June 2, 2009 archive

 I Wear My…..

Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York is to hold hearings on state secrets.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), who chairs the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties subcommittee of the House Judiciary committee, will host hearings Thursday to examine how to curb abuse of the privilege, while protecting true state secrets.

As a candidate, Obama criticized President Bush for being too quick to invoke the privilege. But since taking office, his administration has angered civil libertarians by likewise invoking it in cases involving warrantless wiretapping and renditions.

Testifying at Nadler’s hearings will be Patricia Wald, a retired federal judge; Asa Hutchinson, the former GOP congressman from Arkansas; Ben Wizner of the ACLU; and Andrew Grossman of the Heritage Foundation.

The left was critical of President Bush’s use of state secrets privilege as a matter of principal.

It was understandable why, Bush was such a reactionary President that invoked the states secret doctrine way too often and without transparency. One of Obama’s critiques of Bush was that he had ignored public disclosure rules.

 ‘Secrecy in the name of security’ can not overshadow the importance of open government—

regardless of who is in power we need to be wary when the government can arbitrarily claim to withhold evidence in civil cases because information could jeopardize national security.    

In one of the seminal acts of anti-abortion terrorism, the Emma Goldman Clinic for Women in Iowa City was firebombed.

The Carter Justice Dept. ordered the local FBI station to drop everything else and solve the crime, an order which did not sit well with the Resident Agent, himself an anti-abortion zealot.

He came up with a theory which would justify his continuing surveillance of the local lefties, suggesting that the bombing had either been a ploy for fundraising, or the result of a lovers’ spat, theories which he kept planting in the local press.

He proceeded to stalk my friend Steve Wilson (later changed his name to Jackson Clubb, who posted at kos as MadCityRag until his death a month ago) grilling his neighbors, etc. Jackson at the time was dating a member of the collective running the clinic.

The firebombing was never officially solved. No charges were filed against Jack, probably because the US Attorney wasn’t buying the FBI agent’s crap.

(Jack later moved to Madison, where we partnered in publishing Zenger, “the Nation’s Underground Newspaper,” from 1987 until 1993.)

When government officials agree to torture prisoners, issue sham legal opinions to “authorize” the torture contrary to law and then enact laws designed to prevent prosecution, the law calls that conspiracy. Evidence that started as a sporadic trickle and is now flowing steadily indicates that former administration officials, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, conspired to commit torture.

Rep. John Olver (D-MA) has recognized the possibility that our “President, Vice President and other top officials conspired to create a policy” to sanction torture.

A 2008 executive summary of a Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry determined that senior officials sanctioned torture by “redefin[ing] the law to create the appearance” that Bush’s torture program was legal.

The engine of that conspiracy is the War Council of lawyers for Bush and Cheney.

A funny thing happened on the way to the “change we can believe in.” We seem to have lost our reasoning faculties. In two important matters concerning the Obama administration, the operation of logic has broken down and it has been replaced by a strange Alice-In-Wonderland kind of unreality. These matters concern missing White House emails and missing pictures of torture and abuse of captives.

1. The Bush administration “lost” a considerable number of emails that might implicate high officials in crimes or impeachable offenses. Curiously, the Obama administration is not interested in finding out how these items went missing, nor is it interested in providing the public with any assurance that such an unfortunate event would not recur. Indeed, the legal position of the Obama administration is that the White House office of administration, which manages the email system, should not be subject to FOIA requests. A President truly committed to “transparency” would have aggressively investigated the missing email scandal and implemented strong measures to prevent it from happening again.

It defies reason to assert that the reliability and accountability of White House email systems is unimportant, yet that is the implicit message of an Obama administration that is eager to disappear the entire missing email controversy. It may be argued that holding Bush regime torturers accountable would be politically divisive, but how could it be controversial to investigate the “loss” of thousands of sensitive White House emails? Yet the press has dropped the missing email story and it seems to have vanished from public awareness. Let me put it plainly: the Bush administration brazenly tampered with official records of emails and the Obama administration has expressed no interest in investigating this activity or preventing a recurrence. Obama smiles and we are supposed to ignore the facts.

2. The Bush administration compiled a large number, possibly several thousand, images of prisoner abuse occuring in multiple locations. Yet the recent controversy over the release of a specific set of 44 photographs demanded in an ACLU FOIA lawsuit has completely muddled the issue of how many such photographs exist and the responsibility of the US Government to release them. Childish quibbling over what is or is not depicted in the small set of officially requested pictures is obscuring what is shown in the much larger set of closely held images.

What kind of investigative genius does it require for the press to demand to know how many torture photographs exist? How hard is it to question White House spokesmen on the distinction between what is depicted in the photographs in the ACLU request and what is in the much larger body of secret photographs? Can there be any explanation, other than the arrogance of Presidential power, for why the White House has refused to even describe the scope and content of these incriminating photographs? Again, Obama smiles and we are supposed to ignore the facts.

We are seeing a consistent and deliberate pattern of disinformation coming from the Obama White House. This activity is now so grossly misleading that it requires the willing suspension of the public’s reasoning faculties. Unfortunately, the public is quite willing to oblige. How much longer can Obama’s smile conceal the truth? How much longer will reason be displaced by hero worship?