I’m surprised the hypocrites on the right aren’t making a bigger deal out of this:
The Obama administration has, yet again, asserted the broadest and most radical version of the “state secrets” privilege — which previously caused so much controversy and turmoil among loyal Democrats (when used by Bush/Cheney) — to attempt to block courts from ruling on the legality of the government’s domestic surveillance activities. Obama did so again this past Friday — just six weeks after the DOJ announced voluntary new internal guidelines which, it insisted, would prevent abuses of the state secrets privilege. Instead — as predicted — the DOJ continues to embrace the very same “state secrets” theories of the Bush administration — which Democrats generally and Barack Obama specifically once vehemently condemned — and is doing so in order literally to shield the President from judicial review or accountability when he is accused of breaking the law.
Regardless, this is a definite failure on the part of Obama. After the FIRE crew, I would say the #2 threat to this nation are the “You can’t handle the truth” goons in the security apparatus.
Phoenix Woman
They won’t because that would require them to admit that they approve of something that Obama’s done. Never happen.
Sadly, Obama, like both Clintons, is letting the insecurity engendered by his non-military background turn him into a roundheels for anyone with stars on the shoulder or a “national security” pitch.
Eric S
Help. Does FIRE = Foundation for Individual Rights in Education? It is not in the Lexicon and that’s the first thing on the Google that makes sense.
ellaesther
Oy. And a good morning to you, too, John!
A year ago Wednesday, I was in Indiana, helping to turn the state blue. I’m still glad we have this guy in the Oval Office (particularly when I pause to remember who his competition was…), but I will be honest: I miss the hope and optimism I felt last year on November 5. The disappointments are real, they are legitimate, and they make me deeply sad. This is a big one.
ellaesther
@Eric S: (What he said…!)
Comrade Jake
Just to play devil’s advocate here, is it possible there’s a good reason for this besides “to shield the President from judicial review or accountability”?
General Winfield Stuck
Maybe, though this is waiting in the wings and the Obama admin. has said it supports it in principle, though likely not without some changes.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Eric S: Finance, Insurance, Real Estate.
Comrade Darkness
I think the security apparatus told him in no uncertain terms that they could not keep him safe without these unconstitutional privileges. True or not, the argument worked.
This is how Banana Republics happen.
geg6
This is one of my biggest disappointments with Obama. I simply cannot get over the lack of action for restoring rule of law and civil liberties. I just can’t.
Yes, he’s better than the alternative, but we can’t expect that to happen always. This needs beaten back and beaten back hard, hard, hard.
I despair for my country at times, alas.
Comrade Jake
If you trace back to the original article in Greenwald’s post (a Jake Tapper classic BTW), here is what you find:
So they are shielding whom again? Bush? Are we perhaps getting a bit carried away this AM?
General Winfield Stuck
I guess this is dem pearl clutching day with a link to the master pearl clutcher.
DZ
Well, after 4 weeks vacation during which time I paid no attention to news of any kind from any source, I come home to rediscover that plus ca change, plus que la meme chose. Depressing
Jack
I don’t think it’s a failure. Barack Obama campaign policy positions were available to pretty much anyone who wanted to read them.
I’m not discussing his rally speeches.
His actual policy positions, which put him somewhere between Clinton and Reagan.
With a little bit less of Clinton’s capitulation to Christianists and less need to pander to the culture warriors.
But, not substantively different on how things are run.
Phoenix Woman
@General Winfield Stuck:
A-yep. Furthermore, what GG doesn’t point out is that a) DoJ is still, thanks in large part to Senate GOP blocking of Obama appointments, run by and large by Bush’s crowd; and b) DoJ is obligated to uphold the laws Congress gives them, even if they suck.
paradox
This relates to what I wrote about this morning visa vi Pakistan, we’ve got to be bloodthirsty killing sumbitches, the law and decency be damned, or the Republicans and the media will call us wussies.
I don’t need a god damn devil’s advocate, Obama expressly, vehemently, was opposed to this. But now that a hissy fit might loom after every move that would result in the US not being a badass killer, well, we just can’t have that.
I think they calculate most Americans simply don’t care, so why take the risks by doing the right thing? Obama kiss-ass supporters ( I would guess that’s about 40% of them) excuse anything, kill a grandma with a drone, no problem, rip up the constitution ’cause Americans can’t care, whatever.
They think we’re stupid, that’s the worst part. I won’t forget, you assholes.
The Moar You Know
This is not eleven-dimensional chess or Obama-fu. This is him reneging on a campaign pledge. I think we, the citizens of this nation, have a right to know why.
Yep. Hope he has the brains to at least say no to that crew about Afghanistan and get us the fuck out of there. I am not hopeful about that, either. And unlike warrantless wiretapping, failure to leave Afghanistan will destroy his presidency and my party.
General Winfield Stuck
@Phoenix Woman:
I think Obama basically wants these old Bush era lawsuits to play out for the Supreme’s to make the final call, to avoid going the whole exercise again, or until congress passes the States Secret leg now pending. Just my opinion.
paradox
I guess this is dem pearl clutching day with a link to the master pearl clutcher.
How many men and women have died for our constitution?
It ought to be kick-your-ass-to-the-trash-authoritarian-pigs-among-us, asshole. How proud the Founders must be of you, Hobessian dickhead Nazi buttkisser.
Jack
@Comrade Jake:
Yes.
Once the egg is cracked (to murder the metaphor), it will neither be cooked into an omelet, nor put back together again.
We have signed treaties which obligate us to prosecute war criminals.
But Obama cannot survive past 2012 if he actually pursue’s Bush era war criminals, or those retained in his own admin and bureacracies.
Think of the GOP, the Village, the corporate press behemoths, NATO, the Pentagon and defense contractors salivating at the chance to have that Obama to sell to constituencies.
It’s not pretty, or the neat conclusion to a pretty little fable, but them is the conditions of empire management. Once you get to the place where you’re actually running it, you have to run it.
Max
@John Cole –
To cheer you up because I know you liked Southland…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/business/media/02tnt.html?_r=2&ref=business
geg6
@The Moar You Know:
I stupidly watched the Chris Matthews Show (the syndicated one; not the MSNBC one) yesterday and the consensus of the entire panel was that McChrystal gets everything he wants. Because Obama never served, he has no real authority to go against the brass and he is afraid to anyway. Thus spake Matthews, Katty Kay, Howard Fineman, Mark Whittaker, and Mary Jordan.
It is the Village word. We must just accept it. And so must Obama. I am not hopeful about AfPak.
General Winfield Stuck
@paradox:
I served my country, so piss off wanker with your petty pontifications. You don’t know wtf you’re talking about.
Jack
<—d’oh slaps self, those awful spelling errors…
cleek
very disappointing.
but it does illustrate one thing: presidents don’t give up powers that their predecessors have secured, no matter which party they come from. maybe it’s best not to give them the powers in the first place.
you’d think small-government types would understand this, best of all. especially, if they’re going to screech like retarded howler monkeys about how Obama is the second coming of SlatinHitlerMao.
so, i guess that means this illustrates two things: that the “small-government” types are really only small-Democratic-government. they could give a shit what the GOP does.
Jack
@geg6:
Perspective matters. If you are so inclined, think about the shorthand “Afpak” and how it conflates a multitude of conflicts, and conflicting goals, with a single mission, “Afpak.”
cleek
SlatinHitlerMao = StalinHitlerMao, obvs.
Keith G
I just do not know. I am stuck, lost actually, between those who still completely trust Obama and those liberals who feel he is a total sell out.
His upcoming war decision scares me. If he escalates, if he buys into McCrystal – or tries a half way fix, I can’t believe in him any more. This military adventure is no longer salvageable for any price we could be willing to pay. If he buys into it he will smell of short term political opportunism not totally unlike the bums we just got rid of.
So tired of crushed hopes. Thank god its a chilly day and I have kittehs who want to snuggle.
Napoleon
@Eric S:
PS to what JSF said in response, FIRE is a mainstream acronym. It is not an Internet thing like GOS.
General Winfield Stuck
@Keith G:
Trusting Obama completely is not the issue. Looking at all the parts in play is. As are politics. These were lawsuits already in the works, and that would be hard for any DOJ to just walk away from. There are other actors acting like the congress with actual ability to codify a solid foundation for seeing that the SS clause, which is in the Constitution itself, is not misused to cover up presidential wrongdoing.
Keith G
@General Winfield Stuck: Hell, I don’t know what he is talking about.
The Moar You Know
@Keith G: There are a lot of shades of gray there. To completely trust anyone you don’t personally know is a mistake of considerable magnitude; to say that Obama is a “total sell-out” is equally misguided.
I’m really not happy about this, and far less happy about what I’m pretty sure is going to happen with Afghanistan. But I can’t forget that Obama is not George Bush, and even more thankfully is not John McCain. We could have done worse.
What’s sad is that we couldn’t do any better.
Ash Can
I’m with Comrade Jake. Like everyone here, I want to see all of Bush’s state-secrets privileges walked back, yesterday if not sooner. However, looking through the links — from Glenn Gadfly (and I mean that in a good sense) Greenwald to Jake Fucking (and not in a good sense) Tapper — I’m not convinced that this is something to get depressed about. And by that I mean that it’s not clear from the information here that Holder’s statement translates directly to nefarious attitudes or behavior on Obama’s part. I can’t tell from the information in the links, for example, whether Holder is bound by any sort of legal precedent to make the statement he did. Also, I don’t know the facts of the case in question and whether they really do impinge upon legitimate security issues.
On the surface, no, I don’t like seeing Holder support Bush’s fishy state-secrets practices, which appears to be what’s happening here. But I have a fundamental problem with tying Holder’s statements directly to Obama, and that’s the fact that the DoJ in general and AG in particular operate independently of anyone and everyone else, including the president. Or at least they’re bloody well supposed to. (Remember how incensed we all got — including me — over the politicization of the DoJ under Bush?)
I’m all in favor of slamming Barack Obama for bad behavior. I’m not at all convinced, however, that this is the case here.
itsbenj
seems Obama went ‘all-in’ on doing everything he could to protect Bush and Cheney on this matter. this is of a piece with Obama’s completely bogus support for the FISA bill. of course the government will at times spy on its own people, every government ever has done so. but openly farming out this activity to private companies was a giant mistake of Bush’s, and it’s a giant mistake for Obama to embrace and then further this mistake. what is he thinking?
Keith G
@General Winfield Stuck: I get you on this and I have understood and support Pres. Obama’s m.o. of change from within the system. I also support his needs to get the timing right.
That said, I would appreciate a few more bones tossed our way (speaking now as a civil libertarian who thought the original so-called Patriot Act was a breach of faith).
And again, the Afghanistan War is beginning to color my other opinions. We need to stop.
Tsulagi
Yep.
And this isn’t 20-dimensional chess with an intended outcome years later to reverse the Bush admin unitary executive direction. Nor is Obama some poor waif buffeted and taken advantage of by mean authoritarian types in the country. His decisions, his actions, his course.
ellaesther
@Ash Can: Ok, I’m supposed to be reading a book for review that has NOTHING whatsoever to do with this, and yet this is what I’m thinking about (thank you John Cole!) — and in the process of not-reading-very-successfully, I’ve reached a very similar conclusion.
Which is a reversal of my earlier “Oy.” Je suis une flip-flopper.
And I came back to write it all out and lo! You had done it for me. Which is excellent/terrible because it means I can/have to get back to my book now!
But I’m still disappointed in other areas (hellooooo, Israel/Palestine!), and still miss my hope and optimism. So I’m still all depressed. No worries!
General Winfield Stuck
@Keith G:
I hear ya. I would say that he’s thrown some fairly juicy ones, at least with the Bush torture regime. I wish he would with the secrecy shit too, if for no other reason to avoid the knashing of teeth from liberal bloggers. It’s important to keep the base happy with some fresh red meat now and then.
The torture issue is the biggie for me and is bright line wrong what the Bushies did. The whole State Secrets thing is murkier as to what is appropriate and what’s not.
Being an O-Bot though, I don’t start seriously pitching pooh until evidence is clear that Obama is actually DOING some of the things Bush/Cheney did, not so much spanking them for what they did. Though that is quite satisfying when it happens.
Bob In Pacifica
My only problem here is that John Cole calls this “Democratic Stupidity”. Did the Democratic caucus vote on it? And, as pointed out, the Repugs and their cheerleaders in the media seem to be on board with it or haven’t noticed it for all their work ferreting out Death Panels.
So why is this “Democratic”? Or, for that matter, why would it be “Republican”?
This is the permanent government in action. If it had been McCain or H. Clinton as President we would have gotten exactly the same administrative action to shut this information down. The permanent government has been trying to keep these unfortunate things out of the public view since WWII. Go back and read some history on some of the things that the CIA and FBI used to do.
I’d put myself as pretty far to the left on the spectrum, but what irritates everyone to my right and my left is that I point out that their sussing of national security issues through a political lens is a pretty useless exercise. The military-industrial complex which Eisenhower warned about (but had collaborated with when he was President) is above and beyond politics. When people talk about how the US should and can get out of Afghanistan they use a logic that doesn’t apply. Most Americans want out of a war that no one can publicly justify. But the war goes on.
This story just reflects the continued erosion of the rest of the government and society when you have people running huge slabs of the government without having to answer to the people or the Constitution. Until people recognize this politics is just a debating society.
What would Truman have done with McChrystal? There. Now you know who’s running the government these days.
Chatterbox
@General Winfield Stuck:
I like GG, but sometimes he gets a bit jumped up over some things whilst ignoring other, far more important issues.
For instance: He wrote multiple columns bashing Obama’s getting a Nobel Peace Prize, despite it being explained repeatedly to him that NPPs are given out for works in progress — and that Obama’s work on nuclear disarmament and the Middle East (work praised by folks like Juan Cole) has already led to Russia’s and China’s working with the US to bring Iran (and now North Korea) to the bargaining table after years of freeze-outs.
While GG, who lives much if not most of the time in Brazil as his marriage is legal there, was focused on the NPP, there was another issue on which he could have had a legitimate reason to critique the Obama Administration: Namely, their reluctance to do more besides shake their fingers on occasion at the coup leaders in Honduras. (The prominence of Clinton friend Lanny Davis among the DC lobbyists for the coup leaders is of particular interest here.) Yet GG hasn’t said anywhere near as much on this as he has on Obama’s Nobel — Amy Goodman very briefly brought up the topic when interviewing him last week, then dropped it, to his expressed relief; that’s been the extent of his discussion of it. This despite the fact that ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya’s spent the past few weeks holed up in the Brazilian Embassy while the coup plotters tried to starve him out!
bystander
If, as Greenwald asserts, the most likely reason for a continuation of these policies is to protect the previous administration from accountability, it makes perfect sense why the hypocrites on the right aren’t making a fuss.
The right isn’t likely to interrupt a political “enemy” when that enemy is performing in such as way as to advance the right’s partisan goals and objectives. I’d argue that there is no hypocrisy evident in that choice. Obama is doing their work for them.
Rick Taylor
Disappointing, but not surprising. Obama ran on unity after all, not accountability.
Phoenix Woman
@The Moar You Know:
Biden’s actually been the voice of reason here. He’s pointing out what Juan Cole’s been pointing out: That most of the Taliban aren’t interested in exporting revolution, can’t stand their nominal allies Al-Qaeda, and could be convinced to work with the US and Pakistan to go after OBL in more of a police operation than a military one.
People keep forgetting that when the WTC was first targeted by terrorists, Clinton nabbed them in six months — and he did so using the FBI, not the military, to track down the perps.
slag
As much as I’m totally on board with being irate about this, Ambinder highlights AG Holder’s special comment:
I’ve been pissed off at this stuff for far too long not to be looking for some reason for hope. Paradoxically, as much as I hate the You-can’t-handle-the-truthers, I can’t help but hope that there’s much more here than meets the eye.
Svensker
@The Moar You Know:
You hit the nutshell on the nose, as my sister-in-law would say.
Obama gets no pass on this “because he still has Bush appointees” in the DOJ. Bull pucky. Since his cave in the Senate on the FISA bill, he has shown absolutely NO interest in pushback on the states secret crap. None. He is not doing Obama-fu — he likes it.
Doesn’t mean I think we would have been better off with McCain or Hillary. But saying that it’s just “pearl clutching” to disapprove of the President and the DOJ acting in this manner is just my-teamism. The Pres and the DOJ are wrong and they deserve to be called out.
General Winfield Stuck
@Svensker:
This crap is a constitutional clause that has been used since the beginning. The problem is it’s misuse grossly by the Bush admin. to cover up wrongdoing, at least likely wrongdoing/ See slag’s comment, that explains it well.
Eric S
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Knew I’d seen it before. Danke!
Reason60
Its even more depressing because the self-styled “Patriots” on the right are in complete accord with the Obama administration on this;
I wrote a diary entry on RedState called “Fear the government that fears a warrant”, making the conservative case for why we need strict accountability and limitations on the Security State; I made the case that Obama could in theory wiretap any phone, read any email, and rifle through any bank account without court oversight.
I had thought that this would be disturbing to the Tea Partiers; the image of the Kenyan Marxist wiretapping their phones might provoke a bit of discussion.
And yet I drew 3 comments, all of which supported the government.
There is a bizarre schizoprenhia on the Right- fevered nightmares of children singing songs to the Dear Leader, frothing accounts of FEMA camps….and yet, the actual, real possibility of Obama wiretapping citizens phones was dismissed as a needful and proper exercise of security.
It is as though the incantation of “Anti-terror” is a magic spell that causes the most ardent patriot to glaze over and nod in assent.
Even worse is the quiet aquiescence of the left- there should be outrage, but only mumbled confusion.
slag
@Reason60:
This statement is an absolute joke.
gnomedad
Another request for FIRE = ?
General Winfield Stuck
And as far as Obama’s yea vote on FISA, didn’t we hash that out for what it was. A pure political campaign vote by Obama which in no way would have made a difference to it’s passage.
That the onus for that should have rested with Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi for calling up a vote when they didn’t have to.
I sure as shit am glad I’m not Obama having to deal with too often purely reactionary supporters.
I give up. Can’t fight city hall and all that.
slag
@gnomedad: See @Just Some Fuckhead:
burnspbesq
@Ash Can:
This. Nothing I have read about this case so far says anything useful about the actual facts of the actual case. Instead, it’s just “Oh noes, Obama is acting just like Bush.”
I’m reserving judgment until I have time to read the pleadings.
Ella in NM
I hate to say it folks, but in this political climate, where the Republican’s only stated purpose is to destroy any potential successes by Obama, he would be a complete fool to do anything other than what he is doing.
Does anyone remember how we got rid of the Special Prosecutor Law after Clinton? Wouldn’t it have been useful under Bush?
My take is that the Obama administration is actually doing the correct things behind the scenes, but to take any public action to remove their privilege assertion would be an open door to Republican wingnuts trying to drag him through the mud for doing the very things they cheered Bush for doing.
Zach
If Dick Cheney were a more competent troll he’d be praising Obama from the rooftops every time something like this happened with the same vigor that he reserves for calling him a dithering traitor.
gnomedad
@slag:
Oops, eyeball search fail. Thanks.
General Winfield Stuck
@Ella in NM:
Viva NM!!
Ash Can
Especially after reading slag’s comment @ #42, I want to emphasize a point, and I’ll do it by asking The Stupid Question Of the Day:
How is Obama at fault here? What does Holder’s statement even have to do with him?
FearItself
I hope you’re not saying that candidate Obama’s claimed desire for openness and transparency in government were “just words.”
sparky
@Ash Can: you are going to lose some credibility if you make those kinds of arguments. Holder works for Obama, just as Gonzales worked for Bush. Holder is more competent but he serves at the pleasure of the Executive. pretending that these decisions are somehow independent is akin to pretending people in Congress don’t listen to health care lobbyists.
if you want to defend a crap decision, then defend it.
sparky
@FearItself: oh, no, not at all. they were pretty words, and that makes all the difference.
bystander
I presume that the Right is also aware of, and has no particular problem with the expansion of the national security apparatus.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231
sparky
@Ella in NM: i’m sorry, but that’s not the way the government is supposed* to work. “trust us” doesn’t work just because there is someone with a D after their name in the WH any more than it worked for the GOP when Bush was there.
*note: this offer invalid in event of empire.
Rick Taylor
While they may be hypocrites in other matters, I think the right wing is sincere in its admiration for those willing to use torture to extract information from alleged terrorists, and as what the administration is doing is clearly necessary to protect them from what they consider to be the insane left, they’ll begrudgingly give the administration credit for this, even as they criticize it for not continuing policies of torture.
Reason60
@Bystander: In my RedState post, I linked to those very articles.
And I disagree with the notion that we need to stand by Obama so as not to give comfort to the enemy; If you read the right wing blogs, they are already trumpeting Obama’s actions as “proof” that Bush was right. It is Obama and Holder who are giving comfort to the enemy.
And besides- this isn’t a sly game. This is about the most basic principle of democracies, that the government is accountable to the people, and the law.
If we aquiesce to this, if we accept that the government can break the law with impunity, then we have done something far worse than any political gamesmanship can ever fix.
wilfred
The (false) dialectic of American politics is how much are you willing to ignore in exchange for something you want.
For Medicare we got Vietnam; Johnson had to look tough, too. It’s a whore’s bargain and shouldn’t be accepted.
You wanted health care, get ready for the killing ground of Afghanistan. For everything you think you must have, whatever is they’re selling, the kill people.
Better to speak up now.
Ash Can
@sparky: No, I stand by my questions. Holder said this: “As part of our internal Department review, we specifically looked for a way to allow this case to proceed while carving out classified information, and ultimately concluded there was no way to do so.” I take “internal Department” to mean that the people looking into this matter were DoJ people and no one else (e.g., Obama himself). Additionally, I take “allow the case to proceed” to mean that the objective here was not to stop the case at all, but to arrange so that it could be prosecuted. Quite frankly, given Holder’s statement, I’m beginning to wonder whether Jake Tapper reached precisely the opposite conclusion than is appropriate in his analysis of what Holder and the DoJ did. If this is indeed the case, it wouldn’t be the first time that Tapper’s brilliant analysis has laid an egg.
I’d “defend the decision,” as you say, if someone can convince me that it was in fact Obama’s decision in the first place. Merely saying that Holder is to Obama what Gonzalez was to Bush doesn’t come anywhere near cutting it in that respect. You’ll have to do a hell of a lot more than that to convince me that Obama was even involved in either the investigation that Holder refers to or the decision that Holder says the investigation resulted in.
BillCinSD
@slag: isn’t the question though how material was classified in the first place, and what material was classified? It’s certainly true there is little that can be done if everything were classified regardless of whether or not it should have been. IIRC Bush had a very expansive classification scheme, which could be reviewed (and possibly is being reviewed) but that would probably require Obama to go against the national security apparatus that wrote the rules, and he hasn’t seemed to have much stomach for that
and not in reference to slag, how exactly does caving in to the right wing help anyone but the people to which one caved?
also, whether the states secret privilege is grounded in the Constitution is not fully settled law currently. If FISA was constitutional, than Congress has clearly overridden protecting unlawful surveillance as a state secret and this would imply states secrets come from a common law perspective and not a constitutional one. Further, in the Al-Haramin Islamic Foundation case, Judge Vaughn Walker made clear that in his opinion the 1953 Reynold’s case, which the Obama DoJ is using to support states secrets, “leaves little room for defendants’ (the DoJ) argument that the state secrets privilege is actually rooted in the Constitution.”
Maude
@Ash Can: Mrs. Can you are right. This isn’t what Bush did. Holder isn’t pulling a fast one. Obama has let cases go through the courts about the Bush Doctrine of denying rights to Detainees so that the court makes the decision. That way, any future executive is prevented from trying it again. I just don’t think that the reaction of Oh, Noes, is accurate. Also if Holder is looking into some actions of the previous administration, the info has to remain “private”.
sparky
@Ash Can:
ok, i think we will have to agree to disagree.
first off, state secrets is a total bar, so the notion that somehow the DOJ wanted the case to proceed is just wishful thinking. if it was the Bush DOJ i rather doubt you would give them the same benefit of the doubt.
second, and more important, i did not say Holder=Gonzales, except in one critical respect.: They both work for the President. this is a decision about the scope of the power of the Executive, not just a lawsuit; of course it was reviewed in the WH. and if you think that this decision was not approved by the WH then you are deluding yourself.
General Winfield Stuck
@BillCinSD:
Herein lies the problem.
The privilege was first officially recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1953 decision United States v. Reynolds (345 U.S. 1).
General Winfield Stuck
Here is the link to my post #70.
Ash Can
@BillCinSD: I like your analysis much better than Tapper’s, and also better than Greenwald’s, since he bases his on Tapper’s. It’s far easier to envision Obama and/or his WH people being overly circumspect (especially for the left’s taste) in reviewing Bush’s classification bullshit — presumably with the objective of cleaning it up, if what Obama has said in the past holds true. And, of course, while this legal parsing is taking place on the WH side, the DoJ is left to work with whatever it actually has in hand — in this case, the classification scheme it inherited from the Bush misadministration. And that’s not a pretty picture from any angle.
I recall how we were all lamenting over the past couple of years, as the extent of the politicization of the DoJ and the executive-branch overstep gradually emerged, that it would take much more than just a change in administration to clean up the legal clusterfuck left by Bush. I suspect we’re seeing that in action now.
sparky
@Maude: sorry, but you are conflating two different and unrelated issues in the assault on the legal system. the first, which you mention, concerns the status of the people being held by the US outside its territorial jurisdiction and the scope of the rights attached to that status. the second, which is at issue here, is the use of the “state secrets” privilege. it is a bar to a court’s consideration of a case. in other words, it is an express statement by the Executive that the legal system may not consider whether a case could even be made, much less whether the government is correct, telling the truth, or breaking the law. it is, at bottom, a statement that as the Bush people liked to say, when the President does it, it’s not illegal, though i suppose it’s really more accurate to say there is no law.
sparky
@Ash Can: um, your last sentence makes no sense. if Obama is continuing the policies of the Bush administration (which he indisputably is in this area), how exactly is that fixing anything, unless by fixing you mean cementing in place with a nice looking veneer?
slag
@BillCinSD:
All good points. I’m not one who disregards national security issues completely, but I also don’t want to have to put trust in these people if I can avoid it. As Rumsfeld annoyingly expounded: There are things we do not know we don’t know. And I don’t know if my lack of knowledge is being used against me in these kinds of situations. It’s frustrating as hell.
General Winfield Stuck
@sparky:
Yes it is. And once again, why not let the Supreme’s make the call on it. Some judges along the way have said no to the bar, some, mostly conservative ones have said yes to it many cases. For the Obama administration to just drop the case would open the door to bazillions of cases wanting to know everything the government does in providing national security. If you want that then say so. Obama didn’t create the conditions that prompted these lawsuits, but as presnit has some duty to not open the door on a flood of future ones where lawbreaking is alleged.
And how many times does it need to be stated that corrective legislation is pending on these matters.
General Winfield Stuck
And all that said, I will say I am sympathetic to peoples concerns and frustrations on getting this stuff out in the open, the lawbreaking side of it. So do I. But when it gets to Obama = Bush that is too far and not fair and I will say so. Free speech for everyone.
Tsulagi
@sparky: It’s strategery, now with Democratic molecules.
sparky
@General Winfield Stuck: “flood of future cases” is an assertion, and frankly, there’s no reason to think that there would be any such flood.
more importantly, it’s not a good rejoinder to this:
Article III, Sec. 2., U.S. Const.
i find no exception in the above for except those cases which the Administration doesn’t want considered.
sparky
@Tsulagi: darn it–you’re right! i forgot to put on my magic pony glasses! silly me.
General Winfield Stuck
@sparky:
Whatever dude.
But I do like the concept of law and order liberals. Has the smell of victory to it.
Phoenix Woman
@slag:
Yeah. I guess FDL, Digby, and half the DKos front-pagers don’t count or are “mumbling”. Bmaz will be surprised to hear this.
Phoenix Woman
@General Winfield Stuck:
Exactly. There is this thing called a legislative branch that I remember hearing about back in my childhood. They make the laws, the judicial branch interprets and enforces them.
I’d also like to add that I’d rather not see a Roberts court rule on any of this stuff, if at all possible.
General Winfield Stuck
@Phoenix Woman:
LOL, I have no solid argument to make on that point.
Enlightened Layperson
Trust me, any legislation modifying the state secrets rule will sound impressive on the surface but be carefully arranged to be gutless. The Obama Administration will carefully arrange it behind that scenes while pretending to support restrictions in public. That has been their MO to date.
If you want to get anywhere cutting back the national security apparatus, you have to convince the right wing that it can be used, not only against Scary Brown People, but against decent, honorable Klansmen and secessionists. And you need to get some right wing source to say so, because they will never believe us.
General Winfield Stuck
@Enlightened Layperson:
Well then goddamn it, lets impeach the sorry motherfucker and his vichy dem sidekick Joe Biden and swear in Presnit Palin. I cannot argue anymore with democrats, it’s just not worth it. Galt.
Ash Can
@sparky:
::headdesk::
First, “review” does not equal “change.” The executive policies in question don’t automatically disappear when one president’s term ends and another’s begins. It would be nice if that were the case, but it’s not. Bush’s shitty policies are by definition being continued, until they’re expressly repealed (and many of them already have been).
Second, the entire reason the politicization of the DoJ under Bush was frowned upon is that the DoJ — from the AG on down — is supposed to operate independently of the president’s agenda. The AG’s job is to advise the administration on legal issues — not the other way around — and, along with the district AGs, to represent the federal government in court. (The White House Counsel, on the other hand, is in political cahoots with the president, by design. That’s not an issue of propriety.)
Ever since you posted this I’ve been scouring Google on the issue of whether the president properly or legally has any control whatsoever over legal decisions of the AG or anyone else at the DoJ. I’m coming up absolutely empty. If I’m missing something, by all means, you or someone else should fill me in. In the meantime, while I recognize that it’s certainly possible that Obama is acting improperly here and exercising control over the DoJ’s findings, insisting that this is what happened here, with no supporting explanation other than that the president has hiring/firing power over the AG, sounds to me like little more than anti-government paranoia.
jim
Seems to me like Obama’s got one very good reason for doing a 180 on state secrets privilege. A reason scary not just for him but for many in both parties in DC.
Sibel Edmonds.
Her “secret” story falls into a both monotonous & terrifying historical pattern going back at least as far as Nixon & Reagan: the GOP becoming deeply enough interlinked to neofascist organized criminal cartels that “Mafiocracy” isn’t just hyperbole – it’s a truism. More than a few Democrats have been pulled into the same ugly hole by their own inertia – Waxman turned on a dime & screwed Edmonds over on his promise of public hearings, & the entire US mass-media screwed her over on her free offer (while risking prosecution) of one full & unedited hour of airtime to explain her situation, thus turning down a hot story that would dwarf Iran-Contra … if national newscasters are unanimously turning down airing a one-hour exclusive on a story that important, perhaps it’s because they’re scared for their lives.
Turkey buying influence to overturn a resolution condemning the Armenian genocide – or an FBI translator being fired for “personnel issues” (trans.: whistleblowing on another agent for ties to groups that the FBI was investigating, instead of taking four-hour lunch breaks) – is the tip of one hell of an ugly iceberg.
Was BushCo getting a tax-free cut of the profits from the same Afghan opium fields they’ were torching with flamethrowers (to drive up the price)? Were (/are) BOTH parties illegally peddling influence (& nuclear weapons-technology secrets) to sundry extremist regimes & retail terrorists while playing a bipartisan game of CYA by hiding & denying it?
Watergate kind of looks like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood beside that sort of political TNT.
Ash Can
@jim: I dunno; there’s something about that whole Sibel Edmonds story that doesn’t pass the sniff test. She, and she alone, is sitting on top of this H-bomb of info, and no journalist on the face of the earth, except for some British fellow with a questionable journalistic track record whose name escapes me, wants to so much as mention it? Cripes, even Orly Taitz comes off as more legit than that.
liberal
@jim:
While in some ways I like Waxman, I presume he’s an Israeli-firster, given his vote on the 2002 AUMF.
Don’t know too much about S. E., but I assume someone with Waxman’s views of the middle east might not be too thrilled about her.
liberal
@Ash Can:
Not the vibe I get, which is that the info is valid and damaging, but not the H-bomb some make it out to be. Maybe just a conventional-explosive bunker buster.
liberal
@Ash Can:
The null hypothesis, so to speak, given the history of multiple presidential administrations, plus the fact that Obama is hardly a radical, is that this is incorrect.
liberal
@Ash Can:
LOL! What you’re apparently willfully missing is that there’s a continuum, with “zero control” and “absolute control” merely being the endpoints.
In the middle is something called “substantial influence.”
sparky
@Ash Can:
ok, a couple of quick points in rebuttal.
we are not talking about a policy here–we are talking about a litigation strategy. that could be changed at any time. it’s easier to change that than to change the policy with respect to marijuana, for example, because this is a narrow issue as the privilege can only be asserted by the DOJ.
next, the AG serves at the pleasure of the President. i don’t mean to cast aspersions but perhaps you have forgotten the Saturday Night Massacre? .
finally, it’s the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that acts as advisor to the Executive, not the DOJ as a whole. OLC first gained national notoriety as the office that generated the “torture memos” under Jay Bybee.
i hope that at least some of the above will demonstrate that DOJ works hand in glove with the Administration. indeed, it is the lawyer for the Administration. (note that this is not the same thing as the President’s lawyer.) thus, arguing that DOJ is somehow independent of the Executive when it litigates a position involving the use of Executive power is rather far-fetched.
sparky
@Enlightened Layperson: didn’t Goldsmith say something to this effect? and remember the infamous Ashcroft hospital scene? those didn’t do the trick.
something like the truthiness equivalent of wrongness will have to surface for a change to come. that was the only good thing about Watergate–no room to parse anything.
of course, in an era when people defend torture, i suppose that’s a bit of wishful thinking too.
General Winfield Stuck
Did you miss the Clinton years dude? The only thing far fetched are your many assumptions of how things are, while using examples of how republicans do it. There is a special prosecutor working now as we sit, on the Bush Torture regime. Something Obama said he didn’t want.
And you are correct in saying that it is easy to change litigation strategy, that is why there is legislation pending to codify it. Unless your going to tell me that is just shit like the other hand wringer, If that is true, we all might as well just say fuck the whole goddamn thing cause there is no hope anyways.
Chris Johnson
I still say that is exactly the point, and that Obama is saying this-
“If I behave like it’s my job to give these powers up it’s the same as saying it’s my job to take them on. I cannot and will not give them up. They have to be taken from me.”
“If our government cannot or will not take these powers from me, I no longer recognize the political system I thought I understood, and had better start learning banana republic skills real quick because if I don’t, the next person in line surely will…”
I think that’s what’s going through his head. The point being, you can’t ask him to take command of rolling back unreasonable powers without conceding that they were his to roll back. I still think his point (politically unspeakable, but constitutional lawyers might agree) is that he needs to have that stuff stripped from him by court action, otherwise it is a ridiculous sham.
Wile E. Quixote
@Chris Johnson
I’m really getting sick and fucking tired of all of the stupid fucking idiots who blather about 11 dimensional chest or about what might be going through Obama’s head, etc, etc, etc. It’s bullshit and it’s every bit as nonsensical as John Hinderaker’s witless gushing about the supposed brilliance of George W. Bush. What Obama is supposedly thinking doesn’t matter. 11 dimensional chess doesn’t matter. What does matter is what he’s doing, and that’s basically continuing the policies of the Bush administration in this area, and getting a pass on it from the many of the same people who were outraged by Bush/Cheney’s assertions of power.
Sleeper
@Wile E. Quixote:
Hear, hear.
Oh, there I go, clutching those pearls again. It’s only been 10 months, full plate, he’s playing the long game, et cetera et cetera.
sparky
@General Winfield Stuck: i dunno. i think WRT to matters of the Empire, we may well be screwed. the best, perhaps, we can do is to try to contain or slow down the rot so that it doesn’t destroy the place too quickly.
as for other matters, what i AM going to say is that “gee something might be passed related to this so therefore we should just STFU about an assertion of unreviewable Executive power” is pretty piss-poor governance and basically boils down to “trust us.”
“trust us” is wrong no matter who is in power. period.
and since when has “legislation is pending” been the answer to an objection to government action NOW? by that logic, all Bush had to do was say, “oh, there’s legislation pending to fix everything i screwed up” and that would take care of it? seriously.
one final note: there’s no such thing as law and order, if we are really committed to law. what there is is law and disorder, because things get messy.
sparky
one other thing: if you think Holder is conducting a torture investigation, then you haven’t been paying attention.
(sorry for multiple posts; no edit avail.)
General Winfield Stuck
@sparky:
You are going to say, but it’s just for people who exceeded the Bybee memo, cause of course that’s what they said publicly. And I would say that’s for political cover, the investigation will go where the evidence leads, all of it. That is what prosecutors do, by ethics.
Now whether anyone ever gets prosecuted, or we just find out more about what happened, that’s a different question.
And I didn’t say you should just stfu, that is a strawman. I am saying things aren’t so black and white and simple as you paint them to be. And that you are just plain wrong to a large degree.
And the Law and Order quip was sarcastic humor, or attempted that. You prolly also ought to read less of Glenzilla. Just a suggestion.