Month: May 2013

Today Attorney General Eric Holder held a meeting — the second of three — with journalists from high-profile organizations including the ABC, The Wall Street Journal, and POLITICO, in order to discuss how to placate them during any potential, future Department of Justice wiretapping. Or something. It’s hard to know exactly what was discussed, since the meeting was off the record. This fact raised the hackles of  several outlets including the AP (well, yeah, guys), The New York Times, CNN, and the Huffington Post, all of whom decided to officially skip the whole thing if they weren’t free to report on what was said.

CNN and Huffpo said they would certainly go if the meeting were on the record. And NY Times executive editor Jill Abramson said, “It isn’t appropriate for us to attend an off-the-record meeting with the attorney general.” Huffington Post Washington bureau chief, Ryan Grim added, “A conversation specifically about the freedom of the press should be an open one. We have a responsibility not to betray that.” Grim must not be a fan of the Obama administration’s long series of ironic moves designed to make their puffery about “openness” more and more hilarious. (One of the best was Obama accepting an award for transparency in a private meeting….)

Now ABC can dish on a few of the things that they are allowed to discuss:

Both ABC and Thompson Reuters representatives expressed deep concern over recent probes of the Associated Press and a Fox News reporter that occurred as the department investigated potential leaks of classified information.

Both ABC and Reuters expressed the need for change in the 1972 Department of Justice guidelines for issuing subpoenas to and investigating members of the news media.

“The meeting was productive. There was a frank discussion of the challenges facing both the government and the news media in protecting the public’s right to the free flow of information,” ABC’s [Washington bureau chief Robin] Sproul said afterward. “A good result would be modified Department of Justice guidelines that set a higher bar for when and under what conditions the government can subpoena journalists.”

I’m very happy for ABC that it was a productive meeting (POLITICO seemed a little less jazzed). But a terrific way to enhance “the public’s right to the free flow of information” might be for the public to be able to know exactly what was said in a meeting with a high-ranking official which included discussions with enormous implications for the freedom of the press in this country.

Also, much of the media is disinterested in protecting “unofficial” journalists, but the rules have changed in this here internet age — it’s not just the AP who deserves to have their phone records untapped. Arguably it’s worse with them, because of the chilling effect on investigative reporting. But what about the chilling effect on political dissent that might come from the allegation that every phone call in the US is being recorded? And much has been said about the Obama administration’s alarming war on whistleblowers, which is more or less another arm of its war on the press (only the press is a lot less interested in the former) but again — if the AP wiretapping is the Rubicon on acceptability, that’s great the press has finally had enough. But that line was there and ignored since, oh, let’s say the moment Candidate Obama voted for telecom immunity for companies that helped the Bush administration in their wiretapping. In short, we’ll see how long the press outrage lasts.

And it’s almost understandable that the media who declined to boycott would tell themselves that some information is better than none, but that’s how we got the media we have. It would have sent a much stronger message to Holder about his Department’s unacceptable behavior, if everyone had just stayed at home.

The unprovoked massacre of 16 Afghan civilians by U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales drew shock and horror from people all over the world when it happened last year.

And it should have. An American soldier, armed to the teeth, committed one of the most heinous atrocities of the war, even going so far as to stick a gun in the mouth of an infant baby and warning its mother to be quiet before ultimately pulling the trigger.

In discussing the long-term effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as Antiwar.com has done since the day each of them began, one common theme that the American public has been incredibly resistant to grasping is that we have created more enemies than we ever eliminated, we’ve fueled the extremism our violence was supposedly intended to snuff out.

We’ve seen such an uninterrupted stream of evidence in support of this that it is almost difficult to pick which ones to illustrate the point. But interviews with family relatives of those Bales murdered have given us another example:

“For this one thing, we would kill 100 American soldiers,” vowed Mohammed Wazir, who had 11 family members killed that night, including his mother and 2-year-old daughter.

“A prison sentence doesn’t mean anything,” said Said Jan, whose wife and three other relatives died. “I know we have no power now. But I will become stronger, and if he does not hang, I will have my revenge.”

The slaughter Bales allegedly committed is categorized by Americans as very unique. After all, it’s not every day that a drunk, maniacal U.S. soldier puts a bullet in the head of an entire family of helpless civilians.

But it’s been far more commonplace than most people think. The war crime committed during a house raid in Iraq in 2006, wherein U.S. soldiers summarily executed one man, four women, two children, and three infants might have been kept secret forever if Bradley Manning had not leaked hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

This particular State Department cable excerpts a letter written by Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, addressed to then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. American troops approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, a farmer living in central Iraq, to conduct a house raid in search of insurgents in March of 2006.

“It would appear that when the MNF [Multinational Forces] approached the house,” Alston wrote, “shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued” and then U.S. “troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them.”

This slaughter and the one committed by Robert Bales are intimate, so they are memorable – and, yes, rare as compared with how most Afghans and Iraqis have been killed in the midst of U.S. violence. But the effect is the same.

Far less intimate, as we all know, are drones. It’s hard to get less intimate than that. But what is their effect?

After a September 2012 drone strike in Yemen that killed 13 civilians, a local Yemeni activist told CNN, “I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined the lines of al-Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake. This part of Yemen takes revenge very seriously.”

Similarly, as the Yemeni youth activist Ibrahim Mothana recently wrote in The New York Times, “Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology but rather by a sense of revenge and despair.”

And amid relentless rhetoric from the Bush administration and browbeating propaganda in the news media about how we were fighting the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here, the war in Iraq was promoting jihadism and feelings of vengeance throughout the Muslim world. The 2006 National Intelligence Estimate on Trends in Global Terrorism said that the Iraq war was “breeding deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”

But the vast majority of Americans have been unable to understand this simple concept – that unleashing constant brutality, violence, and domination on millions of people throughout the Middle East for decades upon decades tends to generate hatred and plots of vengeance. They’re unable to perform the simple task of putting themselves in the position of someone else: If a foreign soldier, as part of a foreign occupation, walked into the home of John Smith on Main Street in Springfield, USA and slaughtered his entire family in cold blood, is it so hard to believe that John would join the insurgency or even plot his revenge on the soil of his occupier?

Yet ongoing U.S. violence in the Middle East continues to be framed as the antidote to terrorism, as opposed to the seed. And virtually all the perpetrators get off scott free.

It’s always amusing when one hears talk about The Washington Post being part of the liberal mainstream media conspiracy. The 136-year-old newspaper, known for its breaking of “Watergate” and subsequent downfall of President Richard N. Nixon in the 1970’s, is hardly “liberal,” nor “progressive” today, but straight down-the-middle establishment, and its editorial page baldly hawkish. There are zillions of examples, and today’s endorsement of new presidential powers to execute an ongoing global war on terror, is no exception.

In today’s lead editorial, the paper came out in favor of a Lawfare.com-generated proposal to turn the Authorized Use of Military Force (AUMF) into an a la carte kill list hand-picked by the Executive Branch, “in consultation” with congress. Just think of the State Department’s list of state sponsored terrorists, only instead of sanctions and frozen assets, members of the new AUMF fraternity would be “targeted for termination,” the predator drones and U.S special forces taking the place of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg assassin, anywhere they operate, across the globe. As I wrote in a recent Antiwar.com piece:

Here is what the current State Department list of designated terrorist organizations looks like today. The first thing that comes to mind when suggesting a similar template for the use of military force is the politics, which would be inevitable when you are inviting various levels of bureaucracy and congress to participate in designating targets. Take the recent State Department de-listing of the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), which came after an audacious public relations blitz that involved millions in shadowy money, A-list campaigners and spokespersons, and a guerilla media war. Is this the kind of theater we are to expect as new terror groups cross the radar of competing Washington interests, or will groups pop on and off with little notice (until of course, their “associates” are flattened one day by a hellfire missile from the sky)?

As John Glaser pointed out in an earlier post, the Lawfare gang is a collection of Bush-era types who are enjoying a bit of popularity with hawks on the Hill, like Sens. John McCain and Carl Levin, who also want to “update” the AUMF. Luckily, there are cooler heads at Lawfare.com who like the idea of letting the AUMF expire, and think the President’s inherent powers under Article II are enough to wage war on new enemies as they come along. That seemed to be President Obama’s gist (but with him we never know) when he suggested the AUMF would ultimately be repealed and that he “will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further.”

The Post, on the other hand, is not happy. “…there’s a danger that dropping the AUMF — as opposed to tailoring it to the new conditions Mr. Obama described — will result in less restraint on presidential power, not more,” the paper argued, relying on a brief by Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith, who said that using Article II to wage the war on terror “would be an unprecedented expansion of [presidential] authority.”

Sounds to me that it would be an exploitation of his powers rather than an expansion, since he already has the authority. Plus, other legal scholars argue that if Article II were his only authority for waging war, the Executive would be more wary of abusing it. From Georgetown’s Rosa Brooks:

With or without the 2001 AUMF, no one seriously doubts that the president has inherent constitutional authority (and international law authority) to use force when necessary to prevent imminent and grave harm to the United States. But the key concepts there are “necessary,” “imminent,” and “grave,” which means that unilateral, non-congressionally authorized uses of force should be reserved for rare and unusual circumstances — as indeed they have been, for most of U.S. history…

That doesn’t seem enough for The Post, which actually argues that despite it’s own support for closing the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, a repeal of the AUMF might  “complicate the future military detention of terror suspects — such as the Obama administration’s holding of a Somali militant on a U.S. warship prior to his transfer to the civilian justice system [what? No more torturing in international waters?]

“While Mr. Obama insists that he prefers capturing to killing terror suspects, there have been few such arrests on his watch,” the paper adds. “A modifed military detention system with appropriate checks and balances could make them more possible.”

Like the Lawfare gang, The Post’s arguments for a new AUMF all depend on some transparent, effective, honest government system that does not exist. They’ve had 11 years to engage the levers of “checks and balances,” to “modify” methods and policies that don’t work. Time to face reality.

But it sounds, unlike much of America outside the Beltway Bubble, The Post is loathe to let the GWOT go, and has taken up the pretzel-logical torch of McCain and Levin and others on the Hill.  They are trying to say  that expiring the AUMF would be an “expansion” of powers, while creating a new one would amount to a “restriction” or “limitation” on runaway presidential authority. Good lord.

The truly scary thing is that the paper is an establishment canary that doesn’t sing unless it’s got some sense of back-up among the power elite in Washington. This will be an interesting debate to follow, for sure.

Democrat/Republican    noun
1: one who selectively applies stated values

From the moment Barack Obama was elected, he resolved to immunize Bush officials from all legal retribution and public accountability for the crimes they committed. As it has become almost trite to point out, he never lived up to the political rhetoric that got him elected.

But Obama did not stop at simply protecting Bush criminals from penalty. He went a step further by appointing several Bush-era officials intimately involved in the war crimes, torture, and warrantless surveillance to his own administration. This happened most prominently when Obama nominated John Brennan to White House counter-terrorism adviser and then CIA chief.

And it’s happening again: Obama has picked James Comey, who signed off on the Bush administration’s secret warrantless surveillance program, to be the next director of the FBI.

Glenn Greenwald, in his usual fashion, nails it:

Comey will run the FBI alongside Obama’s chief of the CIA, John Brennan, who spent the Bush years advocating multiple torture techniques and rendition. The Agent of Change reaches deep into the bowels of the Bush National Security State and empowers them to run two of the most powerful agencies. Then again, the Bush NSA program is hardly controversial in the Age of Obama: it was Obama who first voted to immunize the telecoms from all legal liability for their illegal participation in that program, then the Obama DOJ succeeded in having all lawsuits over that program dismissed on secrecy and immunity grounds, and then Obama himself succeeded in first enacting and then renewing the law that legalized most aspects of that Bush NSA eavesdropping program.

What was once deemed radical is now normal. Bush officials who formally authorized programs once depicted by progressives as radical and criminal are now heralded by those same progressives as Champions of the Constitution. The politician elected on a pledge of Change and Restoration of Our Values now routinely empowers exactly those Washington officials who championed the policies against which he railed.

Mind you, this isn’t a matter of just appointing officials with a checkered past. Obama has embraced the Bush administration’s approach to warrantless surveillance of Americans’ communications.

In December of last year, Obama renewed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which essentially attempted to legalize what several federal judges concluded was an illegal Bush program of warrantless surveillance.

Justice Department documents released in September in litigation brought by the ACLU showed “that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.”

This is what surveillance of Americans’ international communications looks like under Obama:

The way this charade is kept going is that the Obama administration has blocked any judicial scrutiny by stopping lawsuits in their tracks, insisting any legal challenges to the program threaten national security.

This kind of brazen imperiousness generated howls from the left when they occurred under Bush. Now, everybody just nods.

This is the central feature of our political system: “crimes and abuse committed by politicians on my team are acceptable and even praiseworthy, but those same acts committed by the opposing team are horrific atrocities.” We’re seeing this now on the right as well, as Republicans and prominent Fox News pundits wail about the rampant Obama administration abuse in several scandals including the Benghazi consulate attack, snooping on Associated Press journalists, pursuing criminal charges against a reporter for the offense of performing journalism, and IRS scrutiny of certain political groups.

There isn’t a doubt in my mind that if Benghazi happened under the Bush administration, Republicans would have defended the honor, honesty, and handling of the whole incident, and probably even denounced Democrats pushing for accountability as anti-American hinderers of the war on terrorism.

And how about the Obama administration’s crack down on all kinds of national security reporting? In trying to enforce its own secrecy, the Obama DOJ has spied on and pursued dozens of AP journalists and at least one Fox News reporter for publishing stories on national security (in the former case, the White House was planning on publishing the information anyway, and in the latter, nothing secret or unknown was included in the report).

But when the Bush administration tried to pursue James Risen of The New York Times because he reported on the Bush surveillance program, where were Republicans crying foul? Nowhere, in fact, they joined the Bush administration in condemning Risen’s First Amendment rights to practice journalism.

Governments are able to break the law with impunity in part because they have power. Power tends to deliver abuse and corruption. But just as important, the rank partisanship in America’s two-party system reinforces the bipartisan commitment to official criminality. It is always hailed as democracy: if you support and vote for politicians on at least one of the two available teams, you are a stand up citizen who cares for your country; if you condemn both parties equally, you are a cynical hack or extremist.

If anywhere close to a majority of Americans made a commitment to political principles instead of political parties, the prerogative of elected politicians to break the law because their partisans will always defend them would dissolve pretty quickly.

Randolph Bourne entered this world, on this day 122 years ago, the victim of a mishap caused by someone who didn’t know how to use forceps: his face was badly deformed for life. Stacking the deck against him even higher, at age 8 he came down with tuberculosis, one result of which was a hunched back.

Yet he went on to become one of the foremost writers of his day, the epitome of what today would be considered a very old-fashioned variety of American liberalism that was at once libertarian in its impulses and cosmopolitan in its style. He famously took on the evil John Dewey, his former professor, when that overrated philosopher of “pragmatism” took the pragmatic way out and cheered on World War I – that most unforgivably destructive and unnecessary war. In “War and the Intellectuals,” he described a scene that should be readily familiar to those of us who opposed the Iraq war, and the very idea of a generations-long “war on terrorism,” from the very beginning:

“To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the crisis in which America found herself. Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of the world’s people. And the intellectuals are not content with confirming our belligerent posture. They are now complacently asserting that it was they who effectively willed it, against the hesitation and dim perceptions of the American democratic masses. A war made deliberately by the intellectuals! A calm moral verdict, arrived at after a penetrating study of inexorable facts! Sluggish masses, too remote from the world-conflict to be stirred, too lacking in intellect to perceive their danger! An alert intellectual class, saving the people in spite of themselves, biding their time with Fabian strategy until the nation could be moved into war without serious resistance! An intellectual class, gently guiding a nation through sheer force of ideas into what the other nations entered only through predatory craft or popular hysteria or militarist madness! A war free from any taint of self-seeking, a war that will secure the triumph of democracy and internationalize the world! This is the picture which the more self-conscious intellectuals have formed of themselves, and which they are slowly impressing upon a population which is being led no man knows whither by an indubitably intellectualized President.”

Except for the part about the “intellectualized President,” this perfectly describes the run up to the Iraq war, and the triumphalism of the neocons as they wrote speeches for the Dumbest President, Ever touting the imminence of a US-led “global democratic revolution.” If Hell is an endlessly repeated loop, then we’ve been living in it since 1917.

We named our sponsoring organization, the Randolph Bourne Institute, after him because of his famous utterance: “War is the health of the State.” It is the measure of how far authentic American liberalism has fallen that this phrase, spoken or written in a modern context, means something quite different from what Bourne was saying. To the modern “liberal,” the State is a Good Thing, it’s our great friend, and not to be feared but warmly embraced. However, for Bourne and his fellow liberals at the turn of the last century, there was no deadlier embrace. When he wrote that “war is the health of the State” he meant that in wartime government would grow into an overweening tyrant, revealing its true and essential nature as an engine of pure coercion.

He came deformed into this world, and spent his life crusading to correct the social and political deformations brought on by all States everywhere in their constant lust for expansion and plunder. No, he wasn’t a libertarian: he was, instead, a very brave and principled public intellectual, who wasn’t afraid to swim against the tide.

Seletected writings of Randolph Bourne

Randolph Bourne’s America (at Colombia University)

Read Jeff Riggenbach’s biography of Bourne