Obama's first evil act as president

[chlamor]

Obama's Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan as indicator species

20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama's White House

<snip>

Richard Holbrooke

Like Albright, Holbrooke will have major sway over U.S. policy, whether or not he gets an official job. A career diplomat since the Vietnam War, Holbrooke's most recent government post was as President Clinton's ambassador to the U.N. Among the many violent policies he helped implement and enforce was the U.S.-backed Indonesian genocide in East Timor. Holbrooke was an Assistant Secretary of State in the late 1970s at the height of the slaughter and was the point man on East Timor for the Carter Administration.

According to Brad Simpson, director of the Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, "It was Holbrooke and Zbigniew Brzezinski [another top Obama advisor], both now leading lights in the Democratic Party, who played point in trying to frustrate the efforts of congressional human-rights activists to try and condition or stop U.S. military assistance to Indonesia, and in fact accelerated the flow of weapons to Indonesia at the height of the genocide."

Holbrooke, too, was a major player in the dismantling of Yugoslavia and praised the bombing of Serb Television, which killed 16 media workers, as a significant victory. (The man who ordered that bombing, now-retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, is another Obama foreign policy insider who could end up in his cabinet. While Clark is known for being relatively progressive on social issues, as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, he ordered bombings and attacks that Amnesty International labeled war crimes.)

Like many in Obama's foreign policy circle, Holbrooke also supported the Iraq war. In early 2003, shortly after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the UN, where he presented the administration's fraud-laden case for war to the UN (a speech Powell has since called a "blot" on his reputation), Holbrooke said: "It was a masterful job of diplomacy by Colin Powell and his colleagues, and it does not require a second vote to go to war. … Saddam is the most dangerous government leader in the world today, he poses a threat to the region, he could pose a larger threat if he got weapons of mass destruction deployed, and we have a legitimate right to take action."

<snip>

http://la.indymedia.org/news/2008/11/222404.php

[vigilant]

Obama's Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan as indicator species

20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama's White House

<snip>

Richard Holbrooke

Like Albright, Holbrooke will have major sway over U.S. policy, whether or not he gets an official job. A career diplomat since the Vietnam War, Holbrooke's most recent government post was as President Clinton's ambassador to the U.N. Among the many violent policies he helped implement and enforce was the U.S.-backed Indonesian genocide in East Timor. Holbrooke was an Assistant Secretary of State in the late 1970s at the height of the slaughter and was the point man on East Timor for the Carter Administration.

According to Brad Simpson, director of the Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, "It was Holbrooke and Zbigniew Brzezinski [another top Obama advisor], both now leading lights in the Democratic Party, who played point in trying to frustrate the efforts of congressional human-rights activists to try and condition or stop U.S. military assistance to Indonesia, and in fact accelerated the flow of weapons to Indonesia at the height of the genocide."

Holbrooke, too, was a major player in the dismantling of Yugoslavia and praised the bombing of Serb Television, which killed 16 media workers, as a significant victory. (The man who ordered that bombing, now-retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, is another Obama foreign policy insider who could end up in his cabinet. While Clark is known for being relatively progressive on social issues, as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, he ordered bombings and attacks that Amnesty International labeled war crimes.)

Like many in Obama's foreign policy circle, Holbrooke also supported the Iraq war. In early 2003, shortly after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the UN, where he presented the administration's fraud-laden case for war to the UN (a speech Powell has since called a "blot" on his reputation), Holbrooke said: "It was a masterful job of diplomacy by Colin Powell and his colleagues, and it does not require a second vote to go to war. … Saddam is the most dangerous government leader in the world today, he poses a threat to the region, he could pose a larger threat if he got weapons of mass destruction deployed, and we have a legitimate right to take action."

<snip>

http://la.indymedia.org/news/2008/11/222404.php

Great...this guy has no compunction about whacking folks and taking their stuff. He has been a major facilitator of a hell of a lot of misery for untold numbers of people worldwide.

I gotta stop reading the news for a couple of days and live in one world or the other. Living in both is really pissing me off this week.

I am a student of anesthesiology. I take college classes with college students.

In class yesterday.....

Student A: "did you hear that Obama is closing Gitmo within a year, but they don't know what to do with all those criminals?"

Student B: "I heard that, well...I think they should send them to Iraq and make them fight this war."


Student A: "hell they outta just either kill em or lock em up or something because those people shouldn't get out"

Student B: "so what are they going to do with all these criminals? They can't turn them loose on us".


Me: "Well...they debated about sending them into the U.S. justice system for trial and judgement but thay cannot do that because there is NOT ENOUGH EVIDENCE AGAINST THEM TO EVEN GET THEM INTO THE JUSTICE SYSTEM".

Student A totally and completely misses the point. He is so damn brainwashed that it never dawns on him that lack of evidence could indicate their innocence or lack of complicity in a crime. He immediately says...

Student A: "Well to hell with em then, guess they will have to kill em or something, but they damn sure can't turn em loose".

He is absolutely correct, and he is absolutely incorrect.

They cannot be turned loose because they know too much and they are innocent. This makes them an embarassment to the U.S....
so he is correct unfortunately.

He is totally incorrect because they should be turned loose from their life of hell.

Its a weird world ya'll.......I need a break from reality. I think i'll vanish for a while.........


adios........

[Col. Quisp]

We'll miss you, Vig. maybe you should just anesthetize yourself for a few days and then come back!

Good luck with your studies

[OP ED]

indeed, vig.

Hopefully when you come back Chlamor and Pan will have both finally figured out that they're entirely too intelligent to spend all their time bickering.

[ninakat]

Obama's Orders Leave Framework of Torture, Indefinite Detention Intact

By Tom Eley

January 23, 2009 "WSWS" -- -On Thursday, President Barack Obama issued executive orders mandating the closure of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp in a year’s time, requiring that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and military personnel follow the Army Field Manual’s prohibitions on torture, and closing secret CIA prisons overseas.

While the media is portraying these orders as a repudiation of the detention and interrogation policies of the Bush administration, they actually change little. They essentially represent a public relations effort to refurbish the image of the United States abroad after years of torture and extralegal detentions and shield high-ranking American officials from potential criminal prosecution.

In cowardly fashion, Obama staged his signing of the orders in a manner aimed at placating the political right and defenders of Guantánamo and torture and underscoring his intention to continue the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” He was flanked by 16 retired generals and admirals who have pushed for the closure of the prison camp in Cuba on the grounds that it impedes the prosecution of the global “war” and reiterated in his own remarks his determination to continue the basic political framework of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

The continuation of the ideological pretext for wars of aggression and attacks on democratic rights ensures that the police state infrastructure erected under the Bush administration will remain intact. This is further reinforced by Obama’s assurances that his administration will not investigate or prosecute those officials—including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and others—who were responsible for the policies of torture and illegal detention.

The orders signed by Obama do not undo the Bush administration’s attacks on constitutional and international law. They do not challenge the supposed right of the president to unilaterally imprison any individual, without trial and without charges, by declaring him to be an “enemy combatant.” Nor do they end the procedure known as “extraordinary rendition,” by which the United States during the Bush years kidnapped alleged terrorists and shipped them to foreign countries or secret CIA prisons outside the US, where they were subjected to torture.

They do not affect the hundreds of prisoners—600 at the Bagram prison camp in Afghanistan alone—incarcerated beyond the barbed wire of Guantánamo. If and when Guantánamo is closed, the US government will simply ship alleged terrorists caught up its international dragnet to other American-run prison camps.

On the question of so-called “harsh interrogation techniques,” i.e., torture, Obama’s orders leave room for their continuation. White House Counsel Gregory Craig told reporters the administration was prepared to take into account demands from the CIA that such methods be allowed. Obama announced the creation of a task force that will consider new interrogation methods beyond those sanctioned by the Army Field Manual, which now accepts 19 forms of interrogation, as well as the practice of extraordinary rendition.

Retired Admiral Dennis Blair, Obama’s nominee for director of national intelligence, told a Senate confirmation hearing that the Army Field Manual would itself be changed, potentially allowing new forms of harsh interrogation, but that such changes would be kept secret.

Obama also announced a second task force that is to consider the fate of the 245 detainees remaining at Guantánamo. Earlier this week he suspended the military commission procedures at the prison camp, but has not abolished the military commissions themselves.

The new administration has ruled out the only constitutional remedy for those who have been held under barbaric conditions, without due process, for years—either releasing them or giving them a speedy trial in a civilian court, with all of the accompanying legal protections and guarantees. There has been a great deal of speculation that the administration may support the establishment of a special National Security Court within the civilian court system to try Guantánamo prisoners and other alleged terrorists. This would represent yet another attack on civil liberties, setting up a drumhead court system to railroad those charged with terrorism—something that could in future be used to repress political opposition.

According to NBC Nightly News on Thursday, the administration is considering keeping some 20 Guantánamo detainees, including the five alleged 9/11 conspirators currently facing military commission trials, imprisoned indefinitely without charges in a military brig within the US.

Commentators have noted that the Obama administration wants to prevent noncitizens detained as terrorists from being able to exercise habeas corpus rights.

Two separate measures taken Tuesday and Thursday by Obama point to a further major consideration behind his moves to close Guantánamo and finesse the issue of torture. On Thursday the administration requested a stay in the habeas corpus appeal to the Supreme Court by the only alleged enemy combatant now held on US soil—Ali al-Marri, of Qatar, whom Obama has called “dangerous.” Al-Marri’s lawyers are challenging the right of the president to arrest and jail individuals by declaring them enemy combatants, and it was expected that the Supreme Court’s hearing of the appeal would force Obama to reveal his position on the issue.

This followed Tuesday’s request for a stay from the Federal District Court in Washington in similar appeals that could affect the cases of more than 200 Guantánamo prisoners.

Thus, the immediate effect of the new administration’s moves is to halt civilian trials that could prove immensely damaging to the government by revealing systematic torture of the detainees and could potentially entangle high government officials.

[chlamor]

Afghan Conflict Will Be Reviewed
Obama Sees Troops As Buying Time, Not Turning Tide

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 13, 2009; Page A01

President-elect Barack Obama intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like "surge" of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years.

Instead, Obama's national security team expects that the new deployments, which will nearly double the current U.S. force of 32,000 (alongside an equal number of non-U.S. NATO troops), will help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called the "central front on terror."

<snip>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 03492.html

Biden warns of higher US death toll Afghanistan

8 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden says the nation should expect more U.S. military casualties as the Obama administration plans to send additional troops to Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials say they plan to send up to 30,000 additional troops to the Afghan war, where the Taliban is resurgent and violence has been on the rise. The request for more troops from military commanders was endorsed by the Bush administration and has been favored by the Obama government, too.

Biden said Sunday that additional U.S. forces will be engaging the enemy more. Asked if that means the U.S. public should expect more American casualties, the vice president said: "I hate to say it, but yes, I think there will be. There will be an uptick."

Biden spoke on CBS' "Face the Nation."


http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... QD95U9JQ05

[compared2what?]

Conventional wisdom (for whatever that's worth) is that it can't just be shut down without first figuring out how the prisoners are going to be tried and other not-so-unimportant details. Makes sense to me that it needs to be carefully and correctly.

But he (Obama) did make a promise to shut down Gitmo, and this is a first step to ending the extrajudicial military trials.

But of course, Obama is evil and a liar so this must be some kind of ruse.

Barak "Aitch" Obama has just acknowledged the quaintly old-fashioned Geneva Convention AND stated the ballsachingly obvious without making a single grammatical error or even an unwisely unambiguous statement about release-dates. Therefore, like all sane human beings, I want to want to have his baby.

The prospects are golden, for everyone except cynics.

Please forgive me in advance, professorpan and Mac, respectively. My purpose is not to quarrel with you, but rather to starkly demonstrate the ways in which rhetorical manipulation leads people of good conscience to give their hard-earned money and/or (to me, even worse) their trust to people and institutions whose actions have already belied their words.

Okay. First of all. All people should set the bar at which they feel confident that their opinions are informed wherever that happens to be. No one has time to check every checkable fact, obviously. I don't, and I regularly discover that what I've been confidently arguing is bullshit, and that's life. There is no judgment-passing intended, express or implied. To me, any considered opinion that's held in good faith has an initial default setting of "value-neutral," whether I happen to feel confident it's mistaken or not. But since I now do feel confident that a person of conscience who opposes war crimes and the lies told by those who commit them is mistaken to think Obama represents their beliefs, I'm going to make the strongest fair case for that view that I can. It's based on the haphazard intermittent running check I keep on whether the rhetoric on a few random points of importance to me is verified or contradicted by legally valid public documents.

NB -- I take it on faith that an apparently reputable PDF link is a true reproduction of the document in question, and I freely admit I have no rational basis for feeling confident about that. Like I said. Standards: They're idiosyncratic and strictly the business of the person who sets them. But by mine, the words and deeds you're applauding are indeed verifiably a ruse.

Also. Again, I'm sorry. But no one knows what the prospects are with any certainty, even the powers who seek to manipulate them. Because their success in doing that is contingent on successfully manipulating people of good conscience. And they know better than most that you can't take anything for certain when it's dependent on the trustworthiness of other people. There's nought as untrustworthy as folk, as the saying goes. So I can't confidently argue that the prospects are verifiably not golden. Just that the evidence cited doesn't support that conclusion.

Here's my best shot:

Oh, dear, when will the sheeple open their eyes to the Barack psyop? His evil reign continues:

--

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/us/po ... f=politics

Obama to Shut Guantánamo Site and C.I.A. Prisons

Published: January 21, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Obama is expected to sign executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said.

--

A blatant PR stunt that will in no way make anything better, yes, chlamor? Ninakat? Hugh?

We need to stop this man before he accomplishes the further unraveling of our country by closing CIA prisons and making torture illegal again. The horror!

It is a horror, actually. As the Times article to which the first link in there leads states, the orders he signed

will also prohibit the C.I.A. from using coercive interrogation methods, requiring the agency to follow the same rules used by the military in interrogating terrorism suspects, government officials said.

No way to verify what some unnamed government officials said. But if they did say that, they wouldn't be lying. That isn't the problem.

The problem is that the rules used by the military in interrogating terrorism suspects don't prohibit coercive interrogation methods when it comes to enemy combatants -- aka "terrorism suspects." They explicitly allow them. It's the way of the world that almost no one is going to tell you the public something it doesn't want to know as much as it doesn't want to know that. And if they do, you should verify it. Which I'm sorry to say involves reading the current, pertinent, 384-page manual, FM 2-22-3, Human Intelligence Collector Operations. (Formerly FM 34-52, it was revised in September 2006.)

Here's a PDF LINK to the whole damn thing.

Here's an online precis (and/or primer) by Dr. Jeffrey S. Kaye, through which I found the PDF link. It's excellent, imo. And out of an abundance of caution, here's the Emptywheel post that recommended it to me. Because I didn't actually verify it wrt stuff like whether Dr. Jeffrey S. Kaye writes a blog called "Invictus" under the name Valtin. So that might be wrong. Everyone has to make some judgment calls about what's likely to be worth checking, obviously.

Personally, I wouldn't take the New York Times's word for what day of the week it was without confirming it. And I'm inclined to view stuff endorsed by Emptywheel favorably. I do try to check it. But nobody's perfect. Bearing that in mind, though, please, try to check out some of the above if you oppose torture. I mean, it's pretty convincing, I swear. But don't take my word for it.

[OP ED]

thank you. didn't have one of those.

[Nordic]

Didn't it occur to anyone that these missile strikes were done without Obama's permission? This is the realm of the CIA, unmanned aerial drones killing people remotely. The CIA does what it wants, and hell, they're probably figuring they're gonna pull some shit and see what Obama does about it.

He's been President less than a week, do you think the CIA is going to wait for his permission before doing what they feel like, and what they've been doing forever?

Hell no.

Obama has almost no control over this. It will be interesting to see what happens if he DOES try to wrest control of it.

He's no idiot, he knows what happened to JFK as much as any other thinking and informed person.

My point: Why the knee-jerk blaming of this on Obama?

[DoYouEverWonder]

Didn't it occur to anyone that these missile strikes were done without Obama's permission? This is the realm of the CIA, unmanned aerial drones killing people remotely. The CIA does what it wants, and hell, they're probably figuring they're gonna pull some shit and see what Obama does about it.

He's been President less than a week, do you think the CIA is going to wait for his permission before doing what they feel like, and what they've been doing forever?

Hell no.

Obama has almost no control over this. It will be interesting to see what happens if he DOES try to wrest control of it.

He's no idiot, he knows what happened to JFK as much as any other thinking and informed person.

My point: Why the knee-jerk blaming of this on Obama?

President orders air strikes on villages in tribal area

24 January 2009

Barack Obama gave the go-ahead for his first military action yesterday, missile strikes against suspected militants in Pakistan which killed at least 18 people.

Four days after assuming the presidency, he was consulted by US commanders before they launched the two attacks. Although Obama has abandoned many of the "war on terror" policies of George Bush while he was president, he is not retreating from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/ja ... air-strike

[overcoming hope]

Conversely, what would Obama need to do for you to say "That was fucked up; Obama is worse than I'd hoped"?

I'm sure he will do plenty of things that will piss me off. And I will be outspoken when that occurs, just as I've been outspoken about any politician, regardless of party. But unlike the Obama-can-do-no-good RI brigade, I have now seen evidence that he will do some, possibly many, very good things.

He could cure fucking cancer and some of the nitwits here would twist themselves into pretzels trying to come up with why that's actually a bad thing.

It would be amusing if it wasn't so sad.

Go to the dailykos with that noise

[RocketMan]

From the revamped blog of the estimable Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed:

http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2009/01/obam ... ation.html

The arrival of the Obama administration will not fundamentally alter the course of military expansion accelerated during the Bush era. The origins of these policies do not lie uniquely in neoconservative ideology. While the election of President Obama may offer new opportunities for progressive forces to delimit the damage, their space for movement will ultimately be constrained by deep-seated structural pressures that will attempt to exploit Obama to rehabilitate American imperial hegemony, rather than transform it.

Indeed, the radicalization of Anglo-American political ideology represented by the rise of neoconservative principles and the militarization processes of the 'War on Terror', constituted a strategic response to global systemic crises supported by the American business classes. The same classes, recognizing the extent to which the Bush era has discredited this response, have rallied around Obama. Therefore, as global crises intensify, this militarization response is likely to undergo further radicalization, rather than a meaningful change in course. The key differences will be in language and method, not substance.

Got something to add, bee-yotch???

[compared2what?]

Pan, does it piss you off that he kept his campaign promise to end all Bush-era euphemism-for-torture policy wrt terrorism suspects, and instead begin adhering strictly to the torture techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual, without mentioning that the latter were torture techniques?

I can't imagine that he wasn't briefed on them before he made that promise. And probably well before, since he was a sitting senator when John McCain went on a big PR crusade to make the AFM protocols the universal standard.

He went to law school. At Harvard. Used to be president of its Law Review. And was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years. So it's not like he's incapable of understanding this stuff.

If it doesn't piss you off, why not? And if it does, where's the outspokenness?

I voted for the guy. And I'm not sorry I did, because although there are no guarantees, his line of largely empty rhetoric does augur better than McCain's for (a) at least one issue of substance (SCOTUS nominations) that he's almost certainly going to have address; and (b) at least the possibility that the collective outspoken protests of the electorate will not be met with so much undisguised force and hostility that they never develop enough organizational oomph to have any meaningful impact.

It's in the interest of preserving the latter possibility that I'm hassling you, in case that wasn't clear. I don't actually have significantly different political goals than you have, for immediate purposes, at least, and maybe for long-term purposes as well. But basically, I want to see your goals realized, because they're much the same as mine. Neither I nor you can do that without each other's help, though. Everyone's gotta agitate/educate/organize.

So please, speak out if you're pissed off.

[compared2what?]

From the revamped blog of the estimable Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed:

http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2009/01/obam ... ation.html

The arrival of the Obama administration will not fundamentally alter the course of military expansion accelerated during the Bush era. The origins of these policies do not lie uniquely in neoconservative ideology. While the election of President Obama may offer new opportunities for progressive forces to delimit the damage, their space for movement will ultimately be constrained by deep-seated structural pressures that will attempt to exploit Obama to rehabilitate American imperial hegemony, rather than transform it.

Indeed, the radicalization of Anglo-American political ideology represented by the rise of neoconservative principles and the militarization processes of the 'War on Terror', constituted a strategic response to global systemic crises supported by the American business classes. The same classes, recognizing the extent to which the Bush era has discredited this response, have rallied around Obama. Therefore, as global crises intensify, this militarization response is likely to undergo further radicalization, rather than a meaningful change in course. The key differences will be in language and method, not substance.

Got something to add, bee-yotch???

Nothin' but love, honey, but that's not very likely to help with -- to be as charitable as possible -- the third prong of the agitate-educate-organize model. Remember who the opposition really is, I implore you. And beseech you. Please. It's hokey, I know, but are their any children whose futures you can remind yourself of? It's the quickest way I know to force myself into my inner-responsible-adult mode. And that's the only one from which once in a blue moon, I manage to half get something done.

[RocketMan]

Me, I'm just at the stage of learning what we're up against. I weaned myself off the plentiful teat of mainstream discourse relatively late in life (I'm 30 and been reeling since I was 28 or so), so I'm just trying to make sense of it all. Mr. Ahmed to me seems to be one of the most even-handed, calm analysts of the current predicament there are.