OBAMA
OBAMA’s FAILURES NEWSLETTER #2, February 20, 2015.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Caring Peace, Justice, and
Ecology.
(#1 Dec. 12, 2013).
163849 pageviews - 1494
posts, last
published on Feb 20, 2015
What’s at
stake: Ever since the beginning of
US commitment to WWII in Dec. 1941, the Democrats with the Republicans have
formed the War and Empire (and torture) Party.
The same is true today despite the removal of the Great Satan, the
Stalinist Soviet Union. It is time for
the US to have a Peace Party, and the Democrats could be that Party, to the
great relief of the world. And while
some citizens also combine the two main Parties as the Corporate Party, and
ever since the administration of Jimmy Carter the Democrats have increasingly
embraced corporate interests and money, vestiges of FDR’s New Deal remain. Although the decline of the Democrats as the
People’s Party is largely attributable to the ferocity and tenacity of the
Republicans against New Deal values (freedom, equality, democracy), many Democratic
leaders have also contributed by abandoning the struggle for the needs of the populace. Again, President Obama shares that
collapse. But following the last general
election and the takeover of both Senate and House by the Republicans, all of
whom now vote degrees of right-wing, Tea Party values (dislike of affirmative government
and abortion, dislike of equality for homosexuals and women, for examples),
President Obama has noticeably championed many traditional, New Deal values,
following through with the promises in his 2015 State of the Union Address.
See Obama’s
Achievements Newsletters
My
blog:
War Department/Peace Department
War Department/Peace Department
Newsletters
Index:
Contents
Obama’s Failures #2
Roots Action, Stop TPP Secrecy 4-23-14
Bromwich, Obama Unready to be President and
Chose Wrong Advisors 3-1--14
Bacevich, Anatomy
of a Failure, Obama Accomplished So Little
1-15
St. Clair and Frank, Obama and the Politics of Illusion
Obama, Drone War, Extrajudicial Killing (Google
Search)
Roots Action:
Support International Law, No Double Standard, No Double Talk
Tom Dispatch:
Karen Greenberg, Obama’s 5 Shalt Nots Became ‘Thou Shalt’”
Solomon:
Outlaw Obama vs. International Law, Denounces a Breach
Pierce: Obama’s Loss of Control of CIA
Contact the
White House
Contents #1
Secret TPP Meetings Advance Internet Censorship
4-23-14
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David Bromwich "How Obama Became a Publicist for His
Presidency (Rather Than the President)".
March 10, 2014
Worth reading..... from Moyers and co,.
Extreme caution marked all
of Obama’s early actions in public life. Rare departures from this
progress-without-a-trail — such as his pledge to
filibuster granting immunity to the giants of the telecommunications industry
in order to expose them to possible prosecution for warrantless surveillance —
appear in retrospect wholly tactical. The law journal editor without a
published article, the lawyer without a well-known case to his credit, the law
professor whose learning was agreeably presented without a distinctive sense of
his position on the large issues, the state senator with a minimal record of
yes or no votes and the US senator who between 2005 and 2008 refrained from
committing himself as the author of a single piece of significant legislation:
this was the candidate who became president in January 2009. MORE https://twitter.com/tomdispatch/status/443026059790155776
·
David Bromwich has written on civil liberties and America’s wars for the New York Review of Books and
the Huffington Post.
A collection of his essays, Moral Imagination,
will be published this spring by Princeton University Press.
Barack Obama: anatomy of a failure
The President is heir to a mistaken sense of
America’s place in the world. But he has played a bad hand poorly
673 Comments Andrew J. Bacevich. The
Spectator, 3 January 2015. [from HAW]
President
George W. Bush’s place in history is already guaranteed, fixed by a series of
monumental blunders that no amount of revisionism will ever be able to
whitewash. By comparison, historians are likely to have a hard time drawing a
bead on Barack Obama. How could such an obviously gifted President, swept into
office on a wave of immense expectations, have managed to accomplish so little
in his attempted management of global affairs? Over the past six years ‘Yes, we
can!’ has become ‘No, he hasn’t.’ What went wrong? MORE "Barack Obama: Anatomy of a Failure"
Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.
Edited by Jeffrey St.
Clair and Joshua Frank
The election of Barack Obama sparked long-dormant tingles of
optimism in even the most entrenched political cynics. But the promise of an Obama revolution fizzled out even before his
inauguration, as the president-in-waiting stocked his cabinet with
corporate hacks, cut secret deals with Wall Street titans and plotted a bloody
escalation of the senseless war in Afghanistan
OBAMA, DRONE WAR, EXTRAJUDICIAL KILLING, Google
Search, Feb. 20, 2015, page one.
www.theguardian.com › Opinion ›
Drones
The Guardian
Jun 11, 2012 - Michael Boyle: Executive privilege has seduced the president
into a reckless 'kill first, ask questions later' policy that
explodes the US ...
www.theguardian.com › Opinion ›
Drones
The Guardian
Feb 17, 2014 - Obama's itchy trigger finger on drone strikes:
what happened to due process? .... admits to killing four Americans as part of
its war on (or is it “war of”?) .... The extrajudicial
killing of an American citizen seemed to him to be ...
www.cfr.org › Counterterrorism
Council on Foreign Relations
Since assuming office in 2009, President Barack Obama's administration
has ... The primary focus of U.S. targeted killings, particularly
through drone strikes, has ... Philip Alston, the former UN
special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, ...
www.commondreams.org/.../obamas-dron...
Common Dreams NewsCenter
Jun 11, 2012 - Obama's Drone Wars and the Normalization of Extrajudicial Murder.
Executive privilege has seduced the president into a reckless 'kill first,
ask ...
www.commondreams.org/.../us-forced-rele...
Common Dreams NewsCenter
Jun 23, 2014 - US Forced to Release Memo on Extrajudicial Drone Killing of
US Citizen ... the Bush and Obama administrations to authorize
ongoing war and ...
www.thebureauinvestigates.com/.../dr...
Bureau of Investigative
Journalism
Drone Warfare. The evolving international use of armed drones. More ...
The monthly updates from the Bureau on the covert war. ... Almost 2,500
now killed by covert US drone strikes since Obama inauguration
six years ago: The Bureau's ...
www.foxnews.com/.../obama-drone-warfare-legal-wa...
Fox News ChannelApr 24, 2014 - “Extra-judicial killing”
is a targeted killing of a victim by someone in the executive branch without
due process. The president wanted the latter, ...
www.slate.com/.../did_obama_s_drone_war_help_cause_yemen_s_...
Slate
Jan 27, 2015 - A U.S. drone strike hit a vehicle in central
Yemen on Monday, killing three ... of a U.S. citizen being targeted for extrajudicial
killing overseas.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_killing
Wikipedia
Jump to Obama Administration
position on combat drones - While noting that a moredetailed
... of the U.S. Senate Judiciary committee, Patrick ... Obama defended
the use of drones as just ... targeted killings would
not be a war ...
readersupportednews.org/.../16209-extrajudicial-killings-through-drones
Feb 25, 2013 - ... the US President Barack Obama has broken
all the record of human rights by extrajudicial killings of
the innocent ... attacks, openly admitted that 4,700 people have been killed by
the raids of America's secretive drone war.
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March 5, 2014
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Saturday, March 1, 2014
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The Five Commandments of
Barack Obama
How “Thou Shalt Not” Became “Thou Shalt”
More than five years after
first taking office, the president's promises deserve a re-write. (Photo:
Original Jim Crimmings / Flickr / cc / re-purposed by Common Dreams)In January 2009, Barack
Obama entered the Oval Office projecting idealism and proud to be the
constitutional law professor devoted to turning democratic principles into
action. In his first weeks in office, in a series of executive orders and
public statements, the new president broadcast for all to hear the five
commandments by which life in his new world of national security would be
lived.
Thou shalt not torture.
Thou shalt not keep Guantanamo
Thou shalt not keep secrets unnecessarily.
Thou shalt not wage war without limits.
Thou shalt not live above the law.
Five years later, the question is: How have he and his
administration lived up to these self-proclaimed commandments?
Let’s consider them one by one:
1.
Thou Shalt Not Torture.
Here, the
president has fared best at living up to his own standards and ending a
shameful practice encouraged and supported by the previous administration. On
his first day in office, he ordered an end to the practice of torture, or
as the Bush administration euphemistically called it, “enhanced interrogation
techniques” (EITs), by agents of the U.S. U.S.
No
questioning of future terror suspects would henceforth be done without using
standard, legal forms of interrogation codified in the American criminal and
military justice systems. This meant, among other things, shutting down the
network of secret prison facilities, or “black sites,” the
Bush administration had established globally from Poland to Thailand, where the
CIA had infamously tortured its captives in the Global War on Terror.
With that in mind, Obama ordered the CIA to “close as expeditiously as
possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and... not operate
any such detention facility in the future.”
The
practice of officially sponsored torture, which had, in fact, begun to fall
into disuse in the last years of the Bush administration, was now to come to a
full stop. Admittedly, there are still some issues that warrant
attention. The continued force-feeding of detainees at Guantanamo
is a case in point, but state-sponsored torture, justified by law, is now, as
before the Bush years, illegal in America
The commandment banning torture has, it seems, lasted into the
sixth year of Obama’s presidency -- and so much for the good news.
2.
Thou Shalt Not Keep Guantanamo
On his
first day in office, President Obama also pledged to close the infamous Guantanamo Bay Guantanamo
Bay
In June
2013, the president appointed former Clinton White House lawyer Cliff Sloan as
special envoy in charge of closing Guantanamo
But
there’s a catch. No matter how many prisoners Sloan succeeds in
releasing, President Obama has made it clear that he only means to close Guantanamo Guantanamo Washington
In other words, when it comes to his second commandment, the
president will be able to follow it only by redefining what closure means.
3. Thou Shalt Not Keep Secrets.
The first
issue that Obama singled out as
key to his presidency on his initial day in office was the necessity of
establishing a sunshine administration. Early on, he tied his wagon to ending
the excessive secrecy of the Bush administration and putting more information
in the public arena. Bush-era policies of secrecy had been crucial to the
establishment of torture practices, warrantless wiretapping, and other
governmental excesses and patently illegal activities. Obama’s self-professed aim was to restore trust between the
people and their government by pledging himself to “transparency” -- that is,
the open sharing of government information and its acts with the citizenry.
Transparency,
he emphasized, “promotes accountability and provides information for citizens
about what their government is doing. Information maintained by the
Federal Government is a national asset. My administration will take appropriate
action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in
forms that the public can readily find and use.” Towards that end, the
president made a first gesture to seal his good intentions: he released a number of previously classified
documents from the Bush years on torture policy.
And there,
as it happened, the sunshine ended and the shadows crept in again. In the
five years that followed, little of note occurred in the name of transparency
and much, including awar against whistleblowers of every sort, was pursued in the name
of secrecy. In those years, in fact, the Obama administration offered secrecy
(and its spread) a remarkable embrace. The president also sent a chill through
the government itself by prosecuting seven individuals who saw themselves
as whistleblowers, far more than all other presidents combined. And it launched
an international manhunt to capture Edward Snowden, after he
turned over tovarious journalists secret National Security Agency files documenting its
global surveillance methods. At one point, the administration even arranged to
have the Bolivian president’s planeforced down over Europe
on the (mistaken) assumption that Snowden was aboard.
After the
drumbeat of Snowden’s revelations had been going on for months, government
officials, including the president, continued to insist that the NSA’s massive, secret,
warrantless surveillance techniques were crucial to American safety. (This was denied in no uncertain terms by a panel of
five prominent national security experts Obama appointed to examine the secret
documents and propose reforms for the NSA surveillance programs.) Spokespeople
for the administration continued to insist as well that the exposure of these
secret NSA policies represented harm to the nation’s security of the most primal sort.
(For this claim, too, there has still been no proof.)
Before
Snowden's revelations about the gathering of the phone metadata of American
citizens, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper evidently had no hesitation in lying to a congressional committee
on the subject. In their wake, he claimed that they were the “most massive and
most damaging theft of intelligence information in our history.”
Certainly, they were the most embarrassing for officials like Clapper.
By 2014,
it couldn’t have been clearer that secrecy, not transparency, had become this
government’s mantra (accompanied by vague claims of national security), just as
in the Bush years. One clear example of this unabashed embrace of secrecy came
to light last month when that presidentially appointed panel weighed in on
reforming the NSA. While constructive reforms were indeed suggested, the idea
that a secret court -- the FISA court -- could be the final arbiter of who can
legally be surveilled was not challenged. Instead, the reforms suggested and
accepted by Obama were clearly aimed at strengthening the court. No one
seemed to raise the question: Isn't a secret court anathema to democracy?
Nor, of
course, has secrecy been limited to the NSA. It’s been a hallmark of the
Obama years and, for instance, continues to hamper the military commissions at Guantanamo
On the commandment against secrecy, then, the president has
decidedly and defiantly moved from a shall-not to a shall.
4. Thou Shalt Not Wage War Without Limits.
At the
outset of Obama’s presidency, the administration called into question the
notion of a borderless battlefield, aka the globe. He also threw into the trash heap of history the
Bush administration’s term “Global War on Terror,” or GWOT as it came to be
known acronymically.
This
January, in his State of the Union address, the president stated his continued
aversion to the notion that Washington America
Despite
the president’s insistence on placing limits on war, however, his own brand of
warfare has helped lay the basis for a permanent state of American global
warfare via “low footprint” drone campaigns and special forces operations aimed at an ever morphing enemy
usually identified as some form of al-Qaeda. According to Senator Lindsey
Graham, the Obama administration has already killed 4,700 individuals in numerous
countries, including Pakistan ,
Yemen , and Somalia U.S.
On the commandment against waging limitless war, then, the
president has visibly failed to comply with his own mandate.
5. Thou Shalt Not Live Above the Law
At the
outset of his presidency, Obama seemed to hold the concept of accountability in
high regard. Following the spirit of his intention to ban torture, his attorney
general, Eric Holder, opened an investigation into the torture policies of the Bush
years. He even appointed a special prosecutor to look into CIA
interrogation abuses. Two years later, though, all but two of the cases were dropped without prosecution. In 2012,
the final two cases, both involving the deaths of detainees, were dropped as well on the grounds that there was
insufficient evidence “to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable
doubt.” Nor was there any appetite inside the administration for
prosecuting the Bush-era Justice Department lawyers who had drafted the
“torture memos” providing the bogus justifications for applying torture
techniques such as waterboarding in the first place.
Not punishing those who created and applied the policy was
clearly a signal that no acts committed as part of the war on terror and under
the rubric of national security would ever be prosecuted. This was, in its own
way, an invitation to some future presidency to revive the torture program. Nor
have its defenders been silenced. If torture had been considered truly illegal,
and people had been held accountable, then perhaps assurances against its
recurrence would be believable. Instead, each and every time they are given the
chance, leading figures from the Bush administration defend the practice.
In former
CIA Director Michael Hayden’s words, "the
fact is it did work." Marc Thiessen, former speechwriter for President
Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, has underscoredthis
message: "Dick Cheney is right. The CIA interrogation program did produce
valuable intelligence that stopped attacks and saved lives."
While the
case against the torturers was dropped, a potentially shocking and exhaustive
analysis of CIA documents on the "enhanced interrogation program," a 6,000 page report by the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, is still tangled up in administration secrecy rules and
regulations (see Commandment 2), despite innumerable requests for its release.
Supposedly the report claims that the torture program did not work or
fulfill any of the claims of its supporters.
In other words, the absence of accountability for one of the
most egregious crimes committed in the name of the American people
persists. And from drone killings to NSA surveillance policies, the Obama
administration has continued to support those in the government who are
perfectly ready to live above the law and extrajudicially.
On this commandment, then, the president has once again failed to meet his own standards.
Five years later, Obama’s commandants need a rewrite.
Here’s what they should now look like and, barring surprises in the next three
years, these, as written, will both be the virtual law of the land and
constitute the Obama legacy.
Thou shalt not torture (but thou shalt leave the door open to
the future use of torture).
Thou shalt detain forever.
Thou shalt live by limitless secrecy.
Thou shalt wage war everywhere and forever.
Thou shalt not punish those who have done bad things in the name
of the national security state.
© 2014 Karen Greenberg
Karen Greenberg is the Executive Director of
the Center on Law and Security at the New York
University School
Heard the One About Obama
Denouncing a Breach of International Law?
Breaches of international law are a serious matter... when some country other than the
Unfortunately, during the last five years, no world leader
has done more to undermine international law than Barack Obama. He treats it with
rhetorical adulation and behavioral contempt, helping to further normalize a might-makes-right approach to global
affairs that is the antithesis of international law.
Fifty years ago, another former law professor, Senator Wayne
Morse, condemned such arrogance of power. “I don’t know why we think, just
because we’re mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for
right,” Morse said on national TV in 1964. “And that’s the American policy in
Southeast Asia—just as unsound when we do it as when Russia
Today, Uncle Sam
continues to preen as the globe’s big sheriff on the side of international law
even while functioning as the world’s biggest outlaw.
Rather than striving for an evenhanded assessment of how
“international law” has become so much coin of the hypocrisy realm, mainline U.S.
On Sunday night, the top of the New York Times home page reported: “Russian President
Vladimir V. Putin has pursued his strategy with subterfuge, propaganda and
brazen military threat, taking aim as much at the United
States and Europe as Ukraine
Following
close behind, a Times editorial appeared in print Monday morning, headlined “Russia ’s Aggression,” condemning “Putin’s
cynical and outrageous exploitation of the Ukrainian crisis to seize control of
Crimea .” The liberal newspaper’s editorial
board said that the United
States
Such demands are righteous—but lack integrity and credibility
when the same standards are not applied to President Obama, whose continuation
of the Bush “war on terror” under revamped rhetoric has bypassed international
law as well as “civilized behavior.”
In these circumstances, major U.S.
For
instance, last October the McClatchy news service reported that “the Obama administration
violated international law with top-secret targeted-killing operations that
claimed dozens of civilian lives in Yemen and Pakistan,” according to reports
released by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Last week,
just before Obama leapt to high dudgeon with condemnation of Putin for his
“breach of international law,” the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed piece that provided illuminating context for
such presidential righteousness.
“Despite the president's insistence on placing limits on war,
and on the defense budget, his brand of warfare has helped lay the basis for a
permanent state of global warfare via ‘low footprint’ drone campaigns and
special forces operations aimed at an ever-morphing enemy usually identified as
some form of Al Qaeda,” wrote Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on
National Security at Fordham University’s law school.
Greenberg
went on to indicate the scope of the U.S. government’s ongoing contempt for
international law: “According to Senator Lindsey Graham(R-S.C.), the
Obama administration has killed 4,700 individuals in numerous countries,
including Pakistan , Yemen and Somalia
But especially in times of crisis, as with the current Ukraine
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 License.
Norman Solomon is co-founder
of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books
include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death”
and "Made Love, Got War: Close E
Charles Pierce. “Obama, the CIA, and the Limits of
Conciliation .” Esquire, Reader Supported News, March 14, 2014
Pierce writes: "It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that, in one very important way, the president has lost control of his own government."
READ MORE
Pierce writes: "It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that, in one very important way, the president has lost control of his own government."
READ MORE
Write or Call the White House
President
Obama is committed to creating the most open and accessible administration in
American history. That begins with taking comments and questions from you, the
public, through our website.
Call
the President
PHONE NUMBERS
Comments:
202-456-1111Switchboard: 202-456-1414
TTY/TTD
Comments:
202-456-6213Visitor's Office: 202-456-2121
Write a letter to
the President
Here
are a few simple things you can do to make sure your message gets to the White
House as quickly as possible.1. If possible, email us! This is the fastest way to get your message to President Obama.
2. If you write a letter, please consider typing it on an 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheet of paper. If you hand-write your letter, please consider using pen and writing as neatly as possible.
3. Please include your return address on your letter as well as your envelope. If you have an email address, please consider including that as well.
4. And finally, be sure to include the full address of the White House to make sure your message gets to us as quickly and directly as possible:
The White
House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington , DC 20500
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