President Obama made history today for all the wrong reasons

Barack Obama went today where no one to the left of Joe McCarthy has ever gone before in refusing to veto the controversial National Defense Authorization Act, which destroys our constitutional protections against being detained indefinitely (even for life) by military forces, and it guarantees that any of us can be apprehended without just cause or guarantee of due process. Once this becomes law none of us is free:

“By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “In the past, Obama has lauded the importance of being on the right side of history, but today he is definitely on the wrong side.”

The far-reaching detainee provisions would codify indefinite detention without trial into US law for the first time since the McCarthy era when Congress in 1950 overrode the veto of then-President Harry Truman and passed the Internal Security Act. The bill would also bar the transfer of detainees currently held at Guantanamo into the US for any reason, including for trial. In addition, it would extend restrictions, imposed last year, on the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo to home or third countries – even those cleared for release by the administration.

Truman never caved to McCarthyism. Obama is poised to do so. My sense is that people most likely to be violated by US military forces are not conservative critics of government, whom Obama has courted and appeased, but progressive dissenters of current federal policy. I fear for social movements the likes of Occupy Wall Street.

Beating up protesters is much easier than plugging potential security breaches in local utilities

Last week I had an interesting chat with a former security guard employed by Metro Nashville contractor Wackenhut to guard the Downtown water treatment plant near Salemtown. He told me that he believed the potential for catastrophic, lethal chlorine spill was real because the system does not have tight oversight.

Reportedly, the FBI is supposed to be regularly testing the security of the chlorine railroad tanker cars that deliver the concentrated toxic chemical during the water treatment process, but he never saw any conducted. He said that chlorine leak alarms went off several times in the small control building next to the tankers while he was on duty and that the building is supposed to be airtight, but on a number of occasions security personnel had to don gas masks while responding to the alarms.

Whenever there was a leak on-call "specialists," some of whom did not act like they knew how to resolve the problem, responded, according to the former guard. He also confirmed what has been reported in the past by others: the complex is remarkably vulnerable to sabotage given its proximity to Downtown Nashville.

Sandbagging tankers against the 2010 flood. 

It has been frustrating enough watching what looks a tragic accident (or act of terrorism) waiting to happen get attention from outside sources while Metro, state, and federal government officials seem to ignore the threat. A major chlorine spill would be a catastrophe for Downtown and both sides of the river. However, what I find even more galling is to watch how government misdirects its security forces away from real threats and toward innocuous inconveniences like the modest protests of dissenting citizens. Take the Department of Homeland Security, which assisted the Tennessee Highway Patrol's misguided crackdown on the relatively small Occupy Nashville protest. Give the protesters credit. They've fought the battle of Legislative Plaza against the state, gone to jail and won in the courts, and been acknowledged across media (along with overwhelming public support) for their perseverance.

Nevertheless, the committed followers who continue with the group beyond Governor Bill Haslam's bumbling heavy-handedness do not seem to expand. Moreover, ON has really not done much to occupy Nashville or otherwise live up to their name. They have not shown the slightest interest in occupying Nashville's Courthouse or the Chamber of Commerce or Gail Kerr's writing cubicle or the windmills of Jerry Maynard's mind or any other place of local political influence in Nashville. They've picketed NES and staged a street play at CCA. Today they're going to occupy the Tennessee Tower. They've basically given Mayor Karl Dean  (a Democrat with political aspirations) a pass. None of this is to slight the alternative democracy they're trying to run in the form of General Assemblies.

But really, was their nonviolent unwillingness to leave state-owned public property worth the attention of Homeland Security or the FBI or any other federal agency sworn to protect Americans against enemies, foreign and domestic? DHS overstepped its boundaries in assisting Bill Haslam's act of stepping on his own feet in the ON crackdown. Why are they not more focused on finding terrorists who might strike in Nashville or on securing vulnerable targets like the chlorine tankers at the Downtown water treatment facility?

Now we see reports that agencies like Homeland Security and the FBI may be coordinating responses with city halls across the country to suppress popular backlash against Wall Street and the financial industry. I have to wonder, given that President Obama broke his campaign promise to close George Bush's oppressive GITMO detention camps, whether the White House might actually be encouraging municipal and state-sponsored gagging of dissent as well as the compromise of universal human rights at home.

I notice this morning that Juan Cole is worrying about it, too:

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan let slip in an interview with the BBC that she had been on a conference call with the mayors of 18 cities about how to deal with the Occupy Wall Street movement. That is, municipal authorities appear to have been conspiring to deprive Americans of their first amendment rights to freedom of assembly and freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances.

Likewise, A Homeland Security official let it slip in a phone interview that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had been strategizing with cities on how to shut down OWS protests. The FBI is said to have advised using zoning ordinances and curfew regulations, and to stage the crackdown with massive police force at a time when the press was not around to cover the crackdown ....

What these two reports show is a high-level conspiracy to deprive Americans of their constitutional right to protest peacefully.

When will we see Occupy Wall Street protesters hooded, dressed in orange jump suits, and sent to Guantanamo for military trials? When you let the government act without regard for the rule of law toward foreigners suspected of terrorism, you open yourself to be treated the same way if the rich decide to sic their police on you (it is mostly their police).

Chapel Hill, NC cops suppress OWS protesters who occupied
an abandoned building to perhaps start a free clinic
-- KATELYN FERRAL AND MARK SCHULTZ

Sounds like the FBI is too distracted with aiding local police--who in turn act like paramilitary thugs toward nonviolent protesters--to spend much time testing for security holes at strategically significant utilities like Metro Water Services. I would agree with those who argue that if Homeland Security is coordinating these crackdown efforts against Occupy Wall Street, then we are not very far away from the day when we will see protesters rounded up and detained GITMO-style. The federal security apparatus, whose overseer is the President of the United States, needs to keep its eye on the ball and focus on potential local threats that are real. It should avoid micromanaging protest response as if it were quelling hostile coup d'etat. It ought to fix holes in the system rather than rolling back the civil rights of Americans.

Journalist Admits that In a "Perfect World" Journalists Would Investigate High Crimes

Political news directors suddenly become hardened realists when faced with the prospect that criminal investigations may also divulge that the news media was asleep at the wheel when they themselves should have been investigating:

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Morally Failed Christians Were Merely Looking for An Excuse to Be Brutal

JB's articulation is aces:

It's not the war on terror that caused Christians to morally fail by accepting something as anti-Christian as torture. It's the other way around. It's the moral failure of the conservative Christian movement, the movement away from the teachings of Christ and toward political radicalism, that made it possible for them to see torture as a morally acceptable part of the war on terror. Fear was just the perfect vehicle.

When the media passes on the meme that Christians were somehow more benevolent and actually loved their enemies before 9/11, they merely empower failed evangelicalism.

A Few Iconoclasts, Not the Bulk of Christendom Takes Moral Stands Against Torture

Leonard Pitts underscores the irony of torture-supporting American Christians claiming to follow Jesus, a Middle Eastern man who was arrested, detained, and tortured.

American Jurisprudence on the Skids

We aren't governed by the rule of law; we're governed by the rule of Phil:

Because Everyone Knows that There Are No Crooked Medical Doctors

The Bush Administration was willing to justify torture as long as a physician was present:

According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, which authored the memos, legal approval to use waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other abusive techniques pivoted on the existence of a “system of medical and psychological monitoring” of interrogations. Medical and psychological personnel were assigned to monitor interrogations and intervene to ensure that interrogators didn’t cause “serious or permanent harm” and thus violate the U.S. federal statute against torture.

The reasoning sounds almost circular. As one memo, from May 2005, put it: “The close monitoring of each detainee for any signs that he is at risk of experiencing severe physical pain reinforces the conclusion that the combined use of interrogation techniques is not intended to inflict such pain.”

In other words, as long as medically trained personnel were present and approved of the techniques being used, it was not torture.

And, after all, clinicians have never gone along with infamy before.

Obama "laying groundwork to look principled when he is doing an utterly unprincipled thing"

It's bad enough that a Bush appointee to the bench defended torture at the Justice Department, but is Barack Obama obstructing a war crime investigation of the Justice Department?

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Say it ain't so, "O."

Closing GITMO, But Otherwise Being Bush-Lite on Detainees

What is the current White House defense team up to (or down to) regarding their first response to a detainee lawsuit? According to SCOTUSblog, it looks like no fundamental change in the Bush Administration's siege on the human rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees.

This is not good:

The Obama Administration, taking its first position in a federal court on claims of torture of Guantanamo Bay detainees, urged the D.C. Circuit Court on Thursday to reject a lawsuit by four Britons formerly held there. In addition, the new filing argued that a recent appeals court ruling makes clear that “aliens held at Guantanamo do not have due process rights.”

Moreover, the document called for a sweeping ban on lawsuits against U.S. military officials, claiming constitutional violations by such officials. Allowing such lawsuits “for actions taken with respect to aliens during wartime,” it said, “would enmesh the courts in military, national security, and foreign affairs matters that are the exclusive province of the political branches.”

The brief was another indication that, at least so far, the new Administration is not moving to make a wide-ranging break with detention policies of the former Bush Administration. While President Obama has ordered the closing of Guantanamo by next January, lawyers for the government have taken positions in a variety of detainee court cases that do not propose fundamental change.

Obama is going to get beat up by the right wing for being soft on terrorists or insurgentsregardless of whether he continues the Bush policies are not. It's not going to help him to mimic Dubya on detainees. He just ought to do what's right, and let the other party scream, because they're going to regardless.

Parsimony on GITMO

Armchair Generalist paraphrases a 5-page WaPo story in less than 5 lines:

"We're going to focus on the 10 percent of Gitmo detainees who decided they can't forget what the US government did to them, instead of the 90 percent who quietly went home after spending years in confinement without trial or access to their families."

Star-Studded Military Officers to Ask Obama to Break from Bush Torture and Rendition Policies

Three dozen retired military officers with 80 stars between them ask Barack Obama for an "abrupt change" from the Bush Administration on prisoner treatment in order to protect American military personnel who might be captured in the future.  After two terms of Guantanamo and episodes like Abu Graib, I'm not sure an abrupt change will do that much to guard future POWs from retribution and violations of the Geneva Convention.  And that albatross should hang heavy around the American right-wing, which claims to be pro-military, but behaves in anti-military fashion.

Saddam Would Have Liked to Have Had the Torturous Bush Cabinet

The Bush promotion of torturing prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention continues:

McCain Not the Greatest American Hero Except to the Media

While the media is falling all over itself to fawn over John McCain's re-recitation of POW, POW, POW, M.J. Rosenberger puts McCain's service in perspective of the greatest war heroes like Grant and Eisenhower:

You would never know it from the media coverage but John McCain is not one of America's greatest war heroes. He is a former POW who survived, heroically. He deserves to be honored for that heroism.
But one thing distinguishes McCain from other war heroes, the kind whose heroism changes history rather than their life stories.

America's two greatest war heroes were Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower. Grant saved the union. And Ike saved civilization.

And neither one ever bragged about their experience. (Can you imagine Ike smacking down Adlai Stevenson by saying that while Adlai ran a nice medium-sized state, he was the Supreme Allied Commander who ran D-Day, defeated Hitler, and liberated Europe?).

Neither Grant nor Ike were POWs like McCain, but there is at least one of McCain's fellow POWs believes that McCain's imprisonment and his temperament makes the prospect of him becoming President a bad idea:

Catch that? There were hundreds of POW, and yet, John McCain is arguing--in fact it's really his main argument--that his POW experience uniquely qualifies him to be president. So, why should we automatically assume that imprisonment and torture are the best prerequisites for a President of the United States? It's not dishonoring his service to question his qualifications for the highest office in the land, especially under a constitution that mandates civilian control of the military.

Hitchens Submits to Waterboarding and Questions the Government's Integrity

He concludes that the Bush Administration is actually aiding the enemy and sacrificing any claim that we may have in the future that our troops not be tortured. "[I]f waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture." Indeed, all of these Pentagon qualifications and nuances on state-sponsored brutality and stacked abuse of human beings amount to meaningless rationalization.

Principal White House Advisors Were Intimately Involved in Authorizing Torture

Not just Cheney and Rummy, but Condi and Colin discussed in detail specific torture procedures and how many times prisoners could be waterboarded:

Looks like vicious micromanagement to me. If Condi Rice ever runs for public office, this violation should be hung around her neck like an albatross.

Cavalcade of Capitalists: Senate Gives Big Oil Back Its Billions in Tax Breaks

TennNews has the largely ugly details on the U.S. Senate's overpriced holiday gift to oil executives everywhere.


UPDATE: And, as a bonus to enabling averice, they sustained the hubristic attacks on human rights: Senate Republicans blocked a U.S. House of Representatives initiative to follow the Army's filed manual and to restrict CIA interrogation methods.

Remember, some like Naomi Klein insist that pro-oil policies and the approval of torture to shock people into compliance are not at all strange bedfellows in the halls of Congress.


UPDATE: Support the troops? Republicans don't even support the Army Field Manual:

On Wednesday, 30 retired generals and admirals signed a joint letter to Congress, urging lawmakers to pass legislation requiring U.S intelligence agents to follow the Army Field Manual, which meets the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of war prisoners and prohibits torture. The House took the military leaders' advice, and passed a measure banning torture, despite the objections of 95% of the House Republican caucus.

You Can Read It in the Sunday Papers

In this morning's papers: studies say either duty or divinity induces generosity, and apparently both Democratic and Republican congressional leaders had neither in 2002 when they were given private briefings on waterboarding detainees with no protest.

In case you were wondering what generosity does not look like:

"One man's torture is another man's CIA-sponsored swim lesson."

Do your kids need to take swim lessons? Based on conservative Rachel Marsden's comments on CNN yesterday, they'd be well taken care of at a CIA-waterboard session:

Sounds like Ms. Marsden hasn't actually gone through a waterboard lesson like this guy has. He calls it "truly horrible ... like you're going to drown." On second thought, don't let them waterboard your kids or anyone else.

What "Liberal" News Media? CNN is Fox News II

Mary over at Liberadio accuses CNN of carrying Fox's water for its double-standardized treatment of Nancy Pelosi's trip to Syria. The whole Pelosi flack is a tempest in a teapot given Republican visits and the fact that lots of American women leaders cover their heads out of respect when meeting Muslim leaders:


I'll add to Mary's points that I watched CNN's coverage this morning of the British sailors returned to their homeland by Iran and the pressures that they faced in their imprisonment. Without defending Iran's actions, I can say that I found the anchors' comments after the sailors' news conference full of maudlin focus on the "pressure" that they faced while imprisoned. And CNN's tone made me wonder if the Bush Administration's defense of torture techniques like water-boarding or its despotic willingness to haul in any American without due process had inspired such pathos and gravitas from CNN last year. I remember more detached indifference in those reports. CNN should express shock and aversion to the mistreatment of prisoners on any shore, and even more towards countries like ours that claim to embrace the constitutional protection of human rights.

You Can See What Waterboarding Is

Current TV filmmakers document what waterboarding is so that you can decide for yourself whether it counts as torture: