President Barack Obama has finally received praise for his terror policies . . . from Bush officials. Two of the officials commonly named as responsible for allegedly criminal acts during the Bush Administration, former National Intelligence Director retired Vice Admiral Michael McConnel and former Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden, are heaping praise on Obama for going even farther than George Bush in his policies. Now, there is an ignoble accomplishment.
McConnell is positively gushing with praise that “the new administration has been as aggressive, if not more aggressive, in pursing these issues . . . ” Hayden, who is most often cited for the unlawful surveillance programs under Bush, stated “I thank god every day for the continuity” shown by Obama in continuing Bush’s approach to the law and terror.
Hayden, who is my neighbor in Virginia, has also opposed any prosecution for torture under the Bush Administration. Obama has pleased many in the Bush Administration by insisting that CIA personnel will never face prosecution for torture — despite our treaty obligations to investigate and prosecute such crimes.
President Obama has certainly earned these professional references. He blocked public interest lawsuits in federal court on the unlawful surveillance program while blocking any investigation into torture. Hayden was the direct beneficiary of these policies. It is like Bernie Madoff praising the enforcement policies of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that allowed him to thrive in the 1990s. When many of us were stating that Hayden’s surveillance programs were clearly unlawful, Hayden was insisting that his own lawyers at the NSA had reviewed the program and were satisfied that it was lawful. This was the same tactic used by Bush in selecting biased lawyers to give clearly unsound legal analysis to support unlawful programs. Ultimately, when Hayden’s program was brought into federal court and faced actual judicial review, Hayden opposed such independent and competent review — and Obama ultimately stopped it.
I accept that people of good faith can disagree with civil libertarians on some of these programs — though even the Bush Administration came to reject the legal analysis of the torture programs. However, Hayden and Obama did not want to risk federal courts resolving this matter on issues like surveillance. Instead, they just circumvented the legal system. The pat on the back for a job well done by Hayden and McConnell should give someone in his Administration a moment of pause . . but I doubt it.
Source: SiFy
Jonathan Turley
Former Federal LEO
1, December 27, 2010 at 11:56 am
Swarthmore mom,
As I have stated previously, I want you and others here to provide a viable Democrat for whom I could vote.
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Oh darlin’, I wish that were possible but the reality of the situation makes any real change impossible. Obama will win another 4 years … easily.
The republicans will yell and scream and drive the wedge issues but there are not enough of them to field a decent candidate and no republican of any real stature is going to waste time or money in a futile bid to beat Obama. They’ll put up another McCain type.
The Democratic Party will not turn him out and all the minorities will flock to the poles and the thing all republicans fear will again happen … Democrats will sweep it all by the force of pure numbers.
You worked in this system for years … you know the drill. The announcement of the Afghan War continuing till 2014, the support of Bush officials that was the subject of this thread, the continuation of the Bush tax cuts, and several other factors all point to this fact … the deal has already been struck!
Keep on keeping on. We blew it in 2008 … maybe we’ll be able to do it right in 2016. (Take a look at the CPP Project.)
Blouise,
I will second your comment on the tea party crowd. The Republicans were already heading to the far right and the Tea Party shoved it off the map to the extreme Right. It is amazing that for being on the Right that they can be so Wrong.
SwM,
I would never align myself with any teabagger, individual or party and I completely agree with rcampbell’s assessment “They’re like cartoon charicatures of rabid right wing crazies. The mainstream, though nearly as screwed up, GOP will use and abuse them (in fact, as they already have) to gin up money and votes and then go right back to their corporatism just as they’ve done for years to the Pro-Life, anti-gay cults within the party.”
You experienced their mob mentality when your sign was destroyed at the Town Hall meeting … and I paid close attention to your words and the experience that those words related. What happened to you happened to several of my friends who mistakenly thought that they would be able to engage a candidate at a Town Hall meeting. What each of them found was a rabid pep rally of anti-Obama hate mongering. They were there to support healthcare and found themselves literally surrounded by people foaming at the mouth because Obama wanted to kill seniors. (It was all the fashion at that particular time to believe that end of life counselling was a death sentence.) Disgusting behavior.
Every event, having happened, becomes part of the past which forms the present which makes the future when the future becomes the present, which is now, which has already become the past.
To me, the past is something I imagine, I name that imaginary imagining, “memory.”
To me, the future is something I imagine, I name that imaginary imagining, “planning.”
As I imagine reconstructing the past, I do so now.
As I imagine constructing the future, I do so now.
From Fredric Winson, Marian Perry, illustrator, “The Space Child’s Mother Goose,” (here cited according to my imagined belief of fair use), Purple House Press, 2001 (first published in 1958), the opening poem.
Probable-Possible, my black hen,
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn’t lay eggs in the Positive Now
Because she’s unable to Postulate How.
Said book appears to remain, as a paperback, in print; my copy is hardcover, and I have the first edition a storage shed, among my boxed reserve books.
What am I doing on this blog (or blawg, for those who believe in the law {remember please, that I believe in non-believing the law if it is adversarial to my belief(s)})?
For a useful hint, please read (No. 30 in my 2001 edition printing), “This is the Theory Jack built.”
Let’s pretend.
Let’s pretend “the Theory” is adversarial law & jurisprudence.
Let’s pretend “Jack” has a surname, “S–t.”
Let’s pretend “Ship High In Transit” identifies very valuable fertilizer.
Let’s pretend “Jack S–t” is an alias for “The Evil One.”
Let’s pretend my Ph.D. work is parody of “This is the Theory Jack built.”
Let’s pretend I am doing rather as the “Space Child with Brow Serene” did.
Let’s pretend I am only pretending.
anon nurse,
Germany was left in a terrible financial state after the country’s defeat in World War I. People in Germany were poor and hungry and suffering (as many are in our country today.) Hitler was able to manipulate the situation of the German people to his political advantage. Jews and some other minority groups were used as scapegoats for the country’s problems. Does that seem familiar? Look how certain politicians in this country used 9/11 to their political advantage. Some in the press were even complicit. Think: Judith Miller.
I agree that Americans as a whole didn’t speak out enough early on when the Bush Administration decided we needed to start a pre-emptive war in Iraq. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough Democrats in Congress to fight the Bush Administration on that either. I believe you would have seen a lot more war protests if we had had a draft at that time.
Jill wrote: “We aren’t allowed easy access to actual information in this country. We really must hunt for it. It’s difficult and time consuming to find even 1/10 of what is actually going on. This has been a disaster for our democracy.”
For sure, it has been a disaster for our democracy!
*****
From Glenn Greenwald (12/27/2010)
The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/27/wired/index.html
Excerpts:
For more than six months, Wired’s Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed — but refuses to publish — the key evidence in one of the year’s most significant political stories: the arrest of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks’ source. In late May, Adrian Lamo — at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning — gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video which WikiLeaks released throughout this year. In interviews with me in June, both Poulsen and Lamo confirmed that Lamo placed no substantive restrictions on Poulsen with regard to the chat logs: Wired was and remains free to publish the logs in their entirety.
Despite that, on June 10, Wired published what it said was only “about 25%” of those logs, excerpts which it hand-picked. For the last six months, Poulsen has not only steadfastly refused to release any further excerpts, but worse, has refused to answer questions about what those logs do and do not contain. This is easily one of the worst journalistic disgraces of the year: it is just inconceivable that someone who claims to be a “journalist” — or who wants to be regarded as one — would actively conceal from the public, for months on end, the key evidence in a political story that has generated headlines around the world.
In June, I examined the long, strange, and multi-layered relationship between Poulsen and Lamo, and in that piece raised the issue of Wired’s severe journalistic malfeasance in withholding these chat logs. But this matter needs to be re-visited now for three reasons:
(1) for the last six months, Adrian Lamo has been allowed to run around making increasingly sensationalistic claims about what Manning told him; journalists then prominently print Lamo’s assertions, but Poulsen’s refusal to release the logs or even verify Lamo’s statements prevents anyone from knowing whether Lamo’s claims about what Manning said are actually true;
(2) there are new, previously undisclosed facts about the long relationship between Wired/Poulsen and a key figure in Manning’s arrest — facts which Poulsen inexcusably concealed; and,
(3) subsequent events gut Poulsen’s rationale for concealing the logs and, in some cases, prove that his claims are false.
*****
Poulsen’s concealment of the chat logs is actively blinding journalists and others who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did not do. By allowing the world to see only the fraction of the Manning-Lamo chats which he chose to release, Poulsen has created a situation where his long-time “source,” Adrian Lamo, is the only source of information for what Manning supposedly said beyond those published exceprts. Journalists thus routinely print Lamo’s assertions about Manning’s statements even though — as a result of Poulsen’s concealment — they are unable to verify whether Lamo is telling the truth. Due to Poulsen, Lamo is now the one driving many of the media stories about Manning and WikiLeaks even though Lamo (a) is a convicted felon, (b) was (as Poulsen strangely reported at the time) involuntarily hospitalized for severe psychiatric distress a mere three weeks before his chats with Manning, and (c) cannot keep his story straight about anything from one minute to the next.
Jill: It is all about CFR, and we have moved further away from it since the election.
Jill: Nader said something similar in 2000
S.M.,
Bruce Fein isn’t a member of the tea party. Now for one moment, take stock of one’s own party and president. Leftists keep hiding behind the villainous tea party as a way to keep from looking squarely at what their own party is doing. Certainly there are villains in the tea party, but no less than Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky, who no one could possibly call right wingers, say to look at what is going on with the president and the Democratic party as closely as one would look at the tea party.
This is exactly what many leftist are failing to do. This is why the president and other Democrats are able to put in place a completely lawless, war mongering, police state corporate nation–leftists don’t want to look. But we must look. We are responsible to hold to account those people who say they are left wing, who are Democrats. That is our job as citizens. It was the job of Republicans under Bush. Most failed the task. It is our job under Democrats. We must not fail this task.
Swarthmore mom,
I agree. We’re in one fine mess, but I choose to believe that there’s a way out of it…
So the question is do we want home-grown terrorists tracked or not. I’d like them to be tracked and have it done legally which should be possible.
Here’s a little different slant on this story. The India news agency link has left some important parts out.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/135121-former-cia-director-calls-homegrown-terror-threat-a-witchs-brew?sms_ss=twitter&at_xt=4d177a0ba899e45c,0
anon nurse: Realistically, I don’t see the left pulling together with the tea party. I have been around that block on here before. The SPLC considers the “tea party” to be a hate group. The tea party is dominating right wing politics these days.
“I think the MSM/corporate media are a big part of the problem.” -Elaine M.
“The MSM has been absent for a decade on any issue related to National Security.” -rafflaw
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I agree, but “we, the people” have allowed it, IMO. Again, we didn’t arrive at this point all at once — it’s been a slow and, at times, insidious process.
Jill wrote:
“We need everyone of conscience, left and right, to pull together to work for justice. Upon this work lies the only hope for the good of our nation and the good of the world.”
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Such true words…
The more people do what we may usefully learn to not do, the more able we may become to not do it.
Learning and understanding what does not work may eventually leave us able to recognize what does work.
Reducing harm by doing ever increasing harm just may be something we may be approaching the threshold of beginning to know and understand as being of what does not work.
Elaine M:
anon nurse,
“There were those in Nazi Germany who spoke out and were severely punished. There were those who helped Jews flee or who hid Jews. Those people risked their own lives. Would you consider such people complicit in the terrible things that happened under the Nazi regime?”
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What you’ve described, Elaine, didn’t happen all at once, as you, of course, know. Was there a point in time when the future could have been altered? Was the rise of Hitler inevitable? Was what happened a foregone conclusion? I would suggest that it wasn’t…
Clearly, I should have used the word “most” and not “all”… This isn’t personal, as I’ve said. In my heart of hearts, I know that I’m not doing enough… Each person must ask him or herself the same question, IMO, and then decide if the shoe fits. That’s all. Most of us could do more… I know that I could. So in that sense, I’m complicit. JMHO.
Elaine M.
Well said. The MSM has been absent for a decade on any issue related to National Security.
rcampbell,
I agree with your review of the teapublicans.
Elaine,
I agree with this. We aren’t allowed easy access to actual information in this country. We really must hunt for it. It’s difficult and time consuming to find even 1/10 of what is actually going on. This has been a disaster for our democracy. I have some hope from wikileaks and other sites where whistle blowers have a chance of getting real information into the public domain. The new sites that formed have said they are inundated with information. If we can get actual information into the public domain, the lies of the govt. will be counteracted. IMO, that’s why the govt. is going to the wall against Wikileaks (that and the fact that information on a big bank’s malfeasance is coming out very soon!).
Ms. Elaine I’d like to know when you got the notion?
Jill,
I think the MSM/corporate media are a big part of the problem. Before the run-up to the war in Iraq, the news media covered few stories about the anti-war movement/anti-war rallies. Some in the press were even cheerleaders for the war and for some of the things the Bush Administration did.
We hear a lot of stories about the likes of Sarah Palin and her Tweets…a lot of insignificant garbage that gets passed off as news these days. There are too few real investigative journalists like Scahill, Jane Mayer, Seymour Hersh and others these days–and too many news media careerists who don’t want to rock the boat for fear of losing their high-paying.
Elaine,
I just don’t know what else to say. I tried to clarify what I wrote. I’m just going to stand by it.