Repulsive progressive hypocrisy

[sad sally]

BY GLENN GREENWALD

During the Bush years, Guantanamo was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to as the “assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution”: so much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not as a secondary but as a central plank in his campaign. But now that there is a Democrat in office presiding over Guantanamo and these other polices — rather than a big, bad, scary Republican — all of that has changed, as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll today demonstrates:

The sharpest edges of President Obama’s counterterrorism policy, including the use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists abroad and keeping open the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have broad public support, including from the left wing of the Democratic Party.
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Repulsive liberal hypocrisy extends far beyond the issue of Guantanamo. A core plank in the Democratic critique of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties assault was the notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. But President Obama has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther than mere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens without due process. As Bush’s own CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden said this week about the Awlaki assassination: “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?” That is indeed “something,” as is the fact that Bush’s mere due-process-free eavesdropping on and detention of American citizens caused such liberal outrage, while Obama’s due-process-free execution of them has not.
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One final point: I’ve often made the case that one of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that he has transformed what was once known as “right-wing shredding of the Constitution” into bipartisan consensus, and this is exactly what I mean. When one of the two major parties supports a certain policy and the other party pretends to oppose it — as happened with these radical War on Terror policies during the Bush years — then public opinion is divisive on the question, sharply split. But once the policy becomes the hallmark of both political parties, then public opinion becomes robust in support of it. That’s because people assume that if both political parties support a certain policy that it must be wise, and because policies that enjoy the status of bipartisan consensus are removed from the realm of mainstream challenge. That’s what Barack Obama has done to these Bush/Cheney policies: he has, as Jack Goldsmith predicted he would back in 2009, shielded and entrenched them as standard U.S. policy for at least a generation, and (by leading his supporters to embrace these policies as their own) has done so with far more success than any GOP President ever could have dreamed of achieving.

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/repulsive_progressive_hypocrisy/singleton/?du

[TheWraith]

1. Third time this is posted, and it's still bullshit.

You know what hypocrisy is? It's saying that it's now okay for the President to step all over Congress and disobey the laws they've passed just because it's for a reason YOU agree with.

[sad sally]

5. America - the land of reinvention. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

[TheWraith]

8. Your jingoism notwithstanding, there's a fairly obvious difference...

...between an administration which commits torture and establishes prison camps, and an administration which bans torture and tries to abolish prison camps.

[sad sally]

10. Would be nice to think the CIA and other clandestine agencies under the Obama administration

weren't in the black prison business, but there's evidence that's not exactly true, as Jeremy Scahill has reported.
#####

The CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia
Jeremy Scahill July 12, 2011

Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.

As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners. The existence of both facilities and the CIA role was uncovered by The Nation during an extensive on-the-ground investigation in Mogadishu. Among the sources who provided information for this story are senior Somali intelligence officials; senior members of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG); former prisoners held at the underground prison; and several well-connected Somali analysts and militia leaders, some of whom have worked with US agents, including those from the CIA. A US official, who confirmed the existence of both sites, told The Nation, “It makes complete sense to have a strong counterterrorism partnership” with the Somali government.

The CIA presence in Mogadishu is part of Washington’s intensifying counterterrorism focus on Somalia, which includes targeted strikes by US Special Operations forces, drone attacks and expanded surveillance operations. The US agents “are here full time,” a senior Somali intelligence official told me. At times, he said, there are as many as thirty of them in Mogadishu, but he stressed that those working with the Somali NSA do not conduct operations; rather, they advise and train Somali agents. “In this environment, it’s very tricky. They want to help us, but the situation is not allowing them to do [it] however they want. They are not in control of the politics, they are not in control of the security,” he adds. “They are not controlling the environment like Afghanistan and Iraq. In Somalia, the situation is fluid, the situation is changing, personalities changing.”
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According to former detainees, the underground prison, which is staffed by Somali guards, consists of a long corridor lined with filthy small cells infested with bedbugs and mosquitoes. One said that when he arrived in February, he saw two white men wearing military boots, combat trousers, gray tucked-in shirts and black sunglasses. The former prisoners described the cells as windowless and the air thick, moist and disgusting. Prisoners, they said, are not allowed outside. Many have developed rashes and scratch themselves incessantly. Some have been detained for a year or more. According to one former prisoner, inmates who had been there for long periods would pace around constantly, while others leaned against walls rocking.

http://www.thenation.com/article/161936/cias-secret-sites-somalia?page=0,0

[sad sally]

11. The Executive Order signed in 2009 reversing the Bush policy left some wiggle room...

The executive orders left maneuvering room on some Bush policies that have long drawn disapproval, however. Senior administration officials indicated that the military commissions established by the previous administration to try prisoners at Guantanamo Bay -- whose operations were suspended by Obama on Wednesday -- might be preserved in some form for those detainees determined to be "unreleasable" and "untriable."

The orders did not prohibit renditions, in which the CIA has secretly transferred prisoners captured in one country to another without trial. Although they mandated that the CIA adhere to interrogation guidelines used by the military, officials said that a separate "protocol" may still be established to govern intelligence agency interrogation practices.
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The CIA -- together with all other government agencies -- would have to rely on the same 16 interrogation techniques approved for military interrogators in a guidebook known as the Army Field Manual.

The administration left open the possibility that the CIA could be given more leeway in the future, not on what the Bush administration called "enhanced interrogation techniques," but on other interrogation-related guidelines. A "separate protocol" would take into account the differences between battlefield interrogations and those aimed at eliciting intelligence about terrorist groups and their plans, the senior administration official said. But he added that the same ban on coercive measures would apply.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/22/AR2009012201527.html

[JoePhilly]

2. Thank god that some one posted Glenn's latest Obama outrage.

I was starting to worry that GG had been sent to Gitmo.

[unblock]

3. who are these liberal hypocrites? i don't know any such person.

if he's talking about obama and his foreign policy team, i wouldn't describe them as "liberal".

outside of the administration, i don't know of a single person who was opposed to torture and eggregious civil rights abuses by shrub who now supports them under obama.

i know plenty who have turned the volume down for partisan reasons, but that's hardly the same thing.

[sad sally]

6. Used to be that liberal Democrats defended the right to be charged, have legal representation, be

tried and first be found guilty before being executed. Now, it seems as long as our President has said that Americans he's ordered to be killed by drones are guilty of "something," the majority of Democrats say it's okay - no questions asked.

From The Washington Post survey:

And get this: Depressingly, Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American citizens by 58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35. Those numbers were provided to me by the Post polling team.

[naragdaban]

9. Yes, but it's still not right.

i know plenty who have turned the volume down for partisan reasons, but that's hardly the same thing.

Things haven't gotten better under Obama. Some policies have gotten worse, although I can understand that Obama probably made a lot of compromises in order to try and serve a second term. Either way, we should be against bad government and injustices no matter what.

[phasma ex machina]

4. "far more success than any GOP President"

BS. GOP Presidents ALWAYS walk over the Constitution FIRST. Leaving Democrat Presidents with the impression that 1. people actually want GOP crap 2. Democrats have to offer GOP crap in order to get elected.

In the end, it's ALWAYS the GOP that dreams up the crap in the first place.

[sad sally]

7. Do you believe the Obama administration's drone program is legal?

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism's report finds that “at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims” and “more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners.” These strikes weren't ordered by a GOP president. How would Americans react if these drone attacks were being carried out right now by Russian or Chinese leaders? Would we be silent in our criticism?
#####

The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.

The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a ‘targeted, focused effort’ that ‘has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.’

Speaking publicly for the first time on the controversial CIA drone strikes, Obama claimed last week they are used strictly to target terrorists, rejecting what he called ‘this perception we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly’.

‘Drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties’, he told a questioner at an on-line forum. ‘This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists trying to go in and harm Americans’.

But research by the Bureau has found that since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than 60 children. A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts.

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/02/04/obama-terror-drones-cia-tactics-in-pakistan-include-targeting-rescuers-and-funerals/?du