There is one strong similarity between Watergate and the slime oozing out of the Obama White House that can’t be ignored.
Watergate created an interesting new cottage industry–the journalist polemic. I’ve never really been able to figure out why this happened exactly, although I blame it, in a large extent, to journalistic frustration with President Johnson over Vietnam. At some point, as Watergate began to break, and it became evident that the news media was on the enemies list, journalists began writing outstanding works of reportage, telling stories that could not be condensed to short spurts of newsprint. Washington insiders began to respond to these works of reportage, and a tidal wave of books deluged the public with sufficient information to really give the American people the ability to understand what Nixon was doing. I’ve also long since concluded that what brought down Nixon wasn’t the third rate burglary, but rather the total lack of credibility held by Nixon, which made two and a half more years of governance nearly impossible. I’ve been watching this trend for thirty years by weighing the books on my book shelf. Watergate takes up shelf after shelf. Iran/Contra takes up shelf after shelf. Whitewater does not. And H.W. and Carter and Ford together comprise about four inches of paper.
But something has happened in the past six months–nearly 40 review copies have landed on my desk, mostly written by center/left journalists and academics, (hard-core Obama territory) which has begun to peel back a very sordid picture of the Obama Administration. Dirty Wars is one example, but I’ve got three review copies that have just arrived that detail the federalization of local police, known as the warrior cop phenomenon, and its not pretty. I’m not sure why this material is pouring out now, other than to say that I get a sense that media now seems to believe that is has been lied to by Obama for the past five years. In Dirty Wars, there is a story of how Obama interfered in the domestic affairs of Yemen, pressuring the government of Yemen to reverse the pardon of a journalist whose only crime was to report that one of Obama’s missile strikes had killed more than 40 Yemeni civilians. There seems to be a sense amongst journalists now that if the whole world is a battlefield and if Obama can kill Americans overseas, and if Obama is willing to lean on an allied nation to jail journalists for telling the truth, then no journalist in America is safe either. And then came the AP and Fox News scandals, the IRS scandal, the Presidential Bling scandal, and a sense that this president is not only untrustworthy and dishonest, but downright dangerous. At the rate we’re going, the books about Obama’s conduct are going to pass Watergate by early next year in terms of volume. Then we’ll see the counter-books, and maybe some tell-all books etc etc etc.
I’m not sure who Obama thought he was lying to yesterday in his big speech. The man has committed war crimes. That is a fact that absolutely cannot be disputed. Obama is a war criminal who has been given a Noble Peace Prize. And he thinks that the answer to his past war crimes is to replace the right front tire on the car. I’m sensing that both the American people and the American media are really tiring of the War on Terror, and I don’t think that they are happy with the excesses that Obama demonstrated. I don’t think people wanted to hear more lies from Obama yesterday. I don’t think they wanted to hear that Obama, the war criminal, didn’t know what was going on in his administration, or that he is going to tweak what he does in the future. You don’t erase the past by mild reform. If Hitler bought a puppy, it doesn’t erase the monstrous acts of his past.
In this way, Obama is worse than Nixon. Maybe Nixon engaged in war crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia, maybe not. But Obama has engaged in war crimes and treaty violations in more than 20 countries, and he has directly ordered the murder of more than 2000 people and at least four American citizens. For him to get up and essentially tell the people that he is not a crook is not enough. He needs to resign, or he needs to be impeached and removed from office. The Noble Committee should retract his award. And Obama’s next flight on Air Force One should be to the Hague to face justice for his crimes.
President Obama addressed many important issues in his speech Thursday (transcript here), some of which I’m writing about for Sunday’s column. The speech also included some remarkable political theater involving Obama and a protester in the audience. If anyone finds the clip and can link to it, you should check it out.
For now, I just want to pass on Obama’s direct response to the debate over the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was the subject of the Senate Armed Services Committee discussion last week and my post the other day:
The AUMF is now nearly 12 years old. The Afghan war is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states.
So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate. And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further. Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.
There are many parts of our criminal justice system that are cruel and counter-productive. A couple of weeks ago, I inveighed against one small stupid injustice: treating 17-year-olds as adults in Massachusetts’ courts and throwing them into adult prisons.
Teens imprisoned with adults are far more likely to be raped, far more likely to commit more serious crimes and return to prison, far less likely to get an education and become law-abiding citizens than those who pay for their crimes through the juvenile justice system. It’s really a no-brainer, but the Mass. Legislature has been unwilling to do anything about it. Last session Rep. Kay Khan, D-Newton, got a bill fixing it through the Judiciary Committee, but it died in House Ways & Means, which deemed it too expensive.
Wednesday the bill finally came up for a vote in the House – and passed unanimously.
What changed? Well, for one thing, the feds stepped in. In 2003, a diverse coalition of evangelical and civil liberties groups convinced Congress to enact the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush. Under that act, studies were mandated that tallied the epidemic of sexual assaults behind bars. Regulations were promulgated by the Department of Justice, one of which requires prisoners under 18 be physically separated at all times from adult prisoners. Massachusetts must comply with that rule by August 2013 or face the loss of federal grant funding. Compliance means building new wings and segregated facilities for the 17-year-olds, which would likely be more expensive than putting them into the juvenile system.
Money talks, and the Speaker listens.
On Rob’s recommendation, I’ve started reading Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill, which tells the story of how the U.S. created a largely secret, largely unaccountable force capable of executing targeted assassinations and projecting lethal force in any country around the world.
As it happens, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing last week at which top Pentagon officials reasserted the premise underlying this historic expansion of executive power and military prerogative. At issue is the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, passed on Sept. 14, 2001. The question was whether the resolution, which authorized force against “those who planned, authorized, committed or aided” the Sept. 11 attacks, should be revised to extend to a new generation of terrorists without a clear connection to 9/11.
John McCain said he wanted to expand the AUMF to cover the “dramatically changed landscape that we have in this war on Muslim extremism and Al Qaeda and others.” Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., said he thought the AUMF was sufficient authorization for anything the military wanted to do. Lindsey Graham spent his questions seeking assurance that the Pentagon agreed with him. Excerpts from a transcript of the hearing:
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Do you agree with me, the war against radical Islam, or terror, whatever description you like to provide, will go on after the second term of President Obama?
MICHAEL SHEEHAN (Asst. Sec. of Defense): Yes, sir. I think it’s at least 10 to 20 years.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: So, from your point of view, you have all of the authorization and legal authorities necessary to conduct a drone strike against terrorist organizations in Yemen without changing the AUMF.
MICHAEL SHEEHAN: Yes, sir, I do believe that.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: OK. Could we send military members into Yemen to strike against one of these organizations? Does the president have that authority to put boots on the ground in Yemen?
ROBERT TAYLOR (Acting general counsel, DoD): Under domestic authority, he would have that authority.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: I hope that Congress is OK with that. I’m OK with that. Does he have authority to put boots on the ground in the Congo?
MICHAEL SHEEHAN: Yes, sir, he does.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Would you agree with me the battlefield is wherever the enemy chooses to make it?
MICHAEL SHEEHAN: Yes, sir, from Boston to the FATA [the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan].
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: I couldn’t agree with you more. We’re in a-do you agree with that, General?
BRIG. GEN. RICHARD GROSS: Yes, sir. I agree that the enemy decides where the battlefield is.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: And it could be anyplace on the planet, and we have to be aware and able to act. And do you have the ability to act, and are you aware of the threats?
MICHAEL SHEEHAN: Yes, sir. We do have the ability to react, and we are tracking threats globally.
So the enemy “decides where the battlefield is,” but who decides who the enemy is? The AUMF defines the targets as organizations behind the attacks of 9/11, or those who harbor them. Statements given to the committee expand that group to include al-Qaida’s “co-belligerents” and “associated forces.”
The next senator called to question the panel was Angus King, I-Me., who I’ve liked since he was governor of Maine:
SEN. ANGUS KING: Gentlemen, I’ve only been here five months, but this is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today. The Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, clearly says that the Congress has the power to declare war. This-this authorization, the AUMF, is very limited. And you keep using the term “associated forces.” You use it 13 times in your statement. That is not in the AUMF. And you said at one point, “It suits us very well.” I assume it does suit you very well, because you’re reading it to cover everything and anything. And then you said, at another point, “So, even if the AUMF doesn’t apply, the general law of war applies, and we can take these actions.” So, my question is: How do you possibly square this with the requirement of the Constitution that the Congress has the power to declare war?
King didn’t get much of an answer, in my reading, at least. But the discussion raises a question I hope to ask Ed Markey and Gabriel Gomez, among others: How does the “war on terror” end? The answer that now springs to mind: When Congress repeals the AUMF.
Gene Robinson has a strong piece today about the accelerating trend toward investigating and prosecuting journalists under the 1917 espionage act. That’s the law under which the AP phone records were subpoenaed and under which Fox News reporter James Rosen was secretly targeted.
The espionage act isn’t new, of course. It was used to prosecute the Rosenbergs in 1950 and Daniel Ellsburg under Nixon. Mostly it has been used to prosecute real spies – i.e. government employees who give classified material to foreign intelligence services. But it has also been used to go after government employees who have given classified material to journalists. The idea of using it to prosecute journalists and news organizations that publish classified material goes at least as far back as Nixon. CIA director Bill Casey threatened to charge five news organizations under the act in 1986. Under Obama, the act has been used six times – including against Wikileaks source Bradley Manning – and counting.
As Robinson writes:
Prosecutors examined Rosen’s phone records, read his emails and, using the electronic record left by his security badge, even tracked when he entered and left the State Department building. How did officials justify such snooping? By asserting in an FBI affidavit, according to the Post, that Rosen broke the law “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.”
In other words, since there is no law that makes publishing this classified information illegal, the Justice Department claims that obtaining the information was a violation of the Espionage Act.
Rosen has not been charged. Every investigative reporter, however, has been put on notice.
What can be done about this, besides partisan beating up on the Obama administration now and leaving the same dangerous tool in the hands of the next administration which, like all its predecessors, will likely be intent on nailing all involved in making embarrassing classified information public? I’d like to see the law clarified to apply only to those entrusted with keeping classified information secret, not journalists they feed it to.
We also need to have a much broader, more robust debate over privacy rights. I’m worried about the abuse of facial-recognition technology and post-Marathon bombing calls for the installation of more video cameras in public places. But a pretty chilling 60 Minutes piece aired on Sunday showing that the threat to privacy is greater from privately-owned cameras than government-owned ones.
Meanwhile, how about this for a proposed law: “Phone records, email and electronic communications of all kinds shall be considered the property of the individual parties to the communication, not the telecommunications providers. No telecommunications provider shall be permitted to share that data without the expressed consent of the parties that own it.”
Knowing our fearless leader, Obama will view the chance for the photo op of wallowing through the blood of more children in a public elementary school to be a great way to distract people from the corruption oozing out of his regime. Our thoughts and prayers are with you, he’ll thunder in Oklahoma, as he proceeds to blame Republicans for opposing tornado control.
Of course, the tragedy in Oklahoma has been both foreseeable and expected for nearly twenty years, ever since the federal No Child Left Behind law required diverting all school money into achieving pointless test scores as opposed to providing for the regional facilities-needs that used to include storm shelters. I got an earful of this when I was down in Texas last March, in which it was pointed out that schools and housing in the Plains states now lack adequate storm shelters due to the way that federal funding affects both school and housing construction. As I was also told last March, in the old days, school districts used to send kids home during tornado watches when shelters were lacking–but now know. If you send kids home from school, you still need to meet your federal attendance requirements, meaning that you have to push school into the summer months, when the thermometer soars to 110, and air conditioning becomes too expensive. Better to leave your kids as sitting ducks in poorly built schools, cause the odds of a direct hit are pretty low, so you have to break some eggs to make the MCAS omelet. In the old days, the schools would get around this by building “bomb shelters,” but the fed put an end to that practice too.
Guns don’t kill kids. People kill kids. Obama kills kids. Drones kill kids. Bad federal policies kill kids. But that won’t be his message when Obama fires up Air Force One for yet another wasted junket to be our comforter in chief.
My column today has my thoughts about Obama’s alleged “scandal trifecta” as of Friday morning, when I wrote it. My bottom line was “not so fast.” Big time scandals in presidential second terms grow into significance over a period of months, not days — and some fall apart and are quickly forgotten when the emerging facts don’t match up with either side’s highest hope or darkest fears. So we’ll see.
As I mentioned in an earlier comment,
I find it ironic that two post-Watergate laws, intended to protect the IRS and the DoJ from the kind of political interference wielded by Nixon, who used both agencies to go after his enemies, may insulate Obama from accountability. One report I saw said everyone involved in this business, with one single exception, was under Civil Service – an earlier reform designed to keep politics out of the IRS.
It’s possible, as most people assume, that there’s a phone call or e-mail tying these actions to Obama’s inner circle. Produce it and you have a case. Interview people. Ask them what happened; who made decisions, who informed whom. The investigation so far, waged by the IRS Inspector General, makes it look like a bureaucratic snafu. Today’s NYT reporting makes it sound like an episode out of “The Office”:
Guess it’s a vain hope to think the question of what happened with the IRS will be answered with the facts of what happened with the IRS.
Climate change skeptics often shrug off the pesky facts scientists present by pointing to the big, over-simplified picture. Climate is always changing, they say. Nature goes through cycles.
True enough, but there’s nothing all-natural about the cycle in this chart. It shows the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. For the last 800,000 years, it has oscillated between 180 and 250-280 parts per million.
Then came the industrial revolution. Since then, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by 41 percent. And on May 9, the tracking station at Mauna Loa that has been measuring fresh air just off the Pacific Ocean for more than 50 years, registered its first daily average CO2 concentration over 400 ppm.
Carbon dioxide, though still a small percentage of the atmosphere, is the most important of the heat-trapping greenhouse gases. To think that humans could make such a dramatic change in the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere without consequences is an act of ignorance and arrogance.
The last time CO2 levels were this high, scientists say, was 3 million years ago, during the Pliocene Epoch. The climate was far warmer then, the polar ice caps far smaller, and sea levels as much as 60 to 80 feet higher. Of course there were no people then, living in highly developed seacoast cities, and the wooly mammoths presumably had an easier time moving inland.
The carbon dioxide milestone “feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” Columbia scientist Maureen E. Raymo told The New York Times. As I note in a Sunday editorial, there are lots of things happening more important than the scandals obsessing the Washington press corps and the political commentariat, none of them more significant than the milestone recorded at Mauna Loa.
I’ve been thinking about Rick’s response to the notion that our first black president has gleefully presided over the lynching of a criminal suspect. What is Rick’s response? 99% like this! As if Facebook overrides the Constitution. And then I point out that it was unlikely that the federal government could have convicted bin Laden in a fair trial, and Rick responds that this is ok, because bin Laden was a dirt bag.
So, here’s an idea as to how Obama can balance the budget, wipe out the deficit, pay for his social welfare program, conduct the war on terror and have fun all at the same time.
Let’s have a reality show, called Who Wants to be an Executioner? Everyone will be able to nominate their favorite criminal dirtbag, and pay a $100 filing fee. The White House will personally select the top 20. Over the course of the season, the top 20 will go through a series of dirt bag challenges, with the public being able to vote via Facebook who will be knocked off. At the end of the show, the remaining dirt bag will be executed by a drone strike. One lucky citizen will get to fire the missile! Think of the fee collection! Think of the ad revenues! Think of all the good things that everyone will feel as Obama, as host, gets a chance to personally torture dirt bags and deny them their rights! 99% like this.
Only drawback for Obama? The first nominee for killer dirt bag beyond the reach of the law, for whom a ton of people would probably gladly pay the fee? Barry himself. But at least he’d go out knowing Obamatax was funded.
I’m pretty thick-skinned, but the book Dirty Wars bothered me a lot. Has kept me up nights. I decided to read it again to see if it shocked me a second time. In some ways, its worse the second time through, because I had expected that some of my reaction to the first pass at the book would mitigate the second reading. Not the case. I’m going to say this again–if you haven’t gone out to get the book and read it since I mentioned it a few weeks ago, you really need to do this.
What I find truly shocking in the book is that the war crimes that both Bush and Obama have committed in our names doesn’t result in the kind of outrage it should. In fact, I’ve been shocked by how numb Obama supporters have become to what he is doing, and how they so glibly defend things that ten years ago outraged them. By way of example, Obama used a special ops force to murder bin Laden, a criminal suspect. Curiously, its become increasingly clear that the United States probably lacked the kind of evidence that would have proven bin Laden’s guilt for 9/11 beyond a reasonable doubt. Increasingly, it is apparent that bin Laden was really good at taking credit for things as the face of al Qaeada, but its not clear how much he knew and when he knew it. So I comment on this blog that his killing was the murder of a criminal suspect, and that the crime was likely political to assuage the political ambitions of Obama. Rick tells me that 99% of Americans disagree about that. Oh? Since when is a lynching ok, if 99% of the populace decide that the murder is ok? Now we want to have civil rights protected by majority fiat. We have a black president, lynching a criminal suspect, and apparently targeting people because of the color of their skin or their national origin or religious belief, and that’s ok because 99% of the American public approve. Really? Or Lee, seriously suggesting that Congress works for Obama. Really?
Dirty Wars has to be your gut check. The scandals which are breaking in Washington are making it clear that Obama has not only internalized W’s worst crimes, but he’s taken them to the next level. Fine. Compare your local Boston Marathon bomber to bin Laden if you want, but when you start to use those homeland security laws to target the Koch brothers and the AP, we’re on dangerous ground. That’s why this president is facing impeachment.
The next election has to be about good governance. Forget about the economy or gay rights or abortion or the minority composition of the country or partisan politics. This country needs a president who understands and appreciates constitutional process, and who vows to investigate where our government has gone off the rails. Six weeks ago, I thought Obama could still be that person. Today, its clear that hes the problem. Maybe Biden could be that person. Maybe he’ll have that chance.
But everyone needs to read Dirty Wars. I mean it. I really want people to read that book, and tell me that what is disclosed in that book is ok with them, and that in light of those revelations, you don’t understand why this country has no respect in the community of nations.
