The liberal and progressive civil
libertarians I know who strongly supported
Barack Obama's "change" campaign last year
are having a difficult time processing some
deeply disturbing recent developments in
Washington.
In one of its most horrifying acts, the
Obama administration filed a telling brief
in federal court last February. In two
sentences, this brief declared that the
Obama Department of Justice essentially
embraced the Bush administration's position
on and against habeas corpus. After the
Supreme Court ruled last June in Boudemiene
v. Bush that Guantanamo detainees possess
the right to a hearing to contest the
charges against them, the Bush
administration simply started sending
so-called enemy combatants from around the
world to the American prison camp in Bagram
Air Force base in occupied Afghanistan.
Since Afghanistan is a "war zone," the
Bush White House argued, prisoners there
have no constitutional rights. Never mind
that many of these captives were not
prisoners captured on a battlefield in Iraq
but were people abducted from their homes
and workplaces in other countries and flown
by secret U.S. jets to be indefinitely
incarcerated at Bagram.
In its February brief, the Obama justice
department defended this Orwellian policy,
arguing that such prisoners can be locked
up without any constitutional rights for an
indefinite period of time just as long as
they are incarcerated in Bagram instead of
Guantanamo (see Glen Greenwald, "Obama and
Habeas Corpus: Then and Now," Salon, April
11, 2009, at
www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/11/bagram/index.html).
Thankfully, as Glen Greenwald notes,
"last month, a federal judge emphatically
rejected the Bush/Obama position and held
that the rationale of Boudemiene applies
every bit as much to Bagram as it does to
Guantanamo. Notably, the district judge who
so ruled -- John Bates -- is an appointee
of George W. Bush, a former Whitewater
prosecutor, and a very pro-executive-power
judge. In his decision, Judge Bates made
clear how identical are the constitutional
rights of detainees flown to Guantanamo and
Bagram and underscored how dangerous is the
Bush/Obama claim that the President has the
right to abduct people from around the
world and imprison them at Bagram with no
due process of any kind" (Greenwald, "Obama
and Habeas Corpus").
Of all the things I've learned about the
Obama administration in preparing upcoming
talks about the new president's First
Hundred Days, none has jarred me more than
its position - shot down by a
pro-executive, Bush-appointed judge - on
habeas corpus.
Last Thursday (I am writing on Tuesday,
April 21, 2009), the Obama Justice
Department expressed its determination to
protect CIA torturers from prosecution
after it released memorandums on the Bush
administration's extreme torture practices.
Those memorandums only saw the light of day
because of a lawsuit by the American Civil
Liberties Union. By announcing in advance
that it will not go after the direct
torturers, the Obama administration has
destroyed its ability to use the threat of
prosecution as a way of getting CIA
personnel to testify against the top
officials who formulated the Bush torture
policy.
As the Justice Department released the
memos spelling out brutal CIA
interrogation, Obama said that "nothing
will be gained by spending our time and
energy laying blame for the past" (NYT,
April 17, 2009). This from a former and
supposedly liberal law professor, someone
who should be expected to understand that
one investigates and punishes past human
rights crimes precisely in order to
discourage and prevent their occurrence in
the present and future.
As the New York Times reported today,
citing top White House aides, Obama "opted
to disclose the memos because his lawyers
worried that they had a weak case for
withholding them and much of the
information had already been published in
the New York Review of Books, in a memoir
by George Tenent, the former CIA Director,
and even in a 2006 speech by President
George W. Bush." (NYT, 4-21-2009, A1).
Revealingly enough, when he went to
Langley last week to reassure CIA staffers
of his safety to their interests, Obama
said that his decision to release the
torture memos was the "most agonizing" call
of his presidency so far. I heard that line
on the evening news and turned off my
television.
Wow. That was his "most agonizing"
decision so far - reluctantly agreeing
under legal compulsion to release documents
showing a previous administration's human
right crimes? Not his decision to launch
missiles and expand illegal wars certain to
kill children and other civilian casualties
in Pakistan. Not his decisions to hand out
yet more hundreds of billions of taxpayer
dollars to Wall Street parasites while
poverty rises across the nation and the
world. Not his decision to increase the war
and military budget while destitution
expands at home and abroad. Pretty
revealing.
Do I sound surprised? I'm not. With the
possible exception of Glen Ford and Bruce
Dixon over at Black Agenda Report, no human
being on Earth has done more than I have to
warn U.S. and world citizens about the
deceptive, fake-progressive, and deeply
conservative nature of Brand Obama, who I
have dubbed "Empire's New Clothes." My
first warnings were issued (I am not
joking) in the late summer of 2004, just
two days after the Democratic Convention
Keynote Address that turned Obama into an
overnight national and even global
celebrity. You can look it up and read it
online: "Keynote Reflections," at
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/8128
.
I'm a highly politics-skeptical
libertarian socialist from the South Side
of Chicago who watched Obama build his
fake-progressive power-seeking career in my
home city and in Springfield, Illinois
(home of the legendarily corrupt Illinois
state legislature where Obama served
between from 1996 to 2004) during the late
1990s and the opening years of the new
millennium. Speaking to a budding
progressive 20-something Democratic Iowa
presidential Caucus campaign activist in
late December of 2006, I said the
following:
"well you can work for Kucinich. He's
the closest thing to a left candidate in
the Caucus. But he won't have any to
money to hire you. Hillary will have a
lot of money but she's an evil
imperialist and she murdered health care
reform and her negatives will probably
make her un-electable. Edwards is the
least objectionable of the 'viable'
candidates and will say some remarkable
things you can feel good about against
economic inequality and poverty and for
labor rights. He can't win, of course: he
talks against class inequality like he
means it. Obama will make you sick with
centrist equivocation and deception. He's
an ideological twin to Hillary, but he's
the next president. If you want to work
for the next president, work for Obama.
The ruling class and the liberal
primary voting base both find him
irresistible for different but intimately
interrelated reasons. The power elite's
got him right - they know what he's
really about. The liberal base is pretty
deluded and in love with him, which, by
the way, is part of why the masters will
support him. That's a killer
combination."
So nothing about Obama ever surprises
me. I never had any "hope" about him.
Still, it's one thing to know that a
grisly crime is likely to occur and to
actually witness that crime's commission.
Its one thing to anticipate Obama's many
nauseating accommodations with - and
advance (under new "liberal" cover) of -
Empire and Inequality, Incorporated. It's
another thing to watch the worst aspects of
the predictable ugliness unfold.
If it didn't sound insensitive to the
untold masses who have been subjected to
U.S.-imperial water-boarding, rendition,
sleep deprivation and the like, I'd say
it's a form of torture.
P.S. 6PM Tue. April
21: Ok so I got home after sending this
essay off earlier in the day and put on
the ABC evening news and the first story
is that Obama has relented somewhat and
appears to be bowing to pressure for him
to perhaps let Eric Holder maybe possibly
investigate John Yoo and Bybee et al.,
But this twist does not surprise me
either; Obama is a crafty politician ---
very tricky ---- and has apparently heard
that his nauseating position on torture
non-prosecutions was just too much for
even many elite liberals to take. I heard
Michael Ratner of the Center for
Constitutional Rights (I hope I have that
organization's name right) just
absolutely destroy Obama's "let's look
forward, not backward" statement on the
PBS Evening News yesterday night. Whether
investigations will really happen and go
anywhere remains to be seen. I'm
skeptical since so many key Democrats
signed off on Bush torture practices. And
of course to be really serious you'd have
to go after Cheney and Bush II. But
pushing back from the grassroots and even
the grasstops (i.e. Ratner et al.) is
important and good...more of it is
required; much more.
Copyright 1998/2009 All Rights
Reserved
"..Last
Thursday (I am writing on Tuesday, April 21, 2009),
the Obama Justice Department expressed its
determination to protect CIA torturers from
prosecution after it released memorandums on the
Bush administration's extreme torture practices.
Those memorandums only saw the light of day because
of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.
By announcing in advance that it will not go after
the direct torturers, the Obama administration has
destroyed its ability to use the threat of
prosecution as a way of getting CIA personnel to
testify against the top officials who formulated
the Bush torture policy... Revealingly enough, when
he went to Langley last week to reassure CIA
staffers of his safety to their interests, Obama
said that his decision to release the torture memos
was the "most agonizing" call of his presidency so
far. I heard that line on the evening news and
turned off my television. Wow. That was his "most
agonizing" decision so far - reluctantly agreeing
under legal compulsion to release documents showing
a previous administration's human right crimes?...
Do I sound surprised? I'm not. With the possible
exception of Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon over at
Black Agenda Report, no human being on Earth has
done more than I have to warn U.S. and world
citizens about the deceptive, fake-progressive, and
deeply conservative nature of Brand Obama, who I
have dubbed "Empire's New Clothes.""
Many
Americans believe Barack Obama represents a hopeful
future for America. But does he also reflect the American
politics of the past? This book offers the broadest and
best-informed understanding on the meaning of the Obama
phenomenon to date. Paul Street was on the ground
throughout the Iowa campaign, and his stories of the
rising Obama phenomenon are poignant. Yet the author s
background in American political history allows him to
explore the deeper meanings of Obama's remarkable
political career. He looks at Obama in relation to
contemporary issues of class, race, war, and empire. He
considers Obama in the context of our nation s political
history, with comparisons to FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton, and
other leaders. Street finds that the Obama persona,
crafted by campaign consultants and filtered through
dominant media trends, masks the change candidate's
adherence to long-prevailing power structures and party
doctrines. He shows how American political culture has
produced misperceptions by the electorate of Obama s
positions and values. Obama is no magical exception to
the narrow-spectrum electoral system and ideological
culture that have done so much to define and limit the
American political tradition. Yet the author suggests key
ways in which Obama potentially advances democratic
transformation. Street makes recommendations on how
citizens can productively respond to and act upon Obama's
influence and the broader historical and social forces
that have produced his celebrity and relevance. He also
lays out a real agenda for change for the new
presidential administration, one that addresses the
recent failures of democratic politics. This study
differs from previous books on Obama in at least three
ways: (1) Street's determination to offer a balanced but
critical assessment of the Obama phenomenon from a
perspective shaped by years of engagement with Left
theory and activism; (2) Street's effort to understand
the phenomenon in a deeply researched historical,
societal, and institutional context, consistently
relating Obama's career and candidacy to the ongoing
historical development and dilemmas of U.S. political
culture; (3) Street's ability to deepen his account by
drawing on his considerable direct experience with the
phenomenon over years as a civil rights researcher and
advocate on the south side of Chicago (2000 2005) and as
a campaign activist in Iowa during the long and critical
Iowa primary (caucus) season of 2007 2008.