Posts Tagged ‘Bush Administration’

2 Jan

Aughts were a lost decade for U.S. economy, workers

Posted by James O'Rourke in Federal Budget and Economy, Obama Administration, Policy, Politics, and Politicians, Politics As Usual. Tagged: , , , .

By Neil Irwin

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, January 2, 2010

For most of the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has grown at a steady clip, generating perpetually higher incomes and wealth for American households. But since 2000, the story is starkly different.

The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation’s growth.

It was, according to a wide range of data, a lost decade for American workers. The decade began in a moment of triumphalism — there was a current of thought among economists in 1999 that recessions were a thing of the past. By the end, there were two, bookends to a debt-driven expansion that was neither robust nor sustainable.

There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.

Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 — and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s.

And the net worth of American households — the value of their houses, retirement funds and other assets minus debts — has also declined when adjusted for inflation, compared with sharp gains in every previous decade since data were initially collected in the 1950s.

“This was the first business cycle where a working-age household ended up worse at the end of it than the beginning, and this in spite of substantial growth in productivity, which should have been able to improve everyone’s well-being,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.

Question of timing

The miserable economic track record is, in part, a quirk of timing. The 1990s ended near the top of a stock market and investment bubble. Three months after champagne corks popped to celebrate the dawn of the year 2000, the market turned south, a recession soon following. The decade finished near the trough of a severe recession.

But beyond these dramatic ups and downs lies an even more sobering reality: long-term economic stagnation. The trillions of dollars that poured into housing investment and consumer spending in the first part of the decade distorted economic activity. Continue reading »

23 Dec

The Ten Worst Nightmares Bush Inflicted on America

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , , .

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment. Posted December 22, 2009.

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which will continue to follow us until citizens stand up to fix them.

By spring of 2000, Texas governor George W. Bush was wrapping up the Republican nomination for president, and he went on to dominate the rest of the decade.

If Dickens proclaimed of the 1790s revolutionary era in France that it was the best of times and the worst of times, the reactionary Bush era was just the worst of times. I declare it the decade of the American oligarchs. Just as the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union allowed the emergence of a class of lawless ‘Oligarchs’ in Russia, so Neoliberal tax policies and deregulation produced American equivalents. (For more on the analogy, see Michael Hudson.) We have always had robber barons in American politics, but the Neoliberal moment created a new social class.

At about 1.3 million adults, it is not too large to have some cohesive interests, and its corporations, lobbyists, and other institutions allow it to intervene systematically in politics. It owns 45 percent of the privately held wealth and is heading toward 50, i.e. toward a Banana Republic. Thus, we have a gutted fairness doctrine and the end of anti-trust concerns in ownership of mass media, allowing a multi-billionaire like Rupert Murdoch to buy up major media properties and to establish a cable television channel which is nothing but oligarch propaganda. They established ‘think tanks’ like the American Enterprise Institute, which hires only staff that are useful agents of the interests of the very wealthy, and which produce studies denying global climate change or lying about the situation in Iraq.

Bush-Cheney were not simply purveyors of wrong-headed ideas. They were the agents of the one percent, and their policies make perfect sense if seen as attempts to advance the interests of this narrow class of persons. It is the class that owns our mass media, that pays for the political campaigns of ‘our’ (their) representatives, that gives us the Bushes and Cheneys and Palins because they are useful to them, and that blocks progressive reform and legislation with the vast war chest funneled to them by deep tax cuts that allow them to use essential public resources, infrastructure and facilities gratis while making the middle class pay for them.

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which, however, will continue to follow us until the economy is re-regulated, anti-trust concerns again pursued, a new, tweaked fairness doctrine is implemented, and we return to a more normal distribution of wealth (surely a quarter of the privately held wealth is enough for the one percent?) It isn’t about which party is in power; parties can always be bought. It is about how broadly shared resources are in a society. Egalitarianism is unworkable, but over-concentration of wealth is also impractical. The latter produced a lot of our problems in the past decade, and as long as such massive inequality persists, our politics will be lopsided.

10. Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy. Of all the income growth of the entire country of the United States in the Bush years, the richest 1 percent of the working population, about 1.3 million persons, grabbed up over two-thirds of it. The Reagan and Bush cuts in tax rates on the wealthy have created a dangerous little alien inside our supposedly democratic society, of the super-rich, with their legions of camp followers (sometimes referred to as ‘analysts’ or ‘economists’ or ‘journalists’). The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn’t want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you. It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists led by W. and now by Sarah Palin that produces clown politics in the US unmatched in most advanced industrial countries with the possible exception of Italy. Continue reading »

27 Jul

Bush Era Horrors Will Haunt Us Until We Truly Face Them

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

Alternet.org

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted July 27, 2009.

We can’t just “move forward.” We need to face who we’ve been and just how badly we’ve acted, if we care to become something better.

We’ve just passed through the CIA assassination flap, already fading from the news after less than two weeks of media attention. Broken in several major newspapers, here’s how the story goes: the Agency, evidently under Vice President Dick Cheney’s orders, didn’t inform Congress that, to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders, it was trying to develop and deploy global death squads. (Of course, just about no one is going to call them that, but the description fits.) Congress is now in high dudgeon. The CIA didn’t keep that body’s “Gang of Eight” informed. A House investigation is now underway.

We’re told that the CIA — being the president’s private army and part of the executive branch of our government — has committed a heinous dereliction of duty. In fact, not keeping key congressional figures up to date on the developing program could even “be illegal,” according to Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin. (Not that Congress, when informed of Bush administration extreme acts, ever did much of anything anyway.)

This story, however, has a largely unexplored strangeness to it that has only been discussed on the fringes of the mainstream media (or in the press of other countries). After all, during the eight years this CIA assassination program was supposedly in formation, U.S. military special ops death squads were, as far as we can tell, freely roaming the planet conducting (or botching) assassination missions, and the CIA’s own robot assassins, airborne death squads, were also launching operations — sometimes wiping out innocent civilians — from Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan. They continue to run such operations in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands near Afghanistan. So we still await an explanation of just why the CIA spent close to eight years, under Vice Presidential oversight, getting its death squads almost operational, but never — we’re told — off the ground.

If there seems to be something odd about this latest flap, if there’s much that we don’t know yet, we do, at least, know one thing: This particular small splash from the previous administration’s deep dive into crime and folly will have its brief time in the media sun and then be swallowed up by oblivion, just as each of the previous flaps has been.

After all, can you honestly tell me that you think often about the CIA torture flap, the CIA-destruction-of-interrogation-video-tapes flap, the what-did-Congress/Nancy Pelosi-really-know-about-torture-methods flap, the Bush-administration-officials-(like-Condi-Rice)-signed-off-on-torture-methods-in-2002-even-before-the-Justice-Department-justified-them flap, the National-Security-Agency-(it-was-far-more-widespread-than-anyone-imagined)-electronic-surveillance flap, the should-the-NSA’s-telecom-spies-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-engaging-in-illegal-warrantless-wiretapping flap, the should-CIA-torturers-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-using-enhanced-interrogation-techniques flap, the Abu-Ghraib-photos-(round-two)-suppression flap, or various versions of the can-they-close-Guantanamo, will-they-keep-detainees-in-prison-forever flaps, among others that have already disappeared into my own personal oblivion file? Every flap its day, evidently. Each flap another problem (again we’re told) for a president with an ambitious program who is eager to “look forward, not backward.”

Of course, he’s not alone. Given the last eight years of disaster piled on catastrophe, who in our American world would want to look backward? The urge to turn the page in this country is palpable, but — just for a moment — let’s not. Continue reading »

20 Jul

Could Dick Cheney Go to Prison?

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , .

AlterNet

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News. Posted July 18, 2009.

Cheney seems to fear that if our system of justice works, he could be in for some serious, uncommuted jail time.

So far, the summer has been mild in the Washington area. But for former Vice President Dick Cheney, the temperature is well over 100 degrees. He is sweating profusely, and it is becoming increasingly clear why.

Cheney has broken openly with former President George W. Bush on one issue of transcendent importance — to Cheney. For whatever reason, Bush decided not to hand out blanket pardons before they both rode off into the sunset.

Cheney has complained bitterly that his former chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby should have been pardoned, rather than simply having his jail sentence commuted.

Cheney told the media that Bush left Libby “sort of hanging in the wind” by refusing to issue a pardon before leaving office. Libby had been convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents investigating the leak of a former CIA operations officer’s identity.

“I believe firmly that Scooter was unjustly accused and prosecuted and deserved a pardon, and the president disagreed with that,” Cheney said. He would disclose no details of his efforts to lobby Bush on Libby’s behalf, saying they would be “best left to history.”

It is getting close to history time. You do not need to be a crackerjack analyst to understand that Cheney is feeling betrayed — that he is thinking not of Libby, but of himself, and fearing that, if our system of justice works, he could be in for some serious, uncommuted jail time.

His situation has grown pathetic. Aside from the man himself, it has fallen almost solely to faithful daughter, Liz, to defend her dad and to start a political backfire to keep him out of prison. She is to be admired for her faithfulness. In the process, though, she has unwittingly given much away.

Liz Cheney on the Offensive

On Washington Times’ “America’s Morning News” radio program Monday, Liz Cheney acted again as designated hitter, responding to the recent New York Times report that her father had given “direct orders” to the CIA to withhold “information about a secret counterterrorism program for eight years.”

Not for the first time, Liz Cheney disclosed what has her father so worried and agitated. She said he is “very angry” over recent press reports that Attorney General Eric Holder may be about to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate “the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices.”

She branded this “shameful” — worse still, “un-American.” Not the interrogation practices, mind you, but the notion that her father should be held to account for them.

Typically, she did well in sticking closely to her talking points, arguing that the issue is “somebody taking office and then starting to prosecute people who carried out policies that they disagreed with, you know, in the previous administration.”

As if unprecedented decisions to torture, in violation of international law and the War Crimes Act of 1996, can be accurately described as “policies” over which there can be honest disagreement. This is about crimes, not “policies.”

Pulling out all the stops, Liz Cheney worried aloud about what this does to “morale at the CIA,” where the practitioners of what Bush called “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogation believed they were acting with the blessing of the Justice Department. (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity addressed that bromide frontally on April 29, 2009, in a memorandum to our new president.)

Liz Cheney went on to argue that this could, in the future, inhibit CIA functionaries from various actions out of fear of criminal liability. (To me, that sounds like a distinct plus.)

The Decider

What has pretty much escaped notice in the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) is that the former vice president has also reminded us all that President Bush was the “decider.“

That unusual word sounded quite macho as Bush strutted about reminding us often that he was also commander in chief. But now, it could be the kiss of death — for Bush, as well as for Dick Cheney. Continue reading »

13 Jul

Bush’s Secret Spy Programs

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: .

thinkprogress.org

NATIONAL SECURITY

When Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 last year, it mandated that the inspectors general of the different branches of the intelligence community that participated in President Bush’s surveillance operations, known as the President’s Surveillance Program, conduct a comprehensive review of the program. On Friday, the inspectors general released their report, confirming that the Bush administration carried out “unprecedented,” massive surveillance activities that stretched beyond the warrantless wiretapping program that had previously been revealed. Soon after the New York Times reported on the existence of a warrantless wiretapping program in 2005, Bush described the effort as his “Terrorist Surveillance Program.” But the IG report makes clear that the term describes only one aspect of the overall surveillance program. In 2007, former deputy attorney general James Comey’s testimony before Congress implied that “other programs exist for domestic spying” outside warrantless wiretapping, the existence of which then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales acknowledged in 2007. In constructing the legal rationale for the “Other Intelligence Activities,” Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer John Yoo “did not accurately describe the scope” of the activities, which led former attorney general John Ashcroft to give “his legal authorization to the program for the first two and a half years based on a ‘misimpression‘ of what activities the N.S.A. was actually conducting.” The report found that the administration’s “extraordinary and inappropriate” secrecy around the program not only allowed it to be built upon flawed legal arguments, but also “undermined its effectiveness as a terrorism-fighting tool.”

‘MISLEADING’ CONGRESS: Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), a former ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, told the Associated Press that “she was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the warrantless wiretapping.” Harman said that when she asked Gonzales two years ago if the government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it. “He looked me in the eye and said ‘no,’” said Harman. Indeed, the report found that Gonzales walked right up to the line of lying to Congress by providing “confusing, inaccurate” statements about the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities to lawmakers in 2007. The Justice Department Inspector General concluded that while Gonzales “did not intend to mislead Congress,” his testimony “had the effect of misleading those who were not knowledgeable about the program.” In an interview with the AP, however, former CIA director Michael Hayden insisted that “that top members of Congress were kept well-informed all along the way.” “One of the points I had in every one of the briefings was to make sure they understood the scope of our activity ‘They’ve got to know this is bigger than a bread box,’ I said,” said Hayden.

DETRIMENTAL SECRECY: As the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and James Risen note, “the report found that the secrecy surrounding the program may have limited its effectiveness.” At the CIA, “so few working-level officers were allowed to know about the program that the agency often did not make full use of the leads the wiretapping generated.” The FBI found that “the exceptionally compartmented nature of the program” frustrated agents who were assigned to follow-up on its tips. Knowledge of the program was so closely held, according to the report, that a top aide to Vice President Cheney, David Addington, could personally decide who in the administration was “read into” the classified program. For the early years of the program, Yoo was the only OLC lawyer “read into” the program, which meant that he was the sole lawyer in the department analyzing the legality of the program. According to the report, senior Justice Department officials “criticized the assignment of a single OLC attorney to draft the legal rationale for the program. These officials noted that OLC traditionally adheres to a rigorous peer review process for all legal memoranda it issues.” Yoo’s boss at the time, Jay Bybee, told the DOJ IG that he was “surprised” and “a little disappointed” to learn that Yoo worked on the program without his knowledge. Neither Bybee nor Gonzales could explain how Yoo became responsible for analyzing the legality of the program. Because the inspectors general “lacked the authority to compel testimony,” five former Bush administration officials — Ashcroft, Yoo, George Tenet, Andrew Card, and Addington — refused to be questioned.

CHENEY’S ‘DIRECT ORDERS’: One day after the IG report was released, the New York Times revealed another example of the Bush administration’s efforts to keep Congress in the dark about the intelligence communities activities. Last week, seven House Democrats on the Intelligence Committee released a letter revealing that CIA Director Leon Panetta had “recently testified to Congress that the agency concealed information and misled lawmakers repeatedly since 2001″ about an unidentified CIA operation that was an “on-again, off-again” effort until Panetta stopped it in June. The Times reported on Saturday that Cheney gave “direct orders” for the program to be concealed from Congress. Yesterday, an intelligence official hinted to the Washington Times that the program “involved assassinations overseas but declined to provide further details.” The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that the now-terminated initiative “was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives.” The WSJ also reports that in 2001, the CIA “examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders,” but “it appears that those discussions tapered off within six months” and it “isn’t clear whether they were an early part of the CIA initiative that Mr. Panetta stopped.” Congressional Democrats are now calling for the program and the lack of congressional notification to be investigated. “The executive branch of government cannot create programs like these programs and keep Congress in the dark,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). Though some Republicans acknowledge that it’s “wrong if somebody told the CIA not to inform the appropriate members of Congress,” several GOP lawmakers have sought to defend Cheney and resist an investigation.

29 Jun

Scalia rebukes Bush, angers banks in predatory lending case

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , .

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — In a rebuke of the Bush administration, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that a federal bank regulator erred in quashing efforts by New York state to combat the kind of predatory mortgage lending that triggered the nation’s financial crisis.

The 5-4 ruling by the high court was unusual. Justice Antonin Scalia, arguably the most conservative jurist, wrote the majority’s opinion and was joined by the court’s four liberal judges.

The five justices held that contrary to what the Bush administration had argued, states can enforce their own laws on matters such as discrimination and predatory lending, even if that crosses into areas under federal regulation.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the four dissenters, argued that laws dating back to the nation’s founding prevent states from meddling in federal bank regulation. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts and justices Anthony Kennedy and Samuel Alito.

The ruling angered many in the financial sector, who fear it’ll lead to a patchwork of state laws that’ll make it harder for banks and other financial firms to take a national approach to the marketplace.

“We are worried about the effect that this ruling could have on the markets,” said Rich Whiting, general counsel for the Financial Services Roundtable, a trade group representing the nation’s 100 largest financial firms, in a statement. The decision “hinders the ability of financial services firms from conducting business in the United States. Even worse, it will cause confusion for consumers, especially those who move from state to state.”

Stephen Ryan, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery, said the decision “will have a significant, negative impact on the ability of a national bank to offer a financial product uniformly throughout the country.”

In a statement, Ryan, who’s brought suits against state enforcement, predicted “a crazy quilt of conflicting legal instructions” and a “confusing situation of shared enforcement responsibilities for financial services.”

Consumer advocates were elated. Continue reading »

29 May

Terrorism: the new communism

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: .

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By Dan Payne

May 29, 2009

DICK CHENEY, who didn’t say eight words publicly in eight years as vice president, suddenly won’t shut up. Every day it seems he’s doing interviews and giving speeches on national security, 9/11, and torture.

Torture defined. Torture is having to listen to Cheney sneer his way through a speech on why he and his president were right about everything and President Obama is wrong.

Selling fear. Cheney mentioned 9/11 only 27 times in his recent speech, flatly declaring that Obama was making America “less safe.” But a poll taken after the speech showed 51 percent of Americans disagreed with his wild charge (38 percent agreed). President Obama has a 64-to-31 percent approve-disapprove rating on national security, and the same two-to-one margin on fighting terrorism.

The numbers are good, but if it’s one thing Republicans are good at it’s making Democrats look weak on national defense. Consciously or not, Cheney is attempting to make terrorism the communism of the 21st century.

In 1946, the GOP won control of Congress by painting Democrats as “soft on Communism.” And they’ve been attacking Democrats ever since. Democrats supposedly let the communists take over China, lost Cuba to Fidel Castro, lost Vietnam, and refused to win the arms race against the Soviet Union – which, we’ve since learned, couldn’t even make a toaster.

Seven years ago, Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune declared, “Terrorism has become the new communism.” Whether it’s the Red Menace or Islamic Jihadists, they represent fear of “the other.” Fighting them leads us into alliances with governments we’d rather not be involved with, like Pakistan. It produces bloated military budgets that take money from American domestic needs. It causes us to forget the lessons of history, such as the French failures in Vietnam or the 15,000 Soviet soldiers who died fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Putting the Constitution on hold. To Cheney, the acid test for an administration is how much of the Constitution and world opinion it is willing to jettison to demonstrate its national security muscle against Islamic terrorists. Obama, Cheney said, wants to make us “more like France.”

Do as I say, not as I do. Cheney, 68 (doesn’t he seem about 80?), never served a day in the military. In fact, he got five deferments during the Vietnam War. Apparently he didn’t feel America needed him to fight the terrorists of his day.

Not in my state. In a way, what’s worrying congressional Democrats over where to house suspected terrorists at Guantanamo isn’t just NIMBY. It’s also that Democrats don’t want to look “soft” on terror by letting those who would destroy America live in a prison in their home state.

Where to put the Gitmo detainees. Accused terrorists accustomed to blazing hot weather in the Middle East might find winters tough in, say . . . Alaska! Fortunately, there’s a spunky Republican governor up there who could keep an eye on terrorists while lookin’ out for an invasion from Russia, which she can see from her porch.

No proof. Cheney declared, without backup, that the Bush administration “prevented attacks and saved lives through the Terrorist Surveillance Program [TSP], which let us intercept calls and track contacts between Al Qaeda and persons inside the United States.”

The TSP sounds like the illegal wiretaps by former FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who eavesdropped on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., among others, on Hoover’s personal belief that they were communists.

Maybe he didn’t get the memo. Cheney conveniently forgets that 9/11 happened on his watch. The Bush administration even got a memo one month before the attacks entitled “Bin Laden likely to strike in US.”

Proving a negative. Cheney is challenging Democrats to prove a negative – that since we haven’t been attacked since 2001, the Bush policies must be responsible. I’d give him that if he’s willing to take responsibility for the evil doers on Wall Street.

Courting Gitmo. The Supreme Court has ruled that Guantanamo detainees have the right to a federal trial to challenge the charges against them. What do you want to bet this will be part of the hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the high court?

Dan Payne is a Boston-area media consultant who has worked for Democratic candidates around the country. dingbat_story_end_icon1.gif

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

28 May

How Is Cheney Wrong? Let Me Count the Ways

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: .

By Ruth Marcus

Wednesday, May 27, 2009; 5:52 PM

Some people think we’re paying too much attention to former Vice President Dick Cheney. I think we may be paying too little. As bracing as last week’s Obama-Cheney face-off was, the inevitable focus was on the current president, not the former vice. And for those of us who are relieved he’s out of office, there’s a tendency to treat Cheney with “there he goes again” ennui. Yet Cheney’s speech at the American Enterprise Institute was so chockfull of faulty arguments and rank misrepresentations that it’s worth taking the time to review them, in their multiple incarnations.

The baseless straw man: “[H]ere’s the great dividing line in our current debate over national security. You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event — coordinated, devastating — but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort.”

Now Obama has erected his squadron of straw men, but this one of Cheney’s is particularly hollow. There has not been another terrorist attack; therefore, everything the previous administration did must be kept in place. Anyone who disagrees is by definition feckless about confronting terrorism.

But Obama’s speech made clear he understands that “this threat will be with us for a long time, and that we must use all elements of our power to defeat it.” The “great dividing line” between Obama and Cheney involves whether to fight terrorism in a way consistent with the Constitution and American values or to subordinate those niceties to the imperative of self-defense.

The dangerous overstatement, topped off with partisan jab: “The administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism… But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground. And half measures keep you half exposed… Triangulation is a political strategy, not a national security strategy.”

If there is no middle ground, why place any limits on how enhanced interrogations can get? Why not wiretap all conversations? Why give detainees any legal process at all? Calibrating the proper balance between liberty and security is difficult, and reasonable people can differ about where lines should be drawn. But Cheney’s whatever-it-takes worldview seems to contemplate no tradeoffs whatsoever. Obama isn’t seizing on terrorism for political advantage, like Bill Clinton with welfare reform. He’s addressing a real threat — and cleaning up Cheney’s mess.

The outright misstatement: “The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts had failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do.”

But former FBI agent Ali Soufan offered a completely conflicting account of his interrogation of Abu Zubaida, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that the injured terrorist was cooperating and yielding important information — the previously unknown role of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the Sept. 11 attacks — until other interrogators insisted on stepping up the pressure, at which point Zubaydah clammed up.

A twist on the above, misstatement wrapped in demagoguery: “Attorney General Holder and others have admitted that the United States will be compelled to accept terrorists here in the homeland, and it has even been suggested U.S. taxpayer dollars will be used to support them…. Keep in mind that these are hardened terrorists picked up overseas since 9/11. The ones that were considered low risk were released a long time ago.”

Hard to know where to start parsing the misinformation here. “Compelled to accept terrorists here in the homeland” makes it sound like they’ll be roaming the local malls. I don’t recall Cheney deploying the “terrorists in the homeland” bogeyman when Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, was being tried, sentenced and imprisoned here. As Obama said: “We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security, nor will we release detainees within the United States who endanger the American people. Where demanded by justice and national security, we will seek to transfer some detainees to the same type of facilities in which we hold all manner of dangerous and violent criminals within our borders — highly secure prisons that ensure the public safety.”

U.S. taxpayer dollars supporting terrorists sounds like the 2009 version of welfare queens driving Cadillacs, with about as much truth. As if tax dollars aren’t being spent on Guantanamo? As to the notion that only the “worst of the worst” remain, in fact, courts have ruled — and in some cases Cheney’s administration acknowledged — that there was no legitimate reason to hold 21 of the 241 prisoners currently at Guantanamo; another 50 have been approved for transfer to another country. So the notion that the “low risk” ones are long gone is simply wrong. Ask the Chinese Uighurs who never intended harm to America but have been held without basis for seven years.

The best defense is a good offense: “[T]here has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened to Abu Ghraib with a top-secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulation and simple decency…. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.”

What radicals have engaged in this slur? Well, a panel appointed by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, for one. Enhanced interrogation techniques “migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq where they were neither limited nor safeguarded,” Schlesinger’s report found.

Finally, ultimate chutzpah: Cheney assailing the Obama administration for failing to disclose documents. “[A]ll that remains an official secret is the information that we gained as a result [of interrogations]. Some of his defenders say the unseen memos are inconclusive, which only raises the question why they won’t let the American people decide that for themselves.”

Cheney, ardent tribune of open government. Now, that’s rich.

23 May

A Tale of Two Speeches: Obama Uplifts, Cheney Uses Old Arsenal of Fear-Mongering

Posted by James O'Rourke in Obama Administration, Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , , .

By Leslie Savan, The Nation. Posted May 23, 2009.

While we’re enthralled by Obama’s elegance and reason, Cheney waits like a troll under a bridge, watching for the slightest misstep.

Tools

As rational, soaring, and adult-ready as Barack Obama’s speech before the shrine of the Constitution in the National Archives was — and, in contrast, as full of retreaded lies as Dick Cheney’s Personal Prosecution Protection Plan before the rightwing American Enterprise Institute was — the former vice was already hanging ten on a fear wave. The day before, the Republicans drew a blind fear response from the Democratically controlled Senate, which voted 90-6 against funding the closing of Guantanamo.

With that vote, the Dems returned to their customary defensive crouch. But it’s not entirely their fault. Obama’s White House made a basic mistake when it failed to recognize that if you leave a bunch of beaten dogs alone in the backyard for a week with the person who beat them, they’ll whine and mewl and suck up to that abusive master all over again.

It doesn’t matter that Cheney is on the other side of the fence now and can no longer hurt them. Old habits die hard, and it takes a firm hand to get a yellow dog up out of the middle of the road and home where it belongs.

Where was Obama as video of orange-garbed Gitmo prisoners were being splayed across TV for the past few weeks? The fandango about the suspected terrorists (or simply “the terrorists,” as most media call them) spiraled into deeper and deeper sinkholes of illogic with each passing day. Gitmoers, we were told, are going to bust outta the local jail, or worse, assemble Islamofacist gangs while in Supermax solitary lockdown; then they’ll hold a habeas corpus carved out of soap to some hapless guard’s head and walk out into the sunny suburbs, scot-free. Never mind that they’re not U.S. citizens and have not a scintilla of a chance to be legally released among the citizenry.

Nonetheless, the cowed Dems ran at the very prospect of ads like the Senate Republican web spot that went up earlier this month (and that Rachel Maddow skewered beautifully), or this one, a sort of Daisy Girl Goes to Gitmo, released today by RNC:

In his speech, Obama sympathized with the quaking souls of his fellow Party members, saying, “These issues are fodder for 30-second commercials and direct-mail pieces that are designed to frighten. I get it.”

Get a grip, European-style socialists! There’s plenty of evidence that the American people want to turn the page on all that fear and doubt. A vast majority desperately wants Barack Obama to be their knight in shining armor, hoping he will modestly rewrite the social contract in a way that eases their economic burdens, gets us out of wars we can’t afford, and moves toward the universal health care that every other developed country takes for granted.

But if we’re supposed to have his back, then he’s got to have ours as well. And as long as Obama lets bankers and their friends, like Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, stay in power, Americans will have nagging doubts about who’s on whose side.

This is where domestic and national security issues come together in a single Gordian Knot. Watching Cheney’s sneering performance, the thought hit home that the real power in America doesn’t come from the barrel of a gun but from the threat of a pink slip. Sure, Wall Street is unpopular now, resented and derided around the world, but Cheney’s very persistence on the stage (and the lickspittle obeisance he got from much of the media, which raised him to be Obama’s — and not, say, Bobby Jindal’s — split-screen equal) was a warning that FDR’s “malefactors of great wealth” are still standing just behind the curtain.

Remember: Not a single major banking chief has been fired for the financial scandals yet; Geithner recently announced that no caps will be placed on executive salaries; and his nominee for the number-two post at the Treasury Department is Neal Wolin, who helped write the bank deregulations that triggered the capitalist collapse in the first place. If the people can’t feel certain that Obama’s going to defend them from such gimlet-eyed sharks, they’re going to be less likely to stand up to Cheney when he plays scary organ music about our physical safety.

Of course, neither Obama nor Cheney spoke directly about the banking bailouts or rising unemployment Thursday morning. But the back-to-back speeches make clear how much of Obama’s foreign policy depends on the success of his domestic economic agenda, and vice versa. Sure, Cheney’s lies were preposterous, as Lawrence O’Donnell energetically noted immediately after the speech:

But Cheney’s aura of authority — complete with rising poll numbers! — is no lie: It stems not only from his masterful fear-mongering, but from the fact that he still speaks from the commanding heights of the ecomony. The former CEO of Halliburton who devised U.S. energy policy with a secret cabal of oil executives represents the industrial and financial elite, whose largesse paid for the microphone he used at AEI. What many of us heard as Cheney talked about “enhanced interrogation techniques,” 9/11, and security for das Homeland was the suggestion that, ultimately, he could still hire or fire us all.

We’re beginning to see the limits of Obama’s moderation, the checks it puts on just how effective a Chief Protector he can be for the middle-class, much less for the poor. While we look on enthralled by Obama’s elegance and calm reason, Cheney waits like a troll under the bridge, watching for the slightest misstep. What I fear is that Obama hasn’t made enough of a change from the Bush-Cheney-Paulsen economic model to keep us from falling back into a financial Charybdis.

Leslie Savan is the author of Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever.

22 May

Cheney: ‘Torture was never permitted’

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , .

The Swamp 5/21/09 1:45 PM

by Mark Silva

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, delivering a forceful defense of the Bush administration’s interrogations of suspected terrorists and stern criticism of the Obama administration, maintained today that the CIA never tortured anyone, but kept the United States safe from an attack potentially worse than the terrorism of Sept. 11, 2001.

The “water-boarding” employed in the questioning of a few captured terrorists was essential to gleaning as much information about al Qaeda’s intentions as quickly as possible in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, the former vice president said in a public address today.

President Barack Obama has banned the harshest tactics that the CIA employed in the interrogation of suspected terrorists captured after 9/11, with his Justice Department labeling water-boarding, a simulated drowning tactic used in many interrogations, as “torture.”

“Torture was never permitted,” Cheney said in his address today at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., where his wife, Lynne Cheney, has worked as a scholar, and where he has delivered defenses of his administration’s policies before.

“Interrogators had authoritative guidance on the line between interrogation and torture, and they knew to stay on the right side of it,” Cheney asserted. “For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States of America has never lost its moral bearings.”

The former vice president’s planned speech served as a direct and forceful counterpoint to Obama’s own address on national security today at the National Archives just an hour before. While Obama explained his plans for closing the U.S. military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Cheney asserted that the prison is essential – and warned against moving its most dangerous detainees to prisons on U.S. soil.

Cheney not only defended the Bush administration’s practices, but also derisively criticized those who contend that the administration had strayed beyond legal boundaries with its handling of captured terrorists.

He dismissed criticism of his administration’s tactics as “recklessness cloaked in righteousness.”

22 May

Dick Cheney’s waterboarding: 9/11 redux

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: , , , .

The Swamp 5/22/09 3:48 PM

by Mark Silva

Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser in the White House of the first President Bush – when Dick Cheney was serving as defense secretary – opposed the second Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

In the transition from one war against Saddam Hussein to another, Scowcroft has suggested, something happened to his old friend, Dick Cheney, vice president for the second Bush.

“The real anomaly in the administration is Cheney,” Scowcroft said in an interview for a New Yorker article in October 2005. “I consider Cheney a good friend — I’ve known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.”

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There always were some who believed the first Bush should have “finished the job’after pushing Iraq out of Kuwait, Scowcroft said then, but there also was “another bunch who were traumatized by 9/11, and who thought, ‘The world’s going to Hell and we’ve got to show we’re not going to take this, and we’ve got to respond, and Afghanistan is O.K., but it’s not sufficient.”’

For all the words that Cheney uttered this week in defense of the second Bush administration’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the water-boarding of a few terrorists after 9/11 – torture was never permitted, Cheney insisted in his address to the American Enterprise Institute – the most revealing words were those of a man who, after serving four presidents and a stint in Congress and surviving a few heart attacks as well, is not prone to public introspection.

“For me, one of the defining experiences was the morning of 9/11 itself,” Cheney said this week. “As you might recall, I was in my office in that first hour, when radar caught sight of an airliner heading toward the White House at 500 miles an hour. That was Flight 77, the one that ended up hitting the Pentagon.

“With the plane still inbound, Secret Service agents came into my office and said we had to leave, now,” he recalled. “A few moments later I found myself in a fortified White House command post somewhere down below.

“There in the bunker came the reports and images that so many Americans remember from that day–word of the crash in Pennsylvania, the final phone calls from hijacked planes, the final horror for those who jumped to their death to escape burning alive,” he said.

” In the years since, I’ve heard occasional speculation that I’m a different man after 9/11,” Cheney said. “I wouldn’t say that. But I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities.”

Coverage of the vice president’s counterpoint this week to the national security address that President Barack Obama delivered at the National Archives has generated a lot of email. For those who wanted to hear more, here is the full run of Cheney’s talk at the American Enterprise Institute. For those who want to hear no more, the comment boards also are open. As usual, we welcome all:

(Photo of Dick Cheney at AEI by Luis Alvarez / AP)

22 May

The Truth About Richard Bruce Cheney

Posted by James O'Rourke in Opinions and Other Issues. Tagged: .

THE WASHINGTON NOTE

Wednesday, May 13 2009, 5:32PM

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This is a guest post exclusive to The Washington Note by Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who is former chief of staff of the Department of State during the term of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Lawrence Wilkerson is also Pamela Harriman Visiting Professor at the College of William & Mary.

Last night I was on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC at the top of the hour. But before I came on, through the earpiece I listened to the five minutes that Rachel sketched as a lead-in. Most of it was videotape from the last few days of former Vice President Dick Cheney extolling the virtues of harsh interrogation, torture, and his leadership. I had heard some of it earlier of course but not all of it and not in such a tightly-packed package.

Let’s just say that five minutes of the Sith Lord was stunningly inaccurate.

So, when I got home last night, I thought long and hard about what I knew at this point in my investigations with respect to the former VP’s office. Here it is.

First, more Americans were killed by terrorists on Cheney’s watch than on any other leader’s watch in US history. So his constant claim that no Americans were killed in the “seven and a half years” after 9/11 of his vice presidency takes on a new texture when one considers that fact. And it is a fact. Continue reading »

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