Some of the things the Obama administration wants to move past

[solarbird]

This came out a week ago; I wanted to sit on it for a while to let it fall out of news service headlines before reminding everybody about it.

The Bush Administration decided internally that it was not bound by the Constitution in any way. First amendment? Void. Fourth amendment? Void. Treaties, specified by the Constitution as law of the land? Void. Laws passed by Congress? Void. Habeas corpus? Void. For everyone. Greenwald, a week ago:

Let's underscore: these weren't just abstract theories. They served as the basis for many U.S. government actions. Military actions were, in fact, directed at American citizens on U.S. soil (that's what the NSA program was, as but one example). Both legal residents and American citizens captured on U.S. soil were put in cages for years with no trial or charges of any kind. And, of course, the U.S. instituted a systematic torture regime that led to the brutalization and even deaths of many detainees in our custody...

This is factually true, with no hyperbole: Over the last eight years, we had a system in place where we pretended that our "laws" were the things enacted out in the open by our Congress and that were set forth by the Constitution. The reality, though, was that our Government secretly vested itself with the power to ignore those public laws, to declare them invalid, and instead, create a whole regimen of secret laws that vested tyrannical, monarchical power in the President. Nobody knew what those secret laws were because even Congress, despite a few lame and meek requests, was denied access to them.

Scott Horton, writing at Harper's Magazine, notes:

John Yoo’s Constitution is unlike any other I have ever seen. It seems to consist of one clause: appointing the President as commander-in-chief. The rest of the Constitution was apparently printed in disappearing ink....

Clearly it was designed to authorize sweeping warrantless surveillance by military agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency... [and] much more was afoot, including the deployment of military units and military police powers on American soil. These memos suggest that John Yoo found a way to treat the Posse Comitatus Act as suspended. These memos gave the President the ability to authorize the torture of persons held at secret overseas sites....

We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. That was thanks to secret memos crafted deep inside the Justice Department that effectively trashed the Constitution. What we know now is likely the least of it.

Well, some of us spent a whole lot of time screaming about it.

Sullivan, also from a week ago:

Just to recap: the last president believed that he had the inherent power to suspend both the First and the Fourth amendments, he had the power to seize anyone in the US or world, disappear and torture them, and ordered his legal goons to come up with patently absurd legal rationales for all of it. And much of official Washington carried on as normal - and those of us who actually stood up and opposed this were regarded as "hysterics."

Something is rotten in a country where this can happen with such impunity - and when, even now, highly regarded and respected journalists and commentators simply move on or roll their eyes or sigh world-weary sighs.

A lot of things are rotten. Still. All of this stands until it is repudiated. It has not been repudiated, and Mr. Obama has been using Mr. Bush's power theories to work in court against repudiation. (And not just in this arena; Mr. Obama is now describing the systematic problems at Gitmo as an artifact of steps "taken immediately after 9/11" and Mr. Gates's "investigation" into conditions at Guantanimo Bay has certified Gitmo as now being squeeky-clean Geneva-compliant, just like magic.) The use of those unilateral secrecy theories continues to undermine both the rule of law and the cause of human rights across the globe:

This is just a fact: the U.N. Human Rights Report is identifying as a gross violation of human rights and international obligations exactly that which the Obama administration is doing: namely, invoking claims of "State Secrets" in order to "conceal illegal acts from oversight bodies or judicial authorities" and to deny victims of torture and secret detention a judicial forum in which to seek remedies. We're not only doing that in our own courts, but also conspiring with and/or pressuring our allies to invoke claims of secrecy to conceal these crimes and prevent accountability. And that's to say nothing of the emphatic position we are still taking that we can abduct citizens from around the world, ship them off to a black hole at Bagram, and deny them any rights of any kind to challenge their detention.

Moreover, citing the Convention Against Torture -- the treaty which Ronald Reagan signed in 1988 and the U.S. Senate ratified in 1994 but which must not be mentioned in decent company these days -- the U.N. Report also reminds the United States:

States are under a positive obligation to conduct independent investigations into alleged violations of the right to life, freedom from torture, or other inhuman treatment, enforced disappearances or arbitrary detention, to bring justice to those responsible for such acts, and to provide reparations where they have participated in such violations.

These are treaties to which the US is signatory. They were signed by then-Presidents and ratified by Senates. They are, Constitutionally, the law of the land. And the US government is following none of them.

Instead, the political class natters on about how important is to "put this behind" us, and runs articles pretending nothing was new, and all this is just a partisan game and Liberal Revenge, which is a lie, but one recycled endlessly with the brainless prolificness of the practised insane, and I am beyond sick of it. The liars on their own will never stop; I simply want to know when, if ever, will they finally be challenged.

Comments

[brombear.livejournal.com]

You put it "behind" you and the people will forget about it...and they'll sooner or later get sick of hearing about how someone is still calling for Justice, when the shiny new reality series is on the idiot box.

The only way to challenge them is to hit their pocketbooks and bank accounts...IF one can afford to...I'm of a mindset that the "Political Ruling class" have almost set themselves up where they can't be touched...even if they get voted out of office, they've still got a nice, cushy bankroll somewhere, or acquaintances who will pardon them.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I guess the real question becomes, what are you and I gonna do about it? Better put (albeit more abstractly), where's the hole, and what sort of sharp stick do we use to poke around in it until somebody says "ow", and how do we avoid the inevitable storm of fire ants?

There are some things I applaud this guy for. It's about damn time somebody killed off don't-ask-don't-tell, for one. But some things I am decidedly grumpy about, and this is one of'em. (The related travesty of being able to travel with one's ever-loving shoes on, and with whatever kind of t-shirt one cares to, is another.)

(I've already asked someone to poke a sharp stick in that last hole.... we'll see.)

[solarbird]

I dunno.

The Democrats managed to achieve something I feared: taking power without ever having become an actual opposition party. So now they have no reason to do anything - they got into power doing nothing about any of this, so now they're in a position where the reflex - at best - will be to continue doing nothing about any of this.

And that's one of the failure modes of a two-party system. It's akin to the regulatory capture, I think, that I talk about in economics sometimes. The system is gamed, so, accordingly, the system does not achieve its stated objectives, but instead those of the people who have gamed it. And you get results like this.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

if this be true, and it's certainly plausible, this would be the point at which we have to contemplate the launching of wooden shoes, and the equipping of simians with Craftsman tools. ne-c'est-pas?

shoes.

[solarbird]

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Re: shoes.

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

It relates to the coded messages about how to defeat The New World Order. (I was going to mention a specific well known person i nthis context, but for all that I think he's kinda of a right wing nut, every now and then I wonder if he's more than half right, and a lot of his theories seem entirely plausible, and sometimes even likely, and then I think making fun of him would be a bad thing.)

The Democrats managed to achieve something I feared: taking power without ever having become an actual opposition party. So now they have no reason to do anything - they got into power doing nothing about any of this, so now they're in a position where the reflex - at best - will be to continue doing nothing about any of this.

This is why I wanted Obama to lose in the general. I just couldn't bring myself to vote for McCain, his campaign was too awful. I figured if I was gonna throw out a protest vote it should at least have elements of encouraging people in a better direction, even if all the other possible protest votes had things wrong w/them as well.

And that's one of the failure modes of a two-party system. It's akin to the regulatory capture, I think, that I talk about in economics sometimes. The system is gamed, so, accordingly, the system does not achieve its stated objectives, but instead those of the people who have gamed it. And you get results like this.

Yes.

Re: shoes.

[ummdruff.livejournal.com]

Alex Jones!??!

Yeah, he's boorish and tends to exaggerate but dammit if he doesn't know his shit. Easy to diss him in good times; less and less easy in times like these.

Re: shoes.

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

I wonder if anyone would guess who I meant. Alex Jones, indeed.

[firni.livejournal.com]

Mmmmmonkeys.