘He didn't understand the enemy ‘because, frankly, he didn't think they warranted his attention.'"

The good news for today comes from press reporting that top officials of the Obama administration, including the President, have read Goldstein's book. Drawing a connection between Kennedy's challenge on Vietnam and Obama's on Afghanistan, a Wall Street Journal report of Oct. 7 noted, "For opponents of a major troop increase ... ‘Lessons in Disaster' encapsulates their concerns about accepting military advice unchallenged."

Obama Must Decide

There are hints that Obama is more Chicago than Harvard-and that, like Kennedy, he carries casualty figures around in his conscience. His late-night, early-morning appearance at Dover Air Force Base a few weeks ago to salute what the Washington Post called "transfer cases" coming home from the war is, I believe, a telling sign. Obama knows they are not just "transfer cases."

This young President, too, is a "clever lad;" he is also a politician. Intellectually, he is surely equipped to understand the March of Folly that would be involved, were he to send substantial additional forces to Afghanistan. And he is surely aware that the majority of Americans are no longer deceived by the pundits at Fox News. Recent polls show broader and broader popular opposition to sending more troops.

The choice, in my view, is between courage and cowardice cloaked as politics of the possible. Let me guess what you're thinking - "But that's asking too much of the young President; "cowardice" is too strong a word; Obama cannot possibly face down the entire military establishment."

Yes He Can

John Kennedy did. So the question is whether Barack Obama is "no Jack Kennedy," or whether he will summon the courage to stand up to the misguided military brass of today. We are talking, after all, about thousands more being killed-and for what?

I would suggest to the President that he give another close read to Goldstein's "Lessons in Disaster" and then ponder the lessons that leap out of Barbara Tuchman's The March to Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.

Obama may also wish to ponder the words of W.E.B. Dubois:

"Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow...."

* * *

Note: In his book JFK and the Unspeakable, James Douglass has arrayed-and documented-his narrative with such care, that it has been all too easy for me to plagiarize from it. Actually, the book takes the JFK story much further, to include a thorough discussion of what-and who-Douglass believes killed the President. I recommend the book highly.

An earlier version of this article first appeared at Consortiumnews.com.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Published on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 by The Nation

Obama's 'Finish the Job' Talk Sets Stage for Afghan Troop Surge

by John Nichols

President Obama plans to formally announce on December 1 his decision with regard to the request from some of his more ambitious generals for a massive troop surge in Afghanistan.

US Marines fire mortar rounds from their forward operating base in Mian Poshteh in Helmand Province. President Barack Obama, vowing to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, promised he would soon announce his decision on sending tens of thousands more US troops to battle Al-Qaeda and the Taliban (AFP/Manpreet Romana)

But indications are that the president who was elected to set a new course for the nation when it comes to foreign policy will instead "stay the course" set by his quagmire-prone predecessor.

Obama announced Tuesday that he plans to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, and there is a growing consensus that he will agree to dispatch roughly 34,000 U.S. troops to the country.

The president says he plans to use his December 1 "finish-the-job" speech to signal "resolve to the allies while not signaling open-ended commitment to the American people."

Translation: There will be talk of an exit strategy -- with reassuring references to "benchmarks" and "off-ramps" -- but no exit strategy.

Obama indicated on Tuesday that he plans to expend a good deal of political capital to promote what is effectively becoming his war. "I feel very confident that when the American people hear a clear rationale for what we're doing there and how we intend to achieve our goals, that they will be supportive," he said.

But there is likely to be significant resistance to what many Americans -- some of whom serve in Congress -- see as a plan to steer the country deeper into a quagmire.

As Obama's intentions began to clarify Tuesday, anti-war activists stepped up their activism on behalf of congressional measures that would limit the scope of the war and begin a process of bringing the troops home.

In particular, they focused on a bill introduced by California Congresswoman Barbara Lee, HR 3699, which would prohibit the use of taxpayer funds for more combat troops to Afghanistan, and another introduced by Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern, HR 2404, which calls for the development of a clear exit strategy.

Tom Hayden, the former California legislator and anti-Vietnam War activist who has positioned himself as prime mover in the movement to prevent an escalation of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, says the Lee and McGovern bills "provide space for the peace movement to organize in local communities across the country during the next six months."

That's right.

Lee's amendment has 23 cosponsors, McGovern's has 100 --including several Republicans.

And there are rumblings from top Democrats in Congress.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, described Afghan President Hamid Karzai as an "unworthy partner" for the U.S., in a statement that indicated deep discomfort with an expansion of the U.S. commitment toprop up Karzai's regime.

Perhaps even more significantly, Congressman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who chairs the powerful House Appropriations Committee, bluntly declared that: "On the merits, I think it is a mistake to deepen our involvement."

Obey and Senator Carl Levin, D-Michigan, are proposing a war surtax on the wealthy to pay for additional troops. "If we have to pay for the health care bill, we should pay for the war as well," says the man who will have a significant say with regarding any move by Obama to expand the occupation. "The problem in this country with this issue is that the only people who have to sacrifice are military families and they've had to go to the well again and again and again and again, and everybody else is blithely unaffected by the war."

Obey is offering what could well be the most effective congressional challenge to Obama's plan. The appropriations committee chair argues that the expanded mission is simply unaffordable.

Surging more troops into Afghanistan will "wipe out every initiative we have to rebuild our own economy," says Obey, who explains that if Obama goes for an expanded war: "There ain't going to be no money for nothing if we pour it all into Afghanistan. If they ask for an increased troop commitment in Afghanistan, I am going to ask them to pay for it."

The Obama administration won't be happy with Obey.

But Obey knows the numbers when it comes to budgeting.

And his warning is stark and necessary one.

Copyright © 2009 The Nation

The Audacity of Wasted Opportunity: Obama/GOP Alliance

Like LBJ, Obama on a self-destructive course in history.

Published on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Get Ready for the Obama/GOP Alliance

by Jeff Cohen

With Obama pushing a huge troop escalation in Afghanistan, history may well repeat itself with a vengeance. And it's not just the apt comparison to LBJ, who destroyed his presidency on the battlefields of Vietnam with an escalation that delivered power to Nixon and the GOP.

There's another frightening parallel: Obama seems to be following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton, who accomplished perhaps his single biggest legislative "triumph" - NAFTA - thanks to an alliance with Republicans that overcame strong Democratic and grassroots opposition.

It was 16 years ago this month when Clinton assembled his coalition with the GOP to bulldoze public skepticism about the trade treaty and overpower a stop-NAFTA movement led by unions, environmentalists and consumer rights groups. How did Clinton win his majority in Congress? With the votes of almost 80 percent of GOP senators and nearly 70 percent of House Republicans. Democrats in the House voted against NAFTA by more than 3 to 2, with fierce opponents including the Democratic majority leader and majority whip.

To get a majority today in Congress on Afghanistan, the Obama White House is apparently bent on a strategy replicating the tragic farce that Clinton pulled off: Ignore the informed doubts of your own party while making common cause with extremist Republicans who never accepted your presidency in the first place.

"Deather" conspiracists are not new to the Grand Old Party. Clinton engendered a similar loathing on the right despite his centrist, corporate-friendly policies. When conservative Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey delivered to Clinton (and corporate elites) the NAFTA victory, it didn't slow down rightwing operatives who circulated wacky videos accusing Clinton death squads of murdering reporters and others.

For those who elected Obama, it's important to remember the downward spiral that was accelerated by Clinton's GOP alliance to pass NAFTA. It should set off alarm bells for us today on Afghanistan.

NAFTA was quickly followed by the debacle of Clinton healthcare "reform" largely drafted by giant insurance companies, which was followed by a stunning election defeat for Congressional Democrats in November 1994, as progressive and labor activists were lethargic while rightwing activists in overdrive put Gingrich into the Speaker's chair.

A year later, advised by his chief political strategist Dick Morris (yes, the Obama-basher now at Fox), Clinton declared: "The era of big government is over." In the coming years, Clinton proved that the era of big business was far from over - working with Republican leaders to grant corporate welfare to media conglomerates (1996 Telecom Act) and investment banks (1999 abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act).

Today, it's crucial to ask where Obama is heading. From the stimulus to healthcare, he's shown a Clinton-like willingness to roll over progressives in Congress on his way to corrupt legislation and frantic efforts to compromise for the votes of corporate Democrats or "moderate" Republicans. Meanwhile, the incredible shrinking "public option" has become a sick joke.

As he glides from retreats on civil liberties to health reform that appeases corporate interests to his Bush-like pledge this week to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, an Obama reliance on Congressional Republicans to fund his troop escalation could be the final straw in disorienting and demobilizing the progressive activists who elected him a year ago.

Throughout the centuries, no foreign power has been able to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, but President Obama thinks he's a tough enough Commander-in-Chief to do it. Too bad he hasn't demonstrated such toughness in the face of obstructionist Republicans and corporate lobbyists. For them, it's been more like "compromiser-in-chief."

When you start in the center (on, say, healthcare or Afghanistan) and readily move rightward several steps to appease rightwing politicians or lobbyists or Generals, by definition you are governing as a conservative.

It's been a gradual descent from the elation and hope for real change many Americans felt on election night, November 2008. For some of us who'd scrutinized the Clinton White House in the early 1990s, the buzz was killed days after Obama's election when he chose his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a top Clinton strategist and architect of the alliance that pushed NAFTA through Congress.

If Obama stands tough on more troops to Afghanistan (as Clinton fought ferociously for NAFTA), only an unprecedented mobilization of progressives - including many who worked tirelessly to elect Obama - will be able to stop him. Trust me: The Republicans who yell and scream about Obama budget deficits when they're obstructing public healthcare will become deficit doves in spending the estimated $1 million per year per new soldier (not to mention private contractors) headed off to Asia.

The only good news I can see: Maybe it will take a White House/GOP alliance over Afghanistan to wake up the base of liberal groups (like MoveOn) to take a closer and more critical look at President Obama's policies.

Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group FAIR, and former board member of Progressive Democrats of America. In 2002, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC (overseen by NBC News). His latest book is Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.

Profiles In Mediocracy: Echoing Bush, Obama Refuses to Sign Landmine Treaty

Published on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 by Reuters

US Will Not Join Treaty Banning Landmines

by David Alexander

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has no plans to join a global treaty banning landmines because a policy review found the United States could not meet its security commitments without them, the State Department said on Tuesday.

"This administration undertook a policy review and we decided that our landmine policy remains in effect," spokesman Ian Kelly told a briefing five days before a review conference in Cartegena, Colombia on the 10-year-old Mine Ban Treaty.

"We determined that we would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we signed this convention," he said.

It was the first time the administration had publicly disclosed the decision.

The treaty bans the use, stockpiling, production or transfer of antipersonnel mines. It has been endorsed by 156 countries, but the United States, Russia, China and India have not adopted it.

U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, a leading advocate for the treaty, called the decision "a default of U.S. leadership."

"It is a lost opportunity for the United States to show leadership instead of joining with China and Russia and impeding progress," Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said in a statement.

Landmines are known to have caused 5,197 casualties last year, a third of them children, according to the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which links some 1,000 activist groups.

The United States generally abides by the provisions of the treaty. It has not used antipersonnel mines since the 1991 Gulf War, has not exported any since 1992 and has not produced them since 1997, Steve Goose, director of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch, told a briefing on Monday.

The review conference next Sunday is expected to draw more than 1,000 delegates representing more than 100 countries, including ministers and heads of state.

It will look at the progress of a broadly popular treaty that has helped cut landmine casualties around the world and provided relief to victims.

Kelly said the United States would send humanitarian mine relief experts from the State Department, Defense Department, U.S. Agency for International Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to observe the conference.

"As a global provider of security, we have an interest in the discussions there," Kelly said. "But we will be there as an observer, obviously, because we haven't signed the convention, nor do we plan to sign the convention."

U.S. SENDING OBSERVERS

It is the first time the United States has sent observers to a gathering of states that have accepted the treaty, a move that was welcomed by anti-landmine campaigners.

"The very fact that they are showing up we take as a positive sign of movement on this issue within the Obama administration," Goose said.

"We hope they're not coming empty-handed," he added. "We very much want them to come and say that they intend to join this convention. Even if they can't give a timeline, we want them to say they intend to join at some point in time."

Anti-mine campaigners said a declaration of intent was important because the Bush administration reversed U.S. policy on accepting the convention and said it would never join.

While Kelly's comment indicated no shift in administration policy, Jeff Abramson, deputy director of the nonpartisan Arms Control Association, said the United States was expected to make a statement at the conference that might shed more light on the decision.

He said it would be disappointing if such a statement shut the door to continuing a review of U.S. policy.

Kelly said the United States was the world's single largest financial supporter of humanitarian mine action, having provided more than $1.5 billion since 1993 to support mine clearance and destruction of conventional weapons.

In contravention of the treaty, however, the United States stockpiles some 10 million antipersonnel mines and retains the option to use them.

But using mines would pose big problems for Washington, Goose said, because most of its allies including all but one NATO country, are parties to the treaty and are pledged not to help other countries use the weapons.

(Editing by Sandra Maler and Alan Elsner)

© 2009 Reuters

Published on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Obama's Profile in Courage Moment

by Ray McGovern

"It took a lot of courage on Kennedy's part to defy the Pentagon, defy the military - and do the right thing," said Col. Larry Wilkerson, USA (ret.), according to Robert Dreyfuss in his recent Rolling Stone article "The Generals' Revolt."

Wilkerson, who was chief of staff at the State Department (2002-2005) and now teaches at George Washington University, was alluding to President John F. Kennedy's courage in 1962, when he faced down his top generals and refused to bomb Cuba and risk nuclear war.

That was as close as we came to nuclear calamity during the entire Cold War.

Despite the urgency of the threat posed by the Russian military buildup in Cuba (we now know the Russians had already placed nuclear weapons on the island), Kennedy's deliberate decision-making style allowed enough time for cooler heads to prevail and yielded a peaceful solution.

A hallmark trait of John Kennedy was his ability to listen and learn. At the same time, he did not hesitate to challenge conventional wisdom.

Call that "dithering," if you wish. I, for one, applaud President Barack Obama for following Kennedy's calm, deliberative style, as Obama faces similar pressure from the military to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan.

Kennedy: Out of Vietnam

The Cuban crisis was not the only time JFK found himself at loggerheads with generals who thought they knew better and who verged on the insubordinate. Kennedy's sustained arm wrestling with his senior generals over whether to send more troops to Vietnam was just as tense, and much more sustained.

In the end, he concluded that they had it wrong and decided against them. In short, he opted to behave like a President - a "decider" (pardon the odd word). His overruling of the U.S. military brass on Vietnam had huge implications, both short- and long-term. This "real history" is highly relevant today.

The 46th anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination passed by last Sunday virtually unnoticed. The unfortunate thing is this: his legacy on Vietnam is so widely misunderstood that it is easy to miss the relevance of his decision-making in the early Sixties to the dilemma faced by President Obama today as he decides whether to stand up to - or cave in to - the Pentagon's plans for escalating another misbegotten war in Afghanistan.

Faux history has it that President Lyndon Baines Johnson's infusion of hundreds of thousands, up to 536,000, combat troops into Vietnam was a straight-line continuation of a buildup started by his slain predecessor. Kennedy did raise the U.S. troop level there from about 1,000 to 16,500 "advisers" - a significant increase.

But as he studied the options, cost and likely outcomes, Kennedy came to see U.S. intervention in Vietnam as a fool's errand. Few Americans are aware that, just before he was assassinated, Kennedy had decided to pull all troops out of Vietnam by 1965.

The Pentagon was hell bent on thwarting such plans, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara found it an uphill struggle to enforce the President's will on the top brass. Senior military officers were experts at "slow-rolling" politicians who favored a course that the Pentagon didn't like.

When in May 1962 Kennedy ordered up a contingency troop-withdrawal plan, it took more than a year for the military brass to draw one up.

As the President encountered continuing resistance, he paid increasing attention to more level-headed military and civilian advisers as well as to his own intuition and instincts. Kennedy asked the Marine Commandant, Gen. David M. Shoup, "to look over the ground in Southeast Asia and counsel him." Shoup told the President:

"Unless we are prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before the war expands beyond control."

Kennedy concluded that there was no responsible course other than to press for a phased withdrawal regardless of the opposition from his senior national security advisers. He decided to pull 1,000 troops out of Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the rest by 1965.

How To Do It

My Irish grandmother called Kennedy "a clever lad" and she was right.

Realizing that he had to exercise the utmost care in navigating choppy military and political waters, Kennedy employed the artifice of sending Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor on a "fact-finding" trip to Saigon. At the end of the trip they would "recommend" the course the President had already chosen.

Stopping in Hawaii en route back to Washington, McNamara and Taylor were given "their" report, which had been written by John and Robert Kennedy. It was instantly named the "McNamara-Taylor report" and the two travelers presented it to the President on the morning of Oct. 2, 1963.

Wasting no time, the President convened a National Security Council meeting that evening to discuss the report.

The senior military saw through the subterfuge and strongly opposed the key recommendations of the report. In his memoir, In Retrospect, McNamara wrote that the NSC meeting saw "heated debate about our recommendation that the Defense Department announce plans to withdraw U.S. military forces by the end of 1965, starting with the withdrawal of 1,000 men by the end of the year."

In McNamara's words, there was "a total lack of consensus." However, there is only one "decider" on the National Security Council - the President. Kennedy stepped up to the plate and decided, bypassing the majority opposed.

Thirty-two years later in a Sept. 12, 1995, letter to the New York Times, McNamara took strong issue with a charge in an earlier op-ed that "the groundwork was being laid for our tragic escalation of the war" before President Kennedy was killed.

McNamara described the President's reasoning in deciding to go ahead, despite the lack of consensus:

"[T]he President nonetheless authorized the beginning of withdrawal, believing that either our training and logistical support led to the progress claimed or, if it had not, additional training would not change the situation and, in either case, we should plan to withdraw."

His decision made, Kennedy wasted no time in acting, well, like a President. He told McNamara to announce it immediately in order to "set it in concrete," according to McNamara.

As the defense secretary was leaving the NSC meeting to tell White House reporters, the President called to him, "And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots, too," according to Kenneth O'Donnell and David Powers in their book, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye.

Action Memo

The President's policy was formalized nine days later in his National Security Action Memorandum Number 263 of Oct. 11, 1963. That document put into effect the McNamara-Taylor recommendations, which provided that:

"A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time ... [and] the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963."

Whether Kennedy truly believed that the U.S. training program would succeed in helping the South Vietnamese prevail is doubtful. Clearly, he wanted out. He carried around in his conscience and from time to time spoke of the number of American troops already killed. (Eight died under Eisenhower; about 170 during Kennedy's tenure.)

Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff, to whom fell the task of announcing President Kennedy's death on Nov. 22, 1963, told James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, that Kennedy's mind was fixed on Vietnam the day before. Instead of rehearsing for a press conference that day, Kennedy told Kilduff:

"I've just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam. We're losing too damned many people over there. It's time for us to get out. The Vietnamese are not fighting for themselves. We're the ones who are doing the fighting.

"After I come back from Texas, that's going to change. There is no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life."

A month before, during his last visit to Hyannis Port, Kennedy told his next-door neighbor Larry Newman, "I'm going to get those guys out [of Vietnam] because we're not going to find ourselves in a war it's impossible to win."

Kennedy understood that decisions on Vietnam were far too important to be left to myopic generals. They were still chafing at what they considered Kennedy's failure in 1962 to seize the moment and obliterate Cuba - and perhaps also the U.S.S.R., while we were at it.

Add Kennedy's clear desire to work closely (often secretly) with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in a priority effort to prevent another Cuba-type crisis, and then letting generic "Communists" take over Vietnam - with "dominoes" expected to fall all over the place - and the military brass became convinced they needed to strongly oppose such "appeasement."

‘Best and Brightest'

And it was not only the generals. Far from it. The "best and the brightest," first and foremost McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security adviser, were also opposed to Kennedy's decision to pull troops out of Vietnam.

Bundy strongly disagreed with the recommendations in the McNamara-Taylor report. He also resisted Kennedy's frequently expressed doubts that foreign troops, even in large numbers, could prevail in guerrilla war, and Kennedy's determination never to send combat troops to Vietnam.

Bundy thought he knew better, refusing to believe that the President would ever "let South Vietnam go." Years later, Bundy's memoirs defended his views and advice to Kennedy on Vietnam.

However, after McNamara published In Retrospect in 1995, in which he concluded that "we were wrong, terribly wrong" on Vietnam, Bundy went back to the drawing board to rethink his assessment.

Bundy hired a man half his age, Gordon Goldstein, as research assistant to help him on what turned out to be Bundy's personal quest for the roots of his own mistakes which, for the most part, were the result of hubris, pure and simple.

Early this year, author William Pfaff reviewed what started out as the Bundy Memoir Part II (McGeorge Bundy died in 1996), but ended up as Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam by Goldstein.

In the review, Pfaff highlights Bundy's pedigree: tops at Groton, professor of government at Harvard and youngest dean of faculty; his mother a Boston Brahmin, his father a diplomat. Pfaff is ruthlessly on point in describing Bundy's attitude:

"American had to ‘win' in Vietnam because America always wins. America knows better than everyone else because of that intellectual firepower deployed at Harvard and other elite universities. America does not have to know about other people because other people are not worth knowing.

"Goldstein's decisive clue to why Bundy failed came by accident. He found a note written in 1996, when Bundy was asked what had been most surprising about the war. He answered, ‘the endurance of the enemy.' Goldstein writes: ‘He didn't understand the enemy ‘because, frankly, he didn't think they warranted his attention.'"

The good news for today comes from press reporting that top officials of the Obama administration, including the President, have read Goldstein's book. Applying Kennedy's challenge on Vietnam to Obama's on Afghanistan, a Wall Street Journal report of Oct. 7 noted, "For opponents of a major troop increase ... ‘Lessons in Disaster' encapsulates their concerns about accepting military advice unchallenged."

Obama Must Decide

There are hints that Obama is more Chicago than Harvard - and that, like Kennedy, he carries casualty figures around in his conscience. His late-night, early-morning appearance at Dover Air Force Base to salute what the Washington Post calls "transfer cases" coming home from the war is, I believe, a telling sign.

Obama knows they are not just "transfer cases."

This young President, too, is a "clever lad;" he is also a politician. Intellectually, he is surely equipped to understand the March of Folly that would be involved, were he to send substantial additional forces to Afghanistan.

Moreover, Obama is surely aware that the majority of Americans are no longer deceived by the pundits at Fox News. Recent polls show broader and broader popular opposition to sending more troops.

The choice, in my view, is between courage anchored in a determination to do the right thing and cowardice cloaked in the politics of the possible. Let me guess what you're thinking - "But that's asking too much of a young President; cowardice is too strong a word; Obama cannot possibly face down the entire military establishment."

John Kennedy did. So the question is whether Barack Obama is "no Jack Kennedy," or whether he will summon the courage to stand up to the misguided military brass of today.

We are talking, after all, about thousands more being killed - and for what?

I would suggest to the President that he give another close read to Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster and then ponder the lessons that leap out of Barbara Tuchman's The March to Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.

Obama may also wish to ponder the words of W.E.B. Dubois:

"Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow."

Note: In his book JFK and the Unspeakable, James Douglass has arrayed - and documented - his narrative with such care, that it has been all too easy for me to plagiarize from it. Actually, the book takes the JFK story much further; I recommend it highly.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Published on Monday, November 23, 2009 by Inter Press Service

Obama Quietly Backs Patriot Act Provisions

by William Fisher

NEW YORK - With the health care debate preoccupying the mainstream media, it has gone virtually unreported that the Barack Obama administration is quietly supporting renewal of provisions of the George W. Bush-era USA Patriot Act that civil libertarians say infringe on basic freedoms.

And it is reportedly doing so over the objections of some prominent Democrats.

When a panicky Congress passed the act 45 days after the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, three contentious parts of the law were scheduled to expire at the end of next month, and opponents of these sections have been pushing Congress to substitute new provisions with substantially strengthened civil liberties protections.

But with the apparent approval of the Obama White House and a number of Republicans – and over the objections of liberal Senate Democrats including Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Dick Durbin of Illinois – the Senate Judiciary Committee has voted to extend the three provisions with only minor changes.

Those provisions would leave unaltered the power of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to seize records and to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail in the course of counterterrorism investigations.

The parts of the act due to expire on Dec. 31 deal with:

National Security Letters (NSLs)

The FBI uses NSLs to compel Internet service providers, libraries, banks, and credit reporting companies to turn over sensitive information about their customers and patrons. Using this data, the government can compile vast dossiers about innocent people.

The 'Material Support' Statute

This provision criminalises providing "material support" to terrorists, defined as providing any tangible or intangible good, service or advice to a terrorist or designated group. As amended by the Patriot Act and other laws since Sep. 11, this section criminalises a wide array of activities, regardless of whether they actually or intentionally further terrorist goals or organisations.

FISA Amendments Act of 2008

This past summer, Congress passed a law that permits the government to conduct warrantless and suspicion-less dragnet collection of U.S. residents' international telephone calls and e-mails.

Asked by IPS why committee chairman Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and other Democrats chose to make only minor changes, Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defence Committee, referred to "the secret and hypocritical lobbying by the Obama administration against reforms – while publicly stating receptiveness to them." White House pressure, he speculated, "was undoubtedly a huge if lamentable factor".

He added that some committee members were cautious because of the recent arrests of Najibullah Zazi and others.

Zazi , a citizen of Afghanistan and a legal U.S. resident, was arrested in September as part of a group accused of planning to carry out acts of terrorism against the U.S. Zazi is said by the FBI to have attended courses and received instruction on weapons and explosives at an al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan.

Leahy acknowledged that, in light of these incidents, "This is no time to weaken or undermine the tools that law enforcement relies on to protect America."

Pitts told IPS, "Short-term and political considerations driven by dramatic events once again dramatically affected the need for a more sensible long-term, reasoned, rule-of-law approach."

"In the eight years since passage of the original Patriot Act, it's become clear that the escalating political competition to appear tough on terror - and avoid being accused of being "soft on terror" - brings perceived electoral benefits with few costs, with vital but fragile civil liberties being easily sacrificed," he added.

In contrast to the Senate, the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee approved a version of the legislation containing several significant reforms. In a 16-10 party-line vote, the committee's version curbs some of the government's controversial surveillance powers.

The Patriot Act, passed by a landslide after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to provide law enforcement and intelligence agencies additional powers to thwart terrorist activities, was reauthorised in 2005.

The legislation has been criticised by many from across the ideological spectrum as a threat to civil liberties, privacy and democratic traditions. Sections of the original act have been ruled unconstitutional, with certain provisions violating protected rights.

Judiciary Chair John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, said the goal of the new legislation was to "craft a law that preserves both our national security and our national values".

The proposed new legislation would permit the so-called "lone wolf" provision to sunset. This authority removed the requirement that an individual needed to be an agent of a foreign power to be placed under surveillance by intelligence officials and permitted surveillance of individuals with a much lower evidentiary threshold than allowed under criminal surveillance procedures.

It was intended to allow the surveillance of individuals believed to be doing the bidding of foreign governments or terrorist organisations, even when the evidence of that connection was lacking.

The Justice Department maintains that the "lone wolf" authority is necessary, even though there is no evidence that it has been used. Its opponents believe that existing authorities are sufficient to achieve the goals of the lone wolf provision while more effectively protecting the rights of innocent citizens.

The proposed new House legislation would also restrict the use of national security letters. According to a Congressional Research Service report, "National security letters (NSL) are roughly comparable to administrative subpoenas. Intelligence agencies issue them for intelligence gathering purposes to telephone companies, Internet service providers, consumer credit reporting agencies, banks, and other financial institutions, directing the recipients to turn over certain customer records and similar information."

Under current law, intelligence agencies have few restrictions on the use of NSLs, and in numerous cases, have abused the authority. An FBI inspector general report in 2007 "found that the FBI used NSLs in violation of applicable NSL statutes, Attorney General Guidelines, and internal FBI policies". The reform provisions seek to create greater judicial scrutiny of NSL use.

The bill approved in the Senate contains much more modest reforms. It would retain the lone wolf provision, and is, in general, much more in line with the wishes of the administration. Should both bills pass and go into conference to be reconciled, it is unclear which approach would prevail.

House and Senate versions still need to be voted on by each body separately and then reconciled into a single bill to send to the president for signature.

Pitts told IPS, "President Obama's flip-flop on Patriot Act issues does as much damage as did his flip-flop on the FISA Amendments Act and telecom immunity last year. But it's imperative that we fight, while we still can, to comprehensively reinsert requirements for fact-based, individualised suspicion, checks and balances, and meaningful judicial review prior to government intrusions."

In a report on the Patriot Act, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said, "More than seven years after its implementation there is little evidence that the Patriot Act has been effective in making America more secure from terrorists. However, there are many unfortunate examples that the government abused these authorities in ways that both violate the rights of innocent people and squander precious security resources."

© 2009 IPS North America

Published on Sunday, November 22, 2009 by the Independent/UK

Corporations: The Real Reason Obama is not Making Much Progress

Before you can appeal to America's voters you have to appeal to the corporations

by Johann Hari

Almost a year after Barack Obama ascended to the White House, many of his supporters are bemused. His healthcare bill is a hefty improvement but it still won't provide coverage for all Americans, and may not provide a public alternative to the over-charging insurance companies - if it passes at all. His environmental team is vandalising the vital Copenhagen conference by saying the US - the single biggest emitter of warming gases - will not sign up to any legally binding restrictions there. He has placed the deregulation-fanatics who caused the New Depression, like Lawrence Summers, in charge of the recovery. Despite the real improvements on Bush - such as the end of torture, the resumption of stem-cell research, and opposition to the coup in Honduras - many people are asking: why he is delivering so little, so slowly?

A pair of seemingly small stories about the forces warping American politics can help us to answer this question. At first glance, they will seem like preposterous caricatures, but the facts are plain. The institutions that are blocking progress on all these issues - Republicans in the Senate, and the mighty corporate lobbying machine that bankrolls both parties - have rallied over the past few months to defend two causes with very little popular support in the United States: rape and slavery. No, really. If we begin to explain how this came to pass, then we might see why the American political system is malfunctioning so badly, even after a landslide victory for change.

Let's start with rape. This story begins in Iraq in 2003. The private military contractors sent by the Bush administration to guard the oil pipelines didn't want to get bogged down in expensive legal cases if anything went wrong. When it came to Iraqis, the Bush team simply exempted them from all Iraqi law, in a move so sweeping one Senator called it "a license to kill". But what about if their employees attacked each other, or other Americans? The private companies insisted all their employees sign contracts saying that, whatever happens to them, they will settle it in in-house, through "arbitration". Why? While representing the company at a real legal trial costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, an arbitration panel costs a few thousand. It saves cash.

This policy came, however, with a different price tag. According to her later sworn testimony, Jamie Leigh Jones - a 20-year-old working for the contractor Halliburton/KBR - was hanging out with co-workers one night in Iraq when her drink was spiked. When she woke up, she was haemorraging blood from her vagina and her anus. Her breast implants were ripped. The damage was so severe she later needed reconstructive surgery on her genitalia. She surmised she had been gang-raped by the seven men she had been drinking with. When she approached Halliburton/KBR, she says they locked her in a metal container with no food or water for 24 hours. A doctor came to see her wounds and took DNA evidence, although it was later "lost." A guard took pity on her and loaned her his cell phone. She called her father, who called the American embassy - and only then was she released.

In an Iraq that was collapsing all around her, there was no chance of the Iraqi police investigating. Halliburton/KBR insisted that her contract required the alleged gang-rape to be addressed by the company's private arbitration process, forbidding any claim in the American courts. (If this was how they treated blonde English-speaking American girls, what did they do if Iraqis said they had been abused?) After Leigh Jones went public, many other American women came forward to say they had similar experiences working in Iraq. Her legal team argues the refusal to allow rape to be pursued through the courts created a climate where it was more likely to happen.

The Democratic Senator Al Franken, when he heard about this, was horrified, and tabled a simple amendment to the law. It demanded that no company that prevents rape victims from having their day in court should receive taxpayers' money any more. Rape is rape. A majority of Republicans in the Senate - including John McCain - voted against the amendment. Why? The private contractors are major donors to the Republican Party, but the Senators claim this didn't affect their judgement. No - they said that Franken's proposal was a "vendetta" against Halliburton/KBR with "political motives". Franken pointed out any company trying to stop rape victims getting justice would be treated exactly the same by this law. The Republicans ignored him. They voted to maintain a system where some rape is not pursuable in a court of law.

At the same time, a group of Democratic senators have tried to amend the latest customs bill to ensure that nothing produced by slaves should be sold in the United States. It sounds uncontroversial - as uncontroversial as punishing rapists, in fact. Yet corporate lobbyists are militating behind the scenes to oppose it. As the private subscription-only newsletter "Inside US Trade" reported: "Business groups are worried by the potential effects", and a source tells them there will be, "a push from lobbyists closer to the Finance Committee mark-up of the bill... US industry groups and foreign governments [ie those that use slave labour] could form ad hoc coalitions to help send a united message." They will fight for their right to use slave labour.

These examples are extreme, but they reveal a powerful undertow that is at work on all political issues (and both main parties) in the United States. To see how, you have to understand two processes. The first is the nature of corporate power. Corporations are structured to do one thing, and one thing only: to maximise profit for their shareholders. No matter how personally nice or nasty their CEOs are, if they put anything ahead of profit, they will be sacked, and replaced by somebody who doesn't. As part of a tightly regulated market, this can be a useful engine for growth. But if it is not strictly reigned in by the law and by trade unions, this pressure for profit will extend anywhere - from trashing the environment to rape and slavery, as these cases remind us. The second factor is the nature of the American political process today. If you want to run for elected office in the US, you have to raise a fortune from corporations or the super-rich to pay for TV advertising. So before you can appeal to the voters, you have to appeal to the corporations. You do this by assuring them you will serve their interests. Once you are in office, you have to keep pleasing them at every step, or they won't pay for your re-election campaign. This two-step overwhelms the positive instincts the individual politicians may have to do good - and drags the US government further and further from the will of the people.

Obama had to climb through this system, and he is currently imprisoned by it. It explains his relative failure so far. Healthcare is proving so hard because the insurance companies are paying both Republicans and right-wing Democrats in Senate to thwart any attempt to provide universal healthcare coverage. Yes, it would save the 17,000 Americans who die every year because they lack insurance but it would depress their profits. Reducing carbon emissions is proving so hard because the oil, coal and gas companies are paying Senators across the spectrum to crush any moves to reduce oil, coal and gas use. And on, and on.

So far, Obama has tried to co-opt the corporations into his agenda by ensuring they will profit from any changes, but this inevitably waters down the proposals, often to the point of uselessness. The Cap and Trade legislation before Congress, for example, will barely limit carbon emissions at all because it has been gutted to please the polluters.

He will only achieve significant progressive change if he reforms the political system itself - to make it accountable to the American people, not the corporations. He needs to change the rules of the game. Ban big business from making political donations, and replace it with state funding. Shut down the lobbying industry. Make a big populist speech announcing you are driving the money-lenders out of the temple of democracy: it'd be surprisingly popular in a country where people can see they're being ripped off every day. The alternative is to become rapidly complicit in a system where defending rape and slavery is seen as just another day's work in Washington DC.

© 2009 Independent/UK

Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world.

Published on Sunday, November 22, 2009 by Truthout.org

Obama’s Failure to Close Guantánamo by January Deadline Is Disastrous

President Obama explained, "We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantánamo will be closed next year. I'm not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend on cooperation from Congress."

by Andy Worthington

President Obama's admission in China that he will miss his self-imposed deadline for the closure of Guantánamo is disastrous for the majority of the 215 men still held, and for those who hoped, ten months ago, that he would move swiftly to close this bitter icon of the Bush administration's lawless detention and interrogation policies in the "War on Terror."

Despite announcing the closure of Guantánamo on his second day in office, as part of a number of executive orders rolling back the Bush administration's executive overreach, Obama then failed to follow up with a detailed plan, missing the opportunity to bring a number of wrongly imprisoned men to the US mainland (the Uighurs, Muslims from China whose release into the US had been ordered by a District Court judge), and allowing Republican fearmongers to seize the initiative, mobilizing lawmakers (including some in Obama's own party) to pass legislation preventing any cleared prisoner from being released into the United States.

Recently, lawmakers were even prepared to go so far as to prevent the administration from bringing prisoners to the US mainland for any reason, even to face trials. Senior officials successfully fought back against this proposal, and announced last week that ten prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, were to be brought to the US mainland to face trials, either in federal courts or in a revamped version of the much-criticized Military Commissions, introduced in November 2001, and revived by Congress in 2006 after the US Supreme Court ruled that they were illegal.

However, administration officials have also explained, as the Washington Post described it, that the government does not intend to put more than 40 prisoners in total on trial, leaving 175 men in Guantánamo in a predicament that has been troubling since Congress rose up in revolt against Obama's intentions, and which has suddenly become even more alarming.

While Obama's deadline stood, there remained the possibility that the President could persuade lawmakers to drop their opposition to bringing these 175 men to the US mainland, so that Guantánamo could be closed as promised.

Now, however, with the President publicly conceding that this will not be possible, and refusing to set a new deadline, it is difficult to work out what pressure the administration can exert on lawmakers to persuade them to overturn their opposition to allowing any prisoners into the US unless they are to face trials.

The horrible truth is that, as a result, prisoners cleared by military review boards under the Bush administration, by the Obama administration's interagency Task Force, established as part of his executive orders, or by the US courts, after successful habeas corpus petitions, who cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured in their home countries, have no alternative to remaining in Guantánamo, until, if possible, other countries can be found to accept them.

According to officials, around 90 prisoners cleared for release are still at Guantánamo, and a majority of these - from countries including Algeria, China, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan - cannot be repatriated. European countries have so far accepted a handful of cleared prisoners, but a major stumbling block to the acceptance of others has been the Americans' refusal to accept cleared prisoners themselves.

The other group - numbering around 75, according to administration officials - are those whom the government does not wish to either charge or release, claiming that they are too dangerous to be released, but that not enough evidence exists to put them on trial, or that the evidence is tainted through the use of torture (or, as the Washington Post put it, "because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material"). This is deeply disturbing, as there is, simply, no excuse for holding people in what is essentially an identical form of "preventive detention" to that practiced by the Bush administration, and prisoners should either be charged or released.

For a small number of these men - eight, to date - the administration can justify its actions because they lost their habeas corpus petitions before District Court judges, who ruled that the government had established, by a preponderance of the evidence, that they were associated with al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. As a result, the government can continue to hold them under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the founding document of the Bush administration's "War on Terror," through which Congress authorized the President "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons."

It is difficult to see why administration officials mentioned the number of prisoners whom the administration intends to hold indefinitely without charge or trial, as their ongoing habeas corpus petitions will put these decisions in the hands of judges, where they belong. In the long run, it is uncertain how acceptable it is to hold prisoners on this basis, especially if it turns out that they may be held for the rest of their lives for "crimes" no more egregious than, for example, cooking for an Arab fighting force supporting the Taliban in 2001.

In a world unsullied by the Bush administration's lawlessness, they would have been held as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions, who can be held until the end of hostilities (in which case they would still be held, as no one seems to have any idea when this particular war will come to an end). However, this didn't happen, of course, and, as a result, the administration needs to do all in its power to facilitate the habeas corpus petitions of the majority of these 75 men, and to release those whose petitions succeed (as in 30 of the 38 cases so far decided).

Even so, it remains unacceptable that these men should have to stay in Guantánamo while their petitions proceed to court, just as it remains unacceptable that cleared prisoners should languish at Guantánamo for one minute longer, let alone for months, or possibly years beyond the deadline that has proven impossible for the administration to honor.

In an interview with Fox News that followed his announcement about Guantánamo, President Obama explained, "We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantánamo will be closed next year. I'm not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend on cooperation from Congress."

That last line sums up the problem succinctly, and I can only hope that this cooperation will be forthcoming, although one major problem, clearly, is that Republicans will delight in thwarting the President still further. If it does not happen, however, the failure to close Guantánamo will cast a dark shadow on Obama's presidency, and an even darker one on the prisoners - whether cleared men, or others still held without charge or trial - who will rightly conclude that, for them, there really is no justice in the United States.

© 2009 truthout

Andy Worthington is a journalist and historian, based in London. He is the author of The Guantánamo Files, the first book to tell the stories of all the detainees in America's illegal prison. For more information, visit his blog here.

Why Won't Obama Give You (or me or anyone else) a Job?

Why Won't Obama Give You a Job?

Tuesday 17 November 2009

by: Joshua Holland | AlterNet

Wall Street's raking in massive profits and paying its execs and traders record bonuses, thanks in part to government cash. What about ordinary Americans?

Working Americans continue to suffer from the worst financial crash since the Great Depression, and Washington has so far offered up only band-aids to help them out -- extended unemployment benefits, small stimulus checks and deeply flawed mortgage relief programs that have done little to stem the tide of foreclosures.

The stimulus plan passed earlier this year appears to have been too modest in scope, as many economists warned at the time. While it helped halt the economy’s free-fall collapse, unemployment still topped 10.2 percent last week, and analysts warn us that “bleak data point to a stark future for job seekers and employers.”

But while caution’s prevailed in Washington when it comes to bailing out “Main Street,” Wall Street’s enjoyed a degree of socialism that would make Hugo Chavez blush. The Obama administration has essentially continued Bush’s policy of loading up dump trucks with tax dollars at the Treasury and dropping them on the banks with little oversight and next to no strings attached.

And it’s had an effect, at least on the banks’ bottom lines. AIG, the insurance giant whose near-collapse last year almost brought down the entire financial system, reported its second consecutive quarterly profit after being rescued by Uncle Sam. Unlike American workers, the company is getting back on its feet after an injection of an almost impossible-to-grasp number of tax-dollars.

AIG’s fortunes are not unique. All of Wall Street’s survivors are raking in massive profits and paying their execs and traders record bonuses.

The disconnect between the banks’ fortunes and those of working Americans makes the question posed by a recent “news analysis” by Washington Post staff writer Alec MacGillis so relevant: “Why Won’t Obama Give You a Job?”

MacGillis writes that while the White House says the stimulus passed earlier in the year “created or saved” 640,000 jobs, the “national unemployment rate has now hit 10.2 percent,” and asks:

Why has a White House that talks so much about boosting employment steered clear of the most direct strategy that could keep Americans on the job?

Since taking office, the Obama administration has studiously avoided paying people to go to work, which could be accomplished by subsidizing workers' private-sector employment or by creating new government-paid jobs. There are programs in a handful of states that financially compensate employees who cut their hours … But the Obama administration has so far opted not to expand this initiative. And aside from a small summer employment program for young people, it has not sought to create jobs on the public payroll, something the country did in the 1930s and 1970s.

MacGillis offers that “engaging in more forthright job creation could invite some political pitfalls (such as those constant accusations of socialism),” and then asks: “but is double-digit unemployment any less a political risk?”

It’s the kind of rationalism that can blind political observers, and ultimately MacGillis leaves the disconnect between policy and politics unaddressed.

There are competing explanations for Democrats’ habitual timidity when they have an opportunity to govern. Take your pick: internal party politics -- skewed Rightwards by the influence of the Blue Dogs -- the Dems’ reliance on fat campaign contributions from Wall Street; an institutional fear of “those constant accusations of socialism”; the organizing skills of their conservative opponents or the fact that the White House policy apparatus is packed with Clinton administration vets, former Wall Streeters and other adherents to classical economic orthodoxy.

Whatever the case, the moves they’ve made to offer relief to ordinary working families haven’t been as bold as their interventions in the financial sector. Not only did many economists view the stimulus package as too small relative to the depth of our economic malaise, but a good chunk of the funds went for tax cuts, and for long-term investments, like “green energy” subsidies, which have limited bang for the buck in terms of generating jobs over the short haul.

Aid to states with crippled tax revenues was crucially important for heading off mass layoff of public employees, and extending unemployment bennies and food stamps cushioned the blow for many families. But much of the job-creation dollars went into so-called “shovel-ready” projects -- back-logged transportation repairs and other long-ignored infrastructure fixes. Those dollars protected the jobs of some workers who would have been laid off, yes, but didn’t create many new ones.

With an ever-expanding workforce, the economy needs to generate new jobs. The employment report last week revealed a noteworthy pattern: the number of workers being cut by employers has dropped dramatically since the worst of the crisis, but almost no new jobs are being added to the labor market. A variety of unprecedented interventions may have stopped firms from shedding jobs left and right as they were a few months ago, but with growth in the near future looking tepid at best, employers aren’t expanding and new positions aren’t being created.

So most people who have gigs are keeping them right now -- and real wages have even started to inch up again -- but those without work face daunting job prospects. And more than one in six Americans in the workforce -- a stunning 17 percent -- are now out of work or under-employed (forced to work part-time or in temporary positions because they can’t find a steady job).

It’s not just that those people are screwed, even though that’s enough to justify some action on the issue. While employment is often called a “lagging indicator” of recovery, it’s important to understand that the economic crisis in which we find ourselves is not just a function of a shaky financial system but of a crash in consumption that’s come along with the evaporation of $14 trillion worth of the wealth of American families -- wealth, and spending power, that vanished as home prices crashed and 401(K) balances were devastated. Until recently, the number one cause of home foreclosures was low-introductory-rate mortgages resetting to higher payments; in recent months that’s changed, and now unemployment has surged to the top of the list of reasons people can’t make their payments.

So the recovery of ordinary families is vital to our economy’s recovery overall. Home values, lending and consumer spending aren’t going to bounce back until the economy starts generating jobs at a rapid clip, and that’s not going to happen until people get back on their feet and start spending money. That Catch-22 is precisely why we’re facing a long and underwhelming recovery at best, and why avoiding more aggressive measures to buoy the job market is myopic.

Julianne Malveaux argues that we’ve been here before, and that we should take a lesson from history:

Eighty years ago this week, the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression. We need to apply the lessons from that era to our own to relieve the needless suffering of the Great Recession…

Private markets weren’t about to create jobs, and the public sector became the employer of last resort. The job creation from the WPA provided survival and sustenance for millions of American families. Where is the contemporary WPA?

“Absent public job creation,” she adds, “it is likely that the economy will not fully recover.”

Experts at the Economic Policy Institute proposed just such a program as part of a “five step plan to end the jobs crisis,” calling for $40 billion -- about the price of four months of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan -- in the first year to pay people to spruce up their communities:

The kind of work that can be done is as varied as the nation’s hundreds of thousands of communities and their needs. Environmental clean-up, stream restoration, community policing, before- and after-school care of children, demolition or boarding up of abandoned houses and buildings, parks improvements, home health care, and preservation of historic buildings are just a few examples.

But parallels between 1929 and 2009 are imperfect, and there are ways to go about putting people to work other than paying people the going rate to paint sidewalks. In his WaPo piece, Alec MacGillis writes that American University’s Robert Lerman “offers a variation”:

Pay people lower-than-market wages, maybe $8 an hour, and reserve the jobs for those who really can't find better work. Instead of extending unemployment benefits over and over, the government would help people develop job skills and would get something in return. He estimates the cost of 1 million jobs (including supervisors) at $30 million, or about $30,000 for each job created, compared with the $92,000 per job that the White House estimates its approach is costing.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, offered another proposal to create jobs at a per-job cost far lower than that of the stimulus:

The government can give [employers] a tax credit of up to $3,000 in order to shorten their workers' hours while leaving their pay unchanged. The reduction in hours can take the form of paid sick days, paid family leave, shorter workweeks or longer vacations. The employer can choose the method that is best for her workers and the workplace.

If take-home pay is left unchanged as a result of the credit, then demand should be left unchanged. If workers are on average putting in fewer hours and demand is unchanged, then employers will need to hire more workers.

This logic is about as simple as it gets. The process is also quick and cheap. In principle, the government can go this route to save jobs at a cost of a bit more than $20,000 per job, far less than the estimates of the cost per job under the administration's stimulus package.

Baker notes that we don’t need to speculate as to whether the approach would work: “Germany put a short-hours program in place at the start of its recession. Its unemployment rate today is 7.6 percent, about the same as the unemployment rate it had going into the recession,” he writes.

Democrats in Washington understand the depth of the problem, and the political risk it carries (Obama’s approval rating has declined along with voters’ belief that the country is on the right track). This week, lawmakers vowed to start work on a jobs bill of some sort -- perhaps pushing back climate change legislation -- and the administration announced that it would hold a summit next month to address the jobs crisis.

But will the kind of bold and direct approaches progressive economists are calling for be “on the table”? If the history of the first 11 months of the Obama administration is a guide, they won’t; expect something built largely around business-friendly tax-credits for employers who add jobs (which, to be clear, can be quite beneficial as part of a broader recovery strategy but has limited bang as a stand-alone approach).

If that proves to be the case, Americans will face more protracted economic pain and the Democrats’ cautious approach will come with a price next Fall, and perhaps in the Fall of 2012. Propping up the banks alone isn’t enough; people vote on the economy they and their neighbors live in, not on abstractions like how many dollars banks are lending or the share price of Goldman Sachs.

It’s a kind of tragic irony: believing that they always have to hew to an artificially manufactured “center” to get elected, Democratic leaders risk electoral disaster by taking aggressive and direct interventions to boost the “Main Street” economy “off the table” --the very moves that would have a tangible impact on communities devastated by the down-turn over the short-term.