Obama to sign indefinite detention bill into law

After spending months threatening a veto, the president decides to codify the first such bill since the 1950s VIDEO

By Glenn Greenwald

President Barack Obama speaks to troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2011. (Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
(updated below)

In one of the least surprising developments imaginable, President Obama – after spending months threatening to veto the Levin/McCain detention bill – yesterday announced that he would instead sign it into law (this is the same individual, of course, who unequivocally vowed when seeking the Democratic nomination to support a filibuster of “any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecom[s],” only to turn around – once he had the nomination secure — and not only vote against such a filibuster, but to vote in favor of the underlying bill itself, so this is perfectly consistent with his past conduct). As a result, the final version of the Levin/McCain bill will be enshrined as law this week as part of the the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). I wrote about the primary provisions and implications of this bill last week, and won’t repeat those points here.

The ACLU said last night that the bill contains “harmful provisions that some legislators have said could authorize the U.S. military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians, including American citizens, anywhere in the world” and added: “if President Obama signs this bill, it will damage his legacy.” Human Rights Watch said that Obama’s decision “does enormous damage to the rule of law both in the US and abroad” and that “President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.”

Both groups pointed out that this is the first time indefinite detention has been enshrined in law since the McCarthy era of the 1950s, when — as the ACLU put it — “President Truman had the courage to veto” the Internal Security Act of 1950 on the ground that it “would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights” and then watched Congress override the veto. That Act authorized the imprisonment of Communists and other “subversives” without the necessity of full trials or due process (many of the most egregious provisions of that bill were repealed by the 1971 Non-Detention Act, and are now being rejuvenated by these War on Terror policies of indefinite detention). President Obama, needless to say, is not Harry Truman. He’s not even the Candidate Obama of 2008 who repeatedly insisted that due process and security were not mutually exclusive and who condemned indefinite detention as “black hole” injustice.

There have been several persistent myths circulating about this bill and President Obama’s position on it that need to be clarified once and for all:

First, while the powers this bill enshrines are indeed radical and dangerous, most of them already exist. That’s because first the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have aggressively argued that the original 2001 AUMF already empowers them to imprison people without charges, use force against even U.S. citizens without due process (Anwar Awlaki), and target not only members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban (as the law states) but also anyone who “substantially supports” those groups and/or “associated forces” (whatever those terms mean). That’s why this bill states that it does not intend to change the 2001 AUMF (even as it codifies far broader language defining the scope of the war) or the detention powers of the President, and it’s why they purposely made the bill vague on whether it expressly authorizes military detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil: it’s because the bill’s proponents and the White House both believe that the President already possesses these broadened powers with or without this bill. With a couple of exceptions, this bill just “clarifies” — and codifies — the powers President Obama has already claimed, seized and exercised.

I’m embedding the video below of the segment I did last night on Cenk Uygur’s TV program where I elaborated on this point: this is not to mitigate how heinous this bill is, as there are real dangers to codifying these powers in law with bipartisan Congressional support as opposed to having the President unilaterally seize them and have some lower courts recognize them. Instead, it’s a reflection of how horrible the civil liberties status quo has become under the Bush and Obama administrations. This is the reason why civil libertarians have been so harshly critical of this President. It’s the reason civil liberties groups have been saying things like this even when saying them was so unpopular: it’s because Obama has, for three years now, been defending and entrenching exactly the detention powers this law vests, but doing it through radical legal theories, warped interpretations of the 2001 AUMF, continuities with the Bush/Cheney template, and devotion to Endless War and the civil liberties assaults it entails. See the newspaper excerpts below for more proof of this.

Second, as I documented at length last week, Obama’s veto threat was never about substantive objections to the detention powers vested by this bill; put another way, he was never objecting to the bill on civil liberties grounds. Obama, as I documented last week and again below, is not an opponent of indefinite detention; he’s a vigorous proponent of it, as evidenced by his continuous, multi-faceted embrace of that policy.

Obama’s objections to this bill had nothing to do with civil liberties, due process or the Constitution. It had everything to do with Executive power. The White House’s complaint was that Congress had no business tying the hands of the President when deciding who should go into military detention, who should be denied a trial, which agencies should interrogate suspects (the FBI or the CIA). Such decisions, insisted the White House, are for the President, not Congress, to make. In other words, his veto threat was not grounded in the premise that indefinite military detention is wrong; it was grounded in the premise that it should be the President who decides who goes into military detention and why, not Congress.

Even the one substantive objection the White House expressed to the bill — mandatory military detention for accused American Terrorists captured on U.S. soil — was about Executive power, not due process or core liberties. The proof of that — the definitive, conclusive proof — is that Sen. Carl Levin has several times disclosed that it was the White House which demanded removal of a provision in his original draft that would have exempted U.S. citizens from military detention (see the clip of Levin explaining this in the video below). In other words, this was an example of the White House demanding greater detention powers in the bill by insisting on the removal of one of its few constraints (the prohibition on military detention for Americans captured on U.S. soil). That’s because the White House’s North Star on this bill —  as they repeatedly made clear — was Presidential discretion: they were going to veto the bill if it contained any limits on the President’s detention powers, regardless of whether those limits forced him to put people in military prison or barred him from doing so.

Any doubt that this was the White House’s only concern with the bill is now dispelled by virtue of the President’s willingness to sign it after certain changes were made in Conference between the House and Senate. Those changes were almost entirely about removing the parts of the bill that constrained his power, and had nothing to do with improving the bill from a civil liberties perspective. Once the sole concern of the White House was addressed — eliminating limits on the President’s power — they were happy to sign the bill even though (rather: because) none of the civil liberties assaults were fixed. As Mother Jones‘ Adam Serwer explained:

This morning I wrote that by making the mandatory military detention provisions mandatory in name only, the Senate had offered the administration an opportunity to see how seriously it takes its own rhetoric on civil liberties. The administration had said that the military detention provisions of an earlier version of the NDAA were “inconsistent with the fundamental American principle that our military does not patrol our streets.”
The revised NDAA is still inconsistent with that fundamental American principle. But the administration has decided that fundamental American principles aren’t actually worth vetoing the bill over. 

That’s because, as Serwer explained in a separate post, Congress — in response to the veto threat — made changes “addressing the security concerns, but not the ones related to civil liberties and the rule of law” (by “security concerns,” the White House means: don’t restrict what the President can do). That the White House cared only about the former (presidential discretion), and not at all about the letter (civil liberties), is proven by its willingness to sign the bill when only objections to the former have been addressed. For more proof on this point — and the perfect encapsulation of it — see this comment here.
Third, the most persistent and propagandistic set of myths about President Obama on detention issues is that he tried to end indefinite detention by closing Guantanamo, but was blocked by Congress from doing so. It is true that Congress blocked the closing of Guantanamo, and again in this bill, Congress is imposing virtually insurmountable restrictions on the transfer of detainees out of that camp, including for detainees who have long ago been cleared for release (restrictions that Obama is now going to sign into law). But — and this is not a hard point to understand — while Obama intended to close Guantanamo, he always planned — long before Congress acted — to preserve Guantanamo’s core injustice: indefinite detention.

I need to say that again: long before, and fully independent of, anything Congress did, President Obama made clear that he was going to preserve the indefinite detention system at Guantanamo even once he closed the camp. That’s what makes the apologias over Obama and GITMO so misleading: the controversy over Guantanamo was not that about its locale — that it was based in the Caribbean Sea — so that simply closing it and then  re-locating it to a different venue would address the problem. The controversy over Guantanamo was that it was a prison camp where people were put in cages indefinitely, for decades or life, without being charged with any crime. And that policy is one that President Obama whole-heartedly embraced from the start.

Totally prior to and independent of anything Congress did, President Obama fully embraced indefinite detention as his own policy. He is a proponent — not an opponent — of indefinite detention. Just review the facts — the indisputable facts — if you have any doubt about that or if you know anyone who does:


New York Times, May 23, 2009:

New York Times, January 22, 2010:

New York Times, February 21, 2009:

ACLU, December 15, 2009:

This is why even some progressive Senators such as Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders ultimately voted to deny funding to the closing of Guantanamo: not because they favored GITMO, but because they wanted first to see Obama’s plan for what would replace it, because they did not want to allocate funds to a plan that would simply re-locate GITMO and its defining injustice — indefinite detention — onto U.S. soil.
Can any rational person review these events and try to claim that Obama is some sort of opponent of indefinite detention? He is one of American history’s most aggressive defenders of that power. As Human Rights Watch put it: “President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.” There is no partisan loyalty or leader-reverent propaganda strong enough to obscure that fact.
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Thank you very much to everyone who participated in last week’s blog fund-raiser. As much as the donations themselves, the expressions of reader support are truly gratifying, and galvanizing. It is much appreciated. I will be sending out thank you emails over the next few weeks but wanted to thank everyone here who contributed.
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I have an Op-Ed in the print edition of The Guardian today on Bradley Manning, who — after 17 months of harsh imprisonment — will finally see the inside of a courtroom when the preliminary stage of his military trial commences tomorrow; that Op-Ed can be read here.
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Here is the segment I did last night with Cenk Uygur on his new Current TV program; he started off the segment with quite a rant (understandably so), so our discussion begins at roughly the 7:00 mark, though the video of Sen. Levin explaining the White House’s demands for domestic detention power is at roughly the 2:30 mark.

Friday, May 11, 2012 03:19 AM PDT

Various matters

Causes of Yemeni terrorism, Obama and marriage equality, lawlessness in Libya, and the 2012 election

By Glenn Greenwald

 

(1) On Wednesday, I was on Cenk Uygur’s Current TV show with Michael Hastings discussing the Yemen bomb plot, and the video of that seven-minute segment is below. The discussion focused on the way in which U.S. “counter-Terrorism” policy in Yemen causes the very Terrorism it ostensibly seeks to battle. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported on several U.S. attacks in Yemen from this week alone and noted: “The latest strikes, aimed at al-Qaeda operatives in southern Yemen, bring the total this year to at least 15, about as many as in the previous 10 years combined“; just this morning, 17 more people were killed by U.S. airstrikes in Southern Yemen. The Obama administration recently leaked that it was escalating its attacks in Yemen to target those who names it does not know — not only with drones but also from the sea — and The Nation‘s Jeremy Scahill wrote this week that still more escalation is likely: “It seems there’s going to be a pretty serious, widespread bombing campaign with ground support in southern Yemen very soon.”

As I did this segment, I actually thought about how complete is the media suppression of the question of what causes Yemenis to want to attack the U.S. Extensive establishment media coverage has been devoted over the last few weeks to Yemen, and almost nobody in those discussions ever raises the question of why some people in Yemen might support such attacks. If you think about it, it’s really quite an impressive propaganda feat. It’s just natural for people who are targeted with violence to wonder what is motivating the attackers — recall the “Why-Do-They-Hate-Us?” bafflement in the wake of 9/11 — and yet that question has been almost entirely disappeared from establishment media discourse:

(2) For those of you who weren’t sufficiently angry at me for my praise of Obama’s support for same-sex marriage, I now have an Op-Ed in The Guardian elaborating on one discrete point: why this is an event of historical significance. I was actually motivated to write it by this excellent comment in response to my post on Wednesday; the commenter explained that what mattered here isn’t how this does or does not reflect on Obama but rather the impact of the act itself:

I’m generally no fan of Obama, and many of the reasons why are reported regularly in Glenn’s blog. . . .
On this issue, Obama’s statement today will be remembered 20 years from now, while his motives, and the North Carolina vote yesterday, and Biden’s carefully calibrated statement last week, and Obama’s previous dithering on this issue, will be long forgotten. A sitting President of the United States is willing, for the first time, to personally back basic civil rights for people who love others of the same sex. That is an action. It’s mostly symbolic, sure, but it will mean a whole lot to a whole lot of people.
I’m old enough to remember eight years of Ronald Reagan not once mentioning the AIDS pandemic while it raged. Any queer or queer ally who lived through that era will instantly recognize today’s significance. That was less than 25 years ago. To get from there to this is remarkable.
No, today’s statement doesn’t get any legislation passed (at least, not directly), and the states’ rights hedge is a copout. But the important takeaway is that marriage equality opponents, and homophobes in general, can no longer dismiss gay civil rights as a fringe concern, and the notion that we can be separated from the fabric of American life and be shunned, buried, and forgotten is officially dead.
Eventually, marriage equality and all those other civil and social rights straight people take for granted will become the law of the land and the norm for everyone. Today helps get us there. That’s worth celebrating no matter how many odious other things Obama’s done.

As he suggests, people who have lived through and were personally affected by that history probably have an instinctive understanding of the significance of this week’s events, so I wanted to place this issue in an historical context and used the Guardian Op-Ed to do that.

(3) In The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Robert Worth has a long and superbly reported article on the rampant torture, lawlessness, arbitrary detentions, vengeance “justice”, and militia rule plaguing Libya — more than six months after the killing of Moammar Ghadaffi (he also notes some isolated flashes of human decency in the midst of the horrors). A couple of days ago, the NYT reported on an attack on the prime minister’s headquarters and said this:

Truckloads of armed men attacked the Tripoli headquarters of Libya’s interim prime minister on Tuesday, in a new demonstration of the lawlessness pervading the capital just weeks before a scheduled national election. . . . Security in the capital is negligible, and gunfights between armed groups from rival neighborhoods or towns are a frequent occurrence in its streets. . . .
“You know that security here is a big joke,” Fathi Baja, a council member, said at the time. With an antiaircraft gun mounted on a pickup truck, he said, “you can do whatever you want — nobody can stop you.”

Obviously, one of the lessons from the attack on Iraq was that if foreign nations use military force to remove a long-standing despot and then fail to stabilize the country, it will be followed by extreme levels of violence, lawlessness, chaos, brutality and militia rule. That is precisely what is happening in Libya, and has been happening there for almost a year now.
As I wrote from the start of the proposed intervention, one cannot say that things have improved for Libyans by the mere killing of Gadaffi without knowing what replaces his rule (those who declared victory based solely on Gadaffi’s death were guilty of succumbing to the adolescent, Hollywood-manufactured tendency to view the supreme foreign goal as killing the “bad guys”; Chris Hayes wrote about that mentality a year ago). It’s still possible, of course, that the situation in Libya can improve, but it’s been fairly infuriating to watch the loudest advocates of the intervention, who flamboyantly claimed vindication upon Gadaffi’s death, simply ignore the aftermath. For obvious reasons, that conspicuous indifference seriously calls into question the role that “humanitarianism” actually played here.

(4) Matt Taibbi has an excellent post on the 2012 presidential election, focusing on how boring and apathy-producing it is, particularly compared to the 2008 election, and how this threatens to undermine one of the prime purposes of American elections — distracting citizens’ attention from what is actually being done:

Meanwhile, Obama has turned out to represent continuity with the Bush administration on a range of key issues, from torture to rendition to economic deregulation. Obama is doing things with extralegal drone strikes that would have liberals marching in the streets if they’d been done by Bush. . . .
In other words, Obama versus McCain actually felt like a clash of ideological opposites. But Obama and Romney feels like a contest between two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus that will operate according to the same demented imperial logic irrespective of who wins the White House.
Then there’s one more thing – Obama versus Romney is the worst reality show on TV since the Tila Tequila days. The characters are terrible, there’s no suspense, and the biggest thing is, it lacks both spontaneity and a gross-out factor. In Reality TV, if you don’t have really sexy half-naked young people scheming against each other over campfires in the Cook Islands, you need to have grown men eating millipedes or chicks in bikinis drinking donkey semen. And if you don’t have that, you really need Sarah Palin.
This race has none of that. . . . The presidential race is always a great illusion, designed to distract people from the more hardcore politics in this country, the minutiae of trade and tax and monetary policy that’s too boring to cover. When the presidential race is a bad show, people might not have any choice but to pay attention to those other things. And this year’s version is the worst show in memory. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Digby dissents from that last point on the ground that political strategists and media mavens are adept at keeping interest levels high by manufacturing the appearance of meaningful conflicts: “It’s like one of those Housewife reality shows where everyone is obscenely wealthy and they create phony feuds and stage screaming fights and then magically become bffs the next season. It’s kind of a trainwreck that you can’t keep your eyes off of at first, but then you just end up falling asleep in front of the TV.”
I think I side more with Digby on this specific question. No matter how trivial are most of the differences between the two candidates and no matter how much each of them is a banal, status-quo-perpetuating imperial manager, the power of political manipulation is potent indeed. Recall that the Obama campaign was named Advertising Age‘s Marketer of the Year for 2008 for its excellence in brand management (the brand being Obama), and the campaign also “claimed two top awards at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards.”
To see how vulnerable people are to this advertising manipulation, one need look only a few posts down from the one by Digby which I just quoted, to one on her blog written by Democratic Party door-to-door canvasser David Atkins. He posted a super-trite one-minute video from the Obama campaign that begins by blaming Bush for America’s woes while sad villain music plays in the background. Then, when 2009 arrives, the ad suddenly shifts to happy, majestic, uplifting muzak — the kind played on an ABC after-school special when a boy and his lost dog are finally re-united – as we see images of the Democratic Commander-in-Chief boldly exiting his presidential helicopter as he stiffly salutes Marines, followed by a grainy-green video feed of U.S. military helicopters dispatched on a dangerous mission under his strong command. We are told that, under Obama, “our greatest enemy [cue bin Laden's face] was brought to justice by our greatest heroes [U.S. soldiers using night-cam helmets and automatic rifles]” and that “He believed in us, fought for us,” and that the American middle class is returning to its greatness, and that “you don’t quit, and neither does he.”
After viewing this mundane, vapid jingoistic tripe, Atkins gushed:

It’s beautiful. Brilliant. . . . It’s hopeful. Inspiring. . . . As a political observer, watching the ad gives me a rush of endorphins, not least because I know that the team that puts out ads like this is probably going to defeat Mitt Romney’s more hapless crew.

Watching that ad literally causes a chemical change to his brain: it triggers “a rush of endorphins.” It makes him feel pleasure, and powerful, and purposeful. And remember, this is someone who writes on (and thus presumably reads) the blog of a very astute political commentator, one who on a virtually daily basis documents the cynicism, deceit and deficiencies at the heart of the Obama presidency (and was also one of the earliest and most vocal skeptics of the notion that Obama the Candidate was some sort of grand, transformational figure), so just imagine how ads like this affect someone less exposed to those facts than he. Indeed, Atkins himself expressly acknowledges that the imagery injected into his brain bears little resemblance to reality, but that rational awareness is no match for the emotional and psychological manipulation. He stands helpless before it, and is grateful for that (just as those who feel thrills “running up their legs” or “starbursts” in their groins when watching their favorite political leader are grateful for those chemical sensations).
That’s what effective political oratory accomplishes: it overrides rational thought and imposes a false reality from the outside. Recall what Ezra Klein wrote in 2008 after listening to Obama, in an article appropriately entitled “Obama’s Gift”:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. His speeches are so big as to expose the smallness of the pretty prejudices and mundane considerations that might interrupt the march of his words, so big that they inspire his listeners to rise to meet their challenge. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our best selves, to the place where America exists as a ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

That’s virtually biblical in its praise. And while Klein himself, after watching Obama up close for several years, has become more measured and grounded, Obama is still a highly effective politician capable of this level of exploitation: exploiting people’s hopes and desires. When you combine that with the desire to believe — to feel once again that he will uplift people’s lives and that the hope one placed in him was justified and not misguided: nobody wants to feel like they were successfully defrauded — it’s an easy trick to repeat. There will probably be lowered levels of enthusiasm this time around. There will be some 2008 supporters who refuse to vote for him at all. But political operatives on each side will spend the next six months using every available form of brand management and advertising manipulation to continuously impart the message that Everything is At Stake — that it’s a grand Manichean battle between Our Great Leader and Their Evil Villain — and there will be plenty of endorphins pumping through people’s brains. There will be enough to drown a large country.

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Thursday, May 10, 2012 03:09 AM PDT

Wall Street’s immunity

Why has the Obama administration so aggressively protected the financial industry from legal accountability?

By Glenn Greenwald

 

President Obama and Eric Holder (Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing)

(updated below)
Of all the ignominious actions of the Obama administration, the steadfast, systematic shielding of Wall Street from criminal liability is probably the most corrupt in the traditional sense of that word. In Newsweek this week, Peter Boyer and Peter Schweizer have an excellent examination of what happened and why, tying together crucial threads. First they lay out the basic facts, including the core deceit of the President’s campaigning for re-election like he’s some sort of populist crusader:

With the Occupy protesters resuming battle stations, and Mitt Romney in place as the presumptive Republican nominee, President Obama has begun to fashion his campaign as a crusade for the 99 percent–a fight against, as one Obama ad puts it, “a guy who had a Swiss bank account.” Casting Romney as a plutocrat will be easy enough. But the president’s claim as avenging populist may prove trickier, given his own deeply complicated, even conflicted, relationship with Big Finance.
Obama came into office vowing to end business as usual, and, in the gray post-crash dawn of 2009, nowhere did a reckoning with justice seem more due than in the financial sector. . . .  Two months into his presidency, Obama summoned the titans of finance to the White House, where he told them, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” . . .

Candidate Obama had been their guy, accepting vast amounts of Wall Street campaign money for his victories over Hillary Clinton and John McCain (Goldman Sachs executives ponied up $1 million, more than any other private source of funding in 2008). Obama far outraised his Republican rival, John McCain, on Wall Street–around $16 million to $9 million. As it turned out, Obama apparently actually meant what he said at that White House meeting–his administration effectively would stand between Big Finance and anything like a severe accounting. To the dismay of many of Obama’s supporters, nearly four years after the disaster, there has not been a single criminal charge filed by the federal government against any top executive of the elite financial institutions.

“It’s perplexing at best,” says Phil Angelides, the Democratic former California treasurer who chaired the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. “It’s deeply troubling at worst.”

The Newsweek reporters note that “financial-fraud prosecutions by the Department of Justice are at 20-year lows”; in fact, such prosecutions under Obama “are just one third of what they were during the Clinton administration” — even though the 2008 financial crisis was drowning in financial fraud. Contrast that with the reaction of George H.W. Bush to the much less severe Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s:

“There hasn’t been any serious investigation of any of the large financial entities by the Justice Department, which includes the FBI,” says William Black, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who, as a government regulator in the 1980s, helped clean up the S&L mess. Black, who is a Democrat, notes that the feds dealt with the S&L crisis with harsh justice, bringing more than a thousand prosecutions, and securing a 90 percent conviction rate. The difference between the government’s response to the two crises, Black says, is a matter of will, and priorities. “You need heads on the pike,” he says. “The first President Bush’s orders were to get the most prominent, nastiest frauds, and put their heads on pikes as a demonstration that there’s a new sheriff in town.”

The Newsweek article offers two well-grounded theories for why Wall Street has been so aggressively protected by the DOJ. The first is that Obama filled his highest level Cabinet positions with Wall Street-subservient officials, beginning with Attorney General Eric Holder, who had been working as a highly-paid corporate lawyer for the law firm Covington & Burling, which represents “Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Deutsche Bank.” The other top-tier DOJ positions were similarly filled with corporate lawyers from large law firms closely tied to and depended upon the financial industry. The problem is obvious:

Some suggest there is also the potential for conflicting interest when the department’s top officials come from lucrative law practices representing the very financial institutions that Justice is supposed to be investigating. “And that’s where they’re going back to,” says Black. “Everybody knows there is a problem with that.” (Two members of Holder’s team have already returned to Covington.)

Why would top DOJ officials — with bulging bank accounts from prior Wall Street service and, with their elevated status as top DOJ officials, future plans for even more bulging bank accounts upon returning — possibly alienate the very industry that will enrich them by prosecuting its top-level criminals? The full-scale immunity bestowed on Wall Street provides the answer.
Then there’s the reliance on Wall Street money for President Obama’s re-election effort. Newsweek notes the multiple investigations that documented numerous criminal acts leading to the financial crisis, including some explicitly incriminating top Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs. Anticipating possible indictments, “Goldman executives, including the firm’s chief executive officer, Lloyd Blankfein, started hiring defense lawyers.” Moreover, Black “says the conduct could well have violated federal fraud statutes–’securities fraud for false disclosures, wire and mail fraud for making false representations about the quality of the loans and derivatives they were selling, bank fraud for false representations to the regulators.’” Beyond the Wall-Street-subservient officials, why have those led to no prosecutions?

Meanwhile, Obama’s political operation continued to ask Wall Street for campaign money. A curious pattern developed. A Newsweek examination of campaign finance records shows that, in the weeks before and after last year’s scathing Senate report, several Goldman executives and their families made large donations to Obama’s Victory Fund and related entities, some of them maxing out at the highest individual donation allowed, $35,800, even though 2011 was an electoral off-year. Some of these executives were giving to Obama for the first time.

Justice insists that political operations such as fundraising are kept strictly distanced from the department, in order to avoid even the appearance of political influence. But the attorney general and his team are not unfamiliar with the process; Holder was himself an Obama bundler–a fundraiser who collected large sums from various donors–in 2008, as were several other lawyers who joined him at Justice.

It would be a leap to infer these Goldman contributions were made–or received–as quid pro quo for dropping a criminal investigation. Still, the situation constitutes what one Justice veteran acknowledged is a “bad set of facts.”

The article goes on to detail the pressure that was continuously placed by the Obama administration on state attorneys general to agree to a lax settlement with banks regarding foreclosure fraud, and how they ultimately co-opted the holdouts to agree to the deal. It notes that while Obama, through last fall, “had collected more donations from Wall Street than any of the Republican candidates” (even “employees of Bain Capital donated more than twice as much to Obama as they did to Romney, who founded the firm”), Wall Street money is now beginning to flock to Romney. That’s almost certainly because Wall Street dislikes some of Obama’s populist rhetoric (financial industry executives are very sensitive and coddled and dislike any hint of criticism, no matter how symbolic and insincere) and because Romney is one of them (they certainly can’t go wrong with Romney either). But it also is clear that they are attempting to leverage Obama’s need for their support into even further concessions: ones that, if the past is any indication, will be eagerly forthcoming.
This is a vital part of the Obama legacy. The prior decade witnessed the most egregious crimes imaginable by the nation’s most powerful actors: torture and warrantless eavesdropping from political officials (with the aid of corporate giants), and massive fraud from financial elites. None has been held accountable; the opposite is true: the Obama administration has steadfastly protected all of them. Echoing the prime theme of my last book — that America’s elites are virtually immune from the rule of law — the Newsweek article notes:

Maintaining public faith in the justice system is one of the reasons why people such as Angelides continue to call for a rigorous criminal investigation into Wall Street. “I think it’s fundamental that people in this country need to feel that the justice system is for everyone–that there’s not one system for those people of enormous wealth and power, and one for everyone else,” he says.

But that’s exactly the principle that has undergone such a relentless assault under this administration. That general development is odious in its own right. That the specific shielding of Wall Street is driven by such corrupt ends makes it even worse. But the worst part of it all is that Obama is going to spend the next six months deceitfully parading around as some sort of populist hero standing up for ordinary Americans and the safety net against big business, and hordes of people who know how false that is will echo it as loudly and repeatedly as they can, tricking many people who don’t know better into believing it.

UPDATE: In comments, Montecarlo recalls this amazing New York Times article from March, which I wrote about at the time, lamenting the extreme levels of corruption in Afghanistan’s ruling class (“a narrow business and political elite defined by its corruption”), made all the worse by this: “Despite years of urging and oversight by American advisers, Mr. Karzai’s government has yet to prosecute a high-level corruption case.” It was that phrase “despite years of urging and oversight by American advisers” — as though the U.S. is a beacon of accountability for ruling class corruption — that was really quite remarkable.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012 12:35 PM PDT

Obama “evolves” on marriage

The president deserves credit for his actions in this civil rights area, regardless of his motives

    

(Credit: Benjamin Wheelock)

(updated below – Update II [Thurs.])

President Obama today became the first American president to endorse same-sex marriage, telling ABC News‘s Robin Roberts: “it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” His record on LGBT equality has not been perfect, but it is one area where he has been quite impressive. He engineered the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. His Justice Department is refusing to defend the constitutionality of DOMA in court, a very unusual step. He has ushered in a series of important federal spousal benefits for gay employees of the federal government. And now, for the first time, the office of the American President is officially supporting a policy that a mere decade ago was deemed truly radical: same-sex marriage. Those are real achievements. And, as virtually all polls reflect – underscored by last night’s landslide defeat for marriage equality in North Carolina — they carry genuine political risk. He deserves credit for his actions in this civil rights realm.

It’s worth making two additional points about this. First, the pressure continuously applied on Obama by some gay groups, most gay activists, and (especially) rich gay funders undoubtedly played a significant role in all of these successes. As David Sirota explained today, this demonstrates why it is so vital to always apply critical pressure even to politicians one likes and supports, and conversely, it demonstrates why it is so foolish and irresponsible to devote oneself with uncritical, blind adoration to a politician, whether in an election year or any other time (unconditional allegiance is the surest way to render one’s beliefs and agenda irrelevant). When someone who wields political power does something you dislike or disagree with, it’s incumbent upon you to object, criticize, and demand a different course. Those who refuse to do so are abdicating the most basic duty of citizenship and rendering themselves impotent.
It may very well be true that Obama took this step not out of any genuine conviction, but because he perceives that high levels of enthusiasm among the Democratic base generally and gay donors specifically are necessary for his re-election, or because Biden’s comments forced his hand, or any number of other tactical reasons. I don’t know what his secret motives are, but even if they could be discerned, I think it’s irrelevant.
When it comes to assessing a politician, what matters, at least to me, are actions, not motives. If they do the wrong thing, they should be criticized regardless of motive; conversely, if they do the right thing, they should be credited. I’ve had zero tolerance over the last three years for people who pop up to justify all the horrible things Obama has done by claiming that he is forced to do them out of political necessity or in cowardly deference to public opinion; that’s because horrible acts don’t become less horrible because they’re prompted by some rational, self-interested political motive rather than conviction. That’s equally true of positive acts: they don’t become less commendable because they were the by-product of political pressure or self-preservation; when a politician takes the right course of action, as Obama did today, credit is merited, regardless of motive.
It should go without saying that none of this mitigates the many horrendous things Obama has done in other areas, nor does it mean he deserves re-election. But just as it’s intellectually corrupted to refuse to criticize him when he deserves it, the same is true of refusing to credit him when he deserves it. Today, he deserves credit. LGBT equality is one area — and it’s an important area for millions of Americans — where he has conducted himself commendably and deserves praise. That was true before today, but even more so now.

UPDATE: Adam Serwer complains that while endorsing same-sex marriage as a personal view, Obama insisted that it is up to the states to decide; thus, writes Serwer, “Obama has endorsed marriage equality federalism—not the notion that marriage for gays and lesbians is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution that can never be taken away.” He adds, correctly, that Obama has merely “adopted the same position that Vice President Dick Cheney did in 2004, when Cheney said he believed in marriage equality but that the states should be allowed to decide by a show of hands, as North Carolina did Tuesday, whether gays and lesbians have the same rights as everyone else.” Gawker’s John Cook voices a similar complaint.
This objection is true as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. I actually had this debate with Adam over the weekend on Twitter, as I argued that Cheney had endorsed marriage equality back in 2004 while Adam insisted that Cheney had merely advanced a states’ rights argument. But Cheney back then — like Obama today — said that he believes same-sex couples should be able to legally marry. That’s marriage equality. It may be true that each believes that it’s an issue for the states to decide democratically — which means that they believe there is no Constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry — but ultimately, this issue is likely to be democratically decided on a state-by-state basis, and either way, since Obama isn’t on the Supreme Court, his view on the constitutionality of opposite-sex-only marriage laws is far less significant than his view on whether marriage laws should include same-sex couples. That both the current Democratic President and the prior GOP Vice President are now on record favoring same-sex marriage can only help this important cause.

UPDATE II: A commenter eloquently explains several key points:

I’m generally no fan of Obama, and many of the reasons why are reported regularly in Glenn’s blog. . . .
On this issue, Obama’s statement today will be remembered 20 years from now, while his motives, and the North Carolina vote yesterday, and Biden’s carefully calibrated statement last week, and Obama’s previous dithering on this issue, will be long forgotten. A sitting President of the United States is willing, for the first time, to personally back basic civil rights for people who love others of the same sex. That is an action. It’s mostly symbolic, sure, but it will mean a whole lot to a whole lot of people.
I’m old enough to remember eight years of Ronald Reagan not once mentioning the AIDS pandemic while it raged. Any queer or queer ally who lived through that era will instantly recognize today’s significance. That was less than 25 years ago. To get from there to this is remarkable.
No, today’s statement doesn’t get any legislation passed (at least, not directly), and the states’ rights hedge is a copout. But the important takeaway is that marriage equality opponents, and homophobes in general, can no longer dismiss gay civil rights as a fringe concern, and the notion that we can be separated from the fabric of American life and be shunned, buried, and forgotten is officially dead.
Eventually, marriage equality and all those other civil and social rights straight people take for granted will become the law of the land and the norm for everyone. Today helps get us there. That’s worth celebrating no matter how many odious other things Obama’s done.

In Salon yesterday, Edmund White similarly wrote:

As a man in his 70s, I grew up in an era when homosexuality was still an offense in some states punishable by death. The stigma of being gay drove my age-mates and me toward drink, suicide and years on the psychoanalytic couch in an effort to go straight. We were wracked with self-hatred, which blighted so many lives of our friends.
Same-sex marriage is a balm to the soul whether it’s an option that an individual embraces or not. The idea that our relationships could be normalized is such a happy sign for those of us who grew up feeling alienated from society and like second-class citizens. The battle is not yet won, but the president’s stand points the way toward success.

There’s no denying that this is a significant event that moves the nation closer to equality for millions of people who have long been denied it in countless damaging ways. That’s an important, and positive, step no matter what else is true about Obama and no matter what else he has done.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012 07:17 AM PDT

US attack kills 5 Afghan kids

The way in which the U.S. media ignores such events speaks volumes about how we perceive them

By Glenn Greenwald

(updated below – Update II)
Yesterday, I noted several reports from Afghanistan that as many as 20 civilians were killed by two NATO airstrikes, including a mother and her five children. Today, the U.S. confirmed at least some of those claims, acknowledging and apologizing for its responsibility for the death of that family: