The Serpent's Wisdom

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs let loose on leftist critics of the administration the other day:

"I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy. ... They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality. ... They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."

Frankly I think this should cost him his job, which is not something I say lightly. It won't, though, because he's only saying what everyone in the White House is thinking. But outbursts like this, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's lovely 'f*cking retards' comment last year, and so on, are going to cost the Democrats dearly on election day this year and in 2012. They can't afford to keep insulting the folks who are most likely to contribute, to volunteer, and to vote on their behalf. They may think they can rely solely on the wealthy donors who flocked to them in 2008, but they can't.

These outbursts also show what they're thinking: we're leftists, they've billed themselves as "leftists," therefore we owe them our vote, our support, and our praise. But leftist bloggers don't work for the Democratic party, and this is what really annoys them. In 2009 they established "Common Purpose," an initiative to essentially get leftist bloggers to start spreading White House talking points for them. Well, hey, it works for the Right, right? ;)

But let's get to the real meat of the problem, which is: the Obama administration is doing a lot of the same things that annoyed leftist bloggers when the Bush administration did them. Leftists complained then, and complain now, not because they are anti-Republican partisan hacks, but because they are anti-injustice.

Foremost in my mind, and the one that I think 20, 30 years from now is going to really tarnish Obama's legacy: the establishment of a permanent authority whose purpose is to imprison people -- citizens and non-citizens -- indefinitely without trial. This is an indelible blemish on the American human rights record akin to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. But they "stopped torture" (they didn't, but they said they would), and they "tried" to close the prison at Guantanamo, so we should be happy, right?

Continuing the war in Afghanistan despite the apparent absence of any evidence that it's making the US safer from Islamist terrorism? There's that, too. People can oppose the war for rational reasons that don't involve the desire to replace the Pentagon with a hippie flower garden. Then there's: appointing bankster wolves to watch the economic henhouse... refusing to prosecute telecoms for their willingness to aid DHS in their program of mass invasion of privacy without search warrants... refusing to prosecute agents who committed torture or investigate detainee deaths or accounts of torture... refusing to investigate the Katrina disaster... and these are all things Democrats did of their own free will without being able to blame them on Republican obstructionism.

So this is not, as the White House wants to paint it, a matter of being upset because the public option was taken out of the health care bill or because other legislative compromises were made to pass bills. Yes, those things suck too, but they are forgivable and they can be fixed. But it turns out we're really bad at paying no attention to the man behind the curtain.

The Obama Administration's attempt to have it both ways on torture seems to be falling apart.

Last week, they released several previously secret memos outlining the twisted legal arguments the Bush Administration offered the CIA to allow agents to torture suspected terrorists. This was a bold and commendable move which revealed... well, a lot of what we already knew about the last administration's way of thinking, but a number of new details which had been previously hidden.

Rachel Maddow offered a particularly chilling illustration of what it was exactly that the Justice Department signed off on.

On Countdown last Friday, Matthew Alexander debunked pretty thoroughly the argument from Obama's critics that the release of these memos makes things worse for the United States. Notably, al Qaida uses torture by the CIA as a recruiting tool.

But while releasing these memos they have announced that they do not intend to prosecute their authors or any CIA agents who acted in accord with the bad legal advice they gave.

It's a fair bet that the real reason for this is not to avoid "dwelling on the past" (was Nuremberg "dwelling on the past?"), but rather, loud bleating behind the scenes from prominent Democrats who are afraid that they too will be caught up in the net of reprisals and accountability. The threads from this stretch not just to the White House but to Congress as well, where detailed briefings were held and various things were signed off on by top Democrats.

Obama, though, may not get to have his cake and eat it too, after all. This weekend the New York Times called for the impeachment of Jay Bybee, one of the authors of the memos in question who is now a federal judge. At least one senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee is now saying he'd like to do just that. Members of Congress are also pushing the Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor to do what he's already said he doesn't intend to do.

Honestly, i felt great after watching his big speech. I dared, for a fleeting moment, to even have a little bit of hope. But i should have remembered never to listen to anything any politician says and watch only what they do. What the White House is actually doing is, to say the least, distressing.

Obama is again defending Bush's human rights abuses and seeking to expand them. From Obama to Appeal Detainee Ruling:

The Obama administration said Friday that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight.

In a court filing, the Justice Department also asked District Judge John D. Bates not to proceed with the habeas-corpus cases of three detainees at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, Afghanistan. Judge Bates ruled last week that the three — each of whom says he was seized outside of Afghanistan — could challenge their detention in court.

Remember the jokes about conservative radio hosts doing nothing more than reading off a daily set of talking points faxed to them by the Bush Administration? Read this and weep: the White House has established a group called "Common Purpose" which is basically tasked with guiding (or if necessary strongarming) progressive organizations into promoting the administration's agenda.

The Treasury's being plundered by Wall Street, unions are being forced to accept concessions, military spending is up, the war is being expanded, the White House is fighting harder than ever before against human rights and privacy, and the overall impression that's starting to form in my mind is of a brewing disaster.

Does anyone remember the skit from Cheech & Chong's first album, where an interrogator was trying to force a prisoner to "sign ze papers"? The punchline was:

OLD MAN: What do the papers say?
INTERROGATOR: Zey merely say zat you haff not been mistreated while in our custody.
OLD MAN: I cannot sign the papers.
INTERROGATOR (shouting): WHY? WHY can you not sign ze papers?
OLD MAN: Because you have broken both of my hands!

Comedy gold, eh? Yeah, well. It'd never happen in the real world, and even if it does, it wouldn't happen HERE, right? [warning, there's some graphic detail in that story.]

I know we have an economic crisis going on and all, but surely we can spare some of our time and attention bringing criminal torturers to justice. Just sayin'.

I suppose the mass media is downplaying this because they think it's ancient history and no one will care. But if there are people alive now who remember it, it's not ancient history.

As the Chinese-backed North Korean army rapidly overran South Korea in 1950, they released leftists whom the southern regime had rounded up in mass arrests and recruited them to help administer their occupation. When southern Korean leaders learned this was going on, they decided to slaughter their political prisoners en masse rather than allow them to be freed and assist the North Korean regime.

It will never be known how many people were thusly murdered, but an estimate of 100,000 is called by at least one historian "very conservative." US General Douglas MacArthur was aware of the mass executions and numerous men under his command colluded in them.

On June 29, 1950, as the southern army and its U.S. advisers retreated southward, reports from Seoul said the conquering northerners had emptied the southern capital's prisons, and ex-inmates were reinforcing the new occupation regime.

In a confidential narrative he later wrote for Army historians, Lt. Col. Rollins S. Emmerich, a senior U.S. adviser, described what then happened in the southern port city of Busan, formerly known as Pusan.

Emmerich was told by a subordinate that a South Korean regimental commander, determined to keep Busan’s political prisoners from joining the enemy, planned "to execute some 3,500 suspected peace-time Communists, locked up in the local prison," according to the declassified 78-page narrative, first uncovered by the newspaper Busan Ilbo at the U.S. National Archives.

Emmerich wrote that he summoned the Korean, Col. Kim Chong-won, and told him the enemy would not reach Busan in a few days as Kim feared, and that "atrocities could not be condoned."

But the American then indicated conditional acceptance of the plan.

"Colonel Kim promised not to execute the prisoners until the situation became more critical," wrote Emmerich, who died in 1986. "Colonel Kim was told that if the enemy did arrive to the outskirts of (Busan) he would be permitted to open the gates of the prison and shoot the prisoners with machine guns."

... Emmerich wrote that soon after his session with Kim, he met with South Korean officials in Daegu, 55 miles north of Busan, and persuaded them "at that time" not to execute 4,500 prisoners immediately, as planned. Within weeks, hundreds were being executed in the Daegu area.

from U.S. ignored Korea killings; Ally executed 100,000, new research shows

In a way, this is of a piece with US forces operating under rules of engagement that called for the killing of literally anyone who moved.

On 26 July the US 8th Army, the highest level of command in Korea, issued orders to stop all Korean civilians. 'No, repeat, no refugees will be permitted to cross battle lines at any time. Movement of all Koreans in group will cease immediately.' On the very same day the first major disaster involving civilians struck.

The stone bridge near the village of No Gun Ri spans a small stream. It is similar to a great many others that cross the landscape of South Korea, except that the walls of this bridge were, until very recently, pockmarked by hundreds of bullet holes. On the very day that the US 8th Army delivered its stop refugee order in July 1950, up to 400 South Korean civilians gathered by the bridge were killed by US forces from the 7th Cavalry Regiment. Some were shot above the bridge, on the railroad tracks. Others were strafed by US planes. More were killed under the arches in an ordeal that local survivors say lasted for three days.

The plight of gallae in prison is quite severe. Cases like that of Alexis Giraldo, who is suing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation because they initially ignored her complaints that her cellmate was regularly beating and raping her, are not unusual. The complicity of law enforcement people and prison guards and administrators in enabling and even encouraging rape and violence against GLBT prisoners has been previously documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Kalani Key, who is now a coordinator of the Transforming Justice coalition, wrote an account for Alternet of her experiences in prison. It's a fascinating read, notably because it is clear from her account that (A) the state of California has actually diminished its protections for transgender prisoners over the last 20 years, and (B) she received far better protection and treatment from fellow prisoners than she did from prison guards and administrators. (Thanks to Monica Roberts.)

I just wrote to my representative and senator in the state government, to urge them to look into what the state can do to resist cooperating with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. For those who missed it, this is the bill -- now law -- which legalizes many forms of torture and allows the President to designate anyone as an "unlawful enemy combatant" and detain them without due process or trial.

If you read this and live in the US, please do the same.

From here on out, i will post in this journal at least once every seven days, so that if eight days go by and i haven't posted, you will know i've been "disappeared."

This sounds kind of drastic and paranoid even to me, but the law passed by the Senate yesterday allows the Department of Defense to declare anyone, anywhere, to be an "unlawful combatant," US citizen or not, in actual contact with actual terrorists or not, in actual possession of weapons or not. All you have to do is be judged to have given "aid or comfort" to terrorists. According to many right wingers, all you have to do to qualify on this count is to criticize the president. I've done that plenty of times and i'm not going to go back and hide all those journal entries, so i'm just as likely to disappear as anyone.

Argh, i don't trust 'em as far as i can throw 'em, neither Democrats nor Republicans. On matters of domestic spying and privacy and governmental war powers, there's barely any difference between them at all.

When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a "signing statement" -- an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law -- declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

"The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief," Bush wrote, adding that this approach "will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks."

... David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.

"The signing statement is saying 'I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it's important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,'" he said. "They don't want to come out and say it directly because it doesn't sound very nice, but it's unmistakable to anyone who has been following what's going on."

from Bush Could Bypass New Torture Ban

Two Republicans and a Democrat are responsible for this piece of work:

The Bush administration notified federal trial judges in Washington that it would soon ask them to dismiss all lawsuits brought by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, challenging their detentions, Justice Department officials said Tuesday.

The action means that the administration is moving swiftly to take advantage of an amendment to the military bill that President Bush signed into law last Friday. The amendment strips federal courts from hearing habeas corpus petitions from Guantánamo detainees.

... Although the courts and Congress are co-equal branches of government, the Constitution allows Congress to define the scope of jurisdiction for all federal courts below the Supreme Court.

from U.S. to Seek Dismissal of Guantánamo Suits

The debate over secret CIA prison camps in Europe is heating up. Can't wait to see what the State Department and the President have to say about THIS:

EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini has warned that any European Union nation found to have allowed secret CIA prison camps to operate on their soil could have their EU voting rights suspended.

'Should the accusations be accurate, I would be forced to draw serious consequences,' Frattini told a security conference in the German capital.

He said the operation of such camps on EU soil would violate the bloc's rules governing freedom and human rights.

from EU threatens sanctions for states operating secret CIA camps

The response from Congress over this fracas: not "We'd better make sure the CIA isn't violating human rights," but "OMG WTF BBQ find the leaker!" Shows you where the GOP's values are (for those who maybe haven't noticed before now).