Fuck Obama

[Joe Hillshoist]

Bring back the Wobblies, renew the IWW. Get Springsteen, Steve Earle, John Sayles, and a whole passel of movie stars on board. Michael Moore and Kucinich, sure. Nader. Cynthia McKinney. Even Ron Paul. Make it a big fucking populist tent. Be Johnny Cash-Christian if you like.

Get across what's the matter with Kansas, why working and poor people have insisted on fucking themselves for 30 years.

(Pouring another drink.)

Yeah. Thats the way.

[foistlastus]

Investigation reveals numerous bogus claims on Obama resume

In what is being called 'the biggest hustle in human history,' a special investigation has discovered numerous bogus claims on Barack Obama's resume, including the outright lie that he was a 'Constitutional scholar and professor.'

The claim turns out to be false.

As investigators delve further into the background of Barack Obama, a disturbing picture is emerging of a man who is not who he claims to be. The information the public has been told concerning Obama is turning out to be false--fabrications and inventions of a man and an unseen force behind him that had clear ulterior motives for seeking the highest office in the land.

According to a special report issued by 'the Blogging Professor,' the Chicago Law School faculty hated Obama. The report states that Obama was unqualified, that he was never a 'constitutional professor and scholar,' and that he never served as editor of the Harvard Law Review while a student at the school.

The real truth is that Barack Obama was merely an 'instructor' at Chicago Law School, not a professor. Commonly, instructors are non-tenure-track teachers hired by colleges and universities to teach certain courses for a salary that is well below that of Associate Professors or full Professors.

In the hierarchy of higher education, the status of instructors is below that of associate professors and professors because they lack the credentials.

http://www.examiner.com/x-37620-Conserv ... ama-resume

[RocketMan]

Glenn Greenwad: The case against Elena Kagan

The prospect that Stevens will be replaced by Elena Kagan has led to the growing perception that Barack Obama will actually take a Supreme Court dominated by Justices Scalia (Reagan), Thomas (Bush 41), Roberts (Bush 43), Alito (Bush 43) and Kennedy (Reagan) and move it further to the Right. Joe Lieberman went on Fox News this weekend to celebrate the prospect that "President Obama may nominate someone in fact who makes the Court slightly less liberal," while The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus predicted: "The court that convenes on the first Monday in October is apt to be more conservative than the one we have now." Last Friday, I made the same argument: that replacing Stevens with Kagan risks moving the Court to the Right, perhaps substantially to the Right (by "the Right," I mean: closer to the Bush/Cheney vision of Government and the Thomas/Scalia approach to executive power and law).

Consider how amazing it is that such a prospect is even possible. Democrats around the country worked extremely hard to elect a Democratic President, a huge majority in the House, and 59 Democratic Senators -- only to watch as the Supreme Court is moved further the Right? Even for those who struggle to find good reasons to vote for Democrats, the prospect of a better Supreme Court remains a significant motive (the day after Obama's election, I wrote that everyone who believed in the Constitution and basic civil liberties should be happy at the result due to the numerous Supreme Court appointments Obama would likely make, even if for no other reason).

[Simulist]

But thank God Sarah Palin didn't get in there! Vote Democrat!!!

(Okay. I have to go puke now.)

Sometimes I actually sort of wish Governor Gidget had become president (I know, I know, she was running for vice president — but, hell, she didn't know the difference), because I would have seen more of Tina Fey, less of change I'm supposed to believe in, and it would have been easier to bring our troops home from Afghanistan since it's our neighboring country.

Voting for a president these days is a little like selecting which seven-year-old is going to fly the jet you're on — a jet that's being maneuvered by ground-based radar.

[Nordic]

Voting for a president these days is a little like selecting which seven-year-old is going to fly the jet you're on — a jet that's being maneuvered by ground-based radar.

Good one! To me it seems like voting for the President of your high school. Knowing full well that the President of the student body has absolutely nothing to do with the actual running of the school.

That's left to the professionals.

[sunny]

Obama Criticizes Liberal Supreme Courts of the 60's & 70's

WASHINGTON — In a seeming rejection of liberal orthodoxy, President Obama has spoken disparagingly about liberal victories before the Supreme Court in the 1960s and 1970s — suggesting that justices made the “error” of overstepping their bounds and trampling on the role of elected officials.

Mr. Obama made his remarks Wednesday night against a backdrop of recent Supreme Court rulings in which conservative justices have struck down laws favored by liberals, most notably a January ruling that nullified restrictions on corporate spending to influence elections.

“It used to be that the notion of an activist judge was somebody who ignored the will of Congress, ignored democratic processes, and tried to impose judicial solutions on problems instead of letting the process work itself through politically,” Mr. Obama said.

“And in the ’60s and ’70s, the feeling was — is that liberals were guilty of that kind of approach. What you’re now seeing, I think, is a conservative jurisprudence that oftentimes makes the same error.”

He added, “The concept of judicial restraint cuts both ways.”

Mr. Obama’s comments, which came as he prepares to make a Supreme Court nomination, amounted to the most sympathetic statement by a sitting Democratic president about the conservative view that the Warren and Burger courts — which expanded criminal defendant rights, required busing to desegregate schools and declared a right to abortion — were dominated by “liberal judicial activists” whose rulings were dubious.

Still, Mr. Obama, who formerly taught constitutional law, did not cite any specific decisions. He has long been a supporter of abortion rights, and repeatedly defended the court’s interventionist stance during the civil rights movement because minorities were cut out of the political process, even while saying that such a role would be inappropriate today.

Mr. Obama made his remarks in an impromptu conversation with reporters on a flight to Washington from the Midwest. They were in response to a question about whether concerns about “conservative judicial activism” would play a role in the court nomination.

Mr. Obama has criticized recent conservative Supreme Court rulings before — including the campaign-finance ruling, Citizens United, in his State of the Union address last January. But his remarks went notably further by drawing an equivalence to rulings a generation ago that have been widely celebrated by liberals as historic achievements.

That troubled some liberals, including Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. He agreed with Mr. Obama’s definition of “judicial activism,” but said he had “a concern about his effort to establish a moral equivalency between the Warren court and the Roberts court.”

And the president of the liberal Alliance for Justice, Nan Aron, argued that the Warren and Burger courts had helped make progress on economic and social fronts for people who lacked political power, while the Roberts court is “tilted in favor of those who already have power and influence.”

By pegging his critique to the 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Obama stayed away from the most famous liberal Supreme Court ruling, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision striking down school segregation. Still, his statement seemed to call into question subsequent liberal legal victories.

Such rulings gave indigent criminal suspects a right to free lawyers, required police to inform them of their rights, and expanded the kinds of evidence that prosecutors could not use. Aside from decisions on abortion and school busing, rulings required electoral districts to contain equal populations, suspended the death penalty, and banned employment practices that had a disparate impact on different racial groups.

Several conservatives said they welcomed an acknowledgment by a Democratic president that the courts led by Chief Justices Earl Warren and Warren Burger had sometimes overstepped their role.
But they also suggested that his arguments might be a strategic move to de-legitimize lawsuits challenging his domestic policy agenda.

John McGinnis, a conservative law professor at Northwestern University, said, “His party is in control, so of course he wants deference” to legislation enacted by Congress in the current era.

The White House declined to identify rulings that Mr. Obama believes relied on judicial activism. It also argued that his recent remarks were consistent with his history of separating himself from liberals in the Warren court mold. In his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” for example, Mr. Obama suggested that “in our reliance on the courts to vindicate not only our rights but also our values, progressives had lost too much faith in democracy.”

Indeed, Walter Dellinger, a Clinton administration lawyer, said in a recent interview that Mr. Obama was likely to seek a nominee who would foster a “culture of restraint” on the court.

“He may be more concerned about avoiding a court that would strike down progressive legislation than he is with achieving a court that will enforce its constitutional views on the other branches,” Mr. Dellinger said.

Marge Baker, of the liberal People for the American Way, said liberals were confident they would be able to use the Citizens United ruling to turn conservatives’ rhetoric against them.

“Republicans are going to talk about ‘legislating from the bench,’ and Democrats will laugh them out of the hearing room, because it doesn’t mean anything after Citizens United,” she said.

Still, several conservatives questioned Mr. Obama’s premise that “judicial activism” means striking down the work of elected branches and “restraint” means upholding it. They argued that conservatives are instead talking about judges ruling based on politics rather than law.

David McIntosh, a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society, said he suspected that Mr. Obama just meant he wanted the court “to uphold the health care bill” without revisiting any of its earlier liberal rulings.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, was also skeptical. “We’ll see if he means it,” he said, “by the type of justice he appoints.”

NYTimes

*Obama's criticisms of the Warren and Burger Courts

Yesterday I wrote about what seemed to be President Obama's fairly stunning disparagement of the Warren and Burger Courts (expressed on the eve of naming Justice Stevens' replacement), as he echoed the classic, decades-old, right-wing claim that those courts were guilty of the "error" of "judicial activism." As I noted in an update, numerous people, in comments and via email, objected that I had misinterpreted Obama's remarks, that he was merely noting the hypocrisy of the Right but not himself criticizing those courts. As it turns out, The New York Times' Charlie Savage and Sheryl Gay Stolberg understood his remarks exactly as I did, as did the experts on both sides of the spectrum they interviewed, and the White House itself seemed to confirm that this is exactly what Obama intended to convey:



Obama Says Liberal Courts May Have Overreached
In a seeming rejection of liberal orthodoxy, President Obama has spoken disparagingly about liberal victories before the Supreme Court in the 1960s and 1970s -- suggesting that justices made the "error" of overstepping their bounds and trampling on the role of elected officials. . . .
Mr. Obama’s comments, which came as he prepares to make a Supreme Court nomination, amounted to the most sympathetic statement by a sitting Democratic president about the conservative view that the Warren and Burger courts — which expanded criminal defendant rights, required busing to desegregate schools and declared a right to abortion — were dominated by "liberal judicial activists" whose rulings were dubious. . . .
Several conservatives said they welcomed an acknowledgment by a Democratic president that the courts led by Chief Justices Earl Warren and Warren Burger had sometimes overstepped their role.
I bet they did welcome it. Now, there's nothing sacrosanct about those courts, and there's nothing per se wrong with criticizing them. But given that the defining rulings of those decades have long formed the bedrock of the progressive understanding of the Constitution and the judiciary, that the dominant Justices of that era (Brennan, Marshall, Douglas, Black) are the iconic liberal judges of the 20th century, and that those decades produced the most vital safeguards for core Constitutional guarantees and critical limits on executive power, Obama -- as I said yesterday -- should at least specify which decisions he finds "erroneous" and illegitimate. But the imperial decree has been issued and that's apparently all you need to know:

The White House declined to identify rulings that Mr. Obama believes relied on judicial activism.
The absolute dumbest political platitude in the vast canon of right-wing idiocies has long been the premise that courts act improperly -- are engaged in "judicial activism" -- whenever they declare a democratically enacted law invalid on the ground that it is unconstitutional. That's one of the central functions of the courts, a linchpin of how our Constitutional Republic operates. We're not a pure democracy precisely because there are limits on what democratic majorities are permitted to do, and those limits are set forth in the Constitution, which courts have the responsibility to interpret and apply. When judges strike down laws because they violate Constitutional guarantees, that's not a subversion of our political system; it's a vindication, a crucial safeguarding of it.

But now, here is Obama giving credence to that idiocy with his sweeping, unspecified condemnation of the Warren and Burger Courts as "judicial activists." If, as Obama argues, some (or many) of the decisions of that era are "errors" of activist overreaching, wouldn't the current Court be justified in reversing them? And won't Republican Senators be justified in demanding that Obama refrain from nominating to the Court anyone whose records seems compatible with the defining judicial approach of those courts (since, after all, even Obama acknowledges they were in "error")? Why is Barack Obama walking around echoing the right-wing/Limbaughian view that the Supreme Court's decisions of the 1960s and 1970s were illegitimate, anti-democratic power grabs?

It's one thing to argue, as Obama has previously, that it sometimes makes more sense to accomplish political goals democratically rather than through the courts, and that liberals in the past have been too reliant on judicial victories in lieu of persuasion and organizing. As a general strategic proposition, I don't disagree with that view. But that has nothing to do with the proper role of judges, which is to strike down any and all laws brought before them which violate the Constitution. That core principle is the one Obama is disparaging.

In their NYT article this morning, Savage and Stolberg suggest that Obama may be motivated by a desire to protect progressive legislation from being struck down by the Roberts Court (as they did in Citizens United):

John McGinnis, a conservative law professor at Northwestern University, said, "[Obama's] party is in control, so of course he wants deference" to legislation enacted by Congress in the current era.
That's a fair enough objective, but demanding judicial deference to democratically elected laws is incredibly short-sighted and destructive. As Bush critics tried (unsuccessfully) to explain to the Right throughout the last decade, the party in power doesn't stay in power forever. Principles that you endorse and powers you vest when your party is in control don't disappear once the other party takes control, as it inevitably will. The changes one party makes to our political system endure once the other party takes control.

Publicly discrediting the core judicial function may serve Obama's short-term political goals by deterring the Roberts Court from striking down laws enacted by the current Congress or actions he takes as President. It may win him a day's worth of plaudits from right-wing legal ideologues. But it also further entrenches the right-wing myth that judges act illegitimately when they strike down democratically elected statutes or "interfere" in executive actions. That won't apply only when it comes time to examine Obama's domestic legislation, but also when it comes time to adjudicate the next Military Commissions Act, or the next oppressive anti-gay referenda, or future efforts to restrict Internet content, or twisted (but democratically-enacted) abortion laws, or government programs to spy on Americans without warrants, or the latest police state expansion of the type just enacted in Arizona, or whatever else the next GOP majority is able to implement. The basis for constitutionally challenging such acts is found in the jurisprudence that Obama just demeaned.

The prime attitude of the Bush administration towards courts was that they had no business interfering with whatever the Executive branch and the GOP Congress decided to do. It's unsurprising that Obama is now echoing that same perspective, but that doesn't mean it's harmless. There are ongoing, very live disputes over the proper role of the courts, and Obama, intentionally or otherwise, just bolstered the right-wing arguments in those debates by embracing long-standing cartoons of the Warren and Burger Courts.

UPDATE: With regard to the other topic here from yesterday -- the Obama DOJ's issuance of a supboena to Jim Risen -- see this Washington Post article headlined "After reporter's subpoena, critics call Obama's leak-plugging efforts Bush-like." The article, by Howard Kurtz, explains that the subpoena "has convinced some press advocates that President Obama's team is pursuing leaks with the same fervor as the Bush administration" and includes this:

"The message they are sending to everyone is, 'You leak to the media, we will get you,' " said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. In the wake of the Bush administration's aggressive stance toward the press, she said, "as far as I can tell there is absolutely no difference, and the Obama administration seems to be paying more attention to it. This is going to get nasty."
It was once the case, not all that long ago, that those who pointed out the extreme similarities between the Obama and Bush administrations in these areas were accused of being hysterical, impetuous purists. It's now the case that those who do so are guilty of nothing more than stating the obvious.

UPDATE II: For all you libertarians appearing in the comment section to defend Obama's comments because you don't like Roe and Brown v. The Bd. of Education: I seriously doubt that those are the decisions he had in mind when criticizing "judicial activism." Obama has long self-identified as pro-choice and a defender of Roe, and I would be quite astonished if he had Brown and its progeny in mind when criticizing the Court. Obama's failure and subsequent refusal to specify the decisions he thinks are illegitimate make it impossible to know for certain, but it's unlikely in the extreme that he intended to question the validity of reproductive right and desegregation rulings.

That said, the fact that people who hate Roe and Brown are identifying so strongly with Obama's views about the Supreme Court illustrate the real point here.

UPDATE III: Jesselyn Radack, the whistle-blower in the Bush DOJ, today recalls Obama's transition position on whistle-blowers:

Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled.
Who knew that the way to "protect" and "encourage" these "courageous patriots" would be by issuing subpoenas to uncover their identity and then criminally prosecuting them?
Meanwhile, Greg Sargent argues that these attacks on the Warren and Burger courts are typical Obama.

UPDATE IV: Here's a very interesting anecdote revealing what happens when novices appear before the Supreme Court.

*many embedded links

[RocketMan]

Damn, sunny, you beat me to it.

Here's Greenwald's follow-up post.

Now, there's nothing sacrosanct about those courts, and there's nothing per se wrong with criticizing them. But given that the defining rulings of those decades have long formed the bedrock of the progressive understanding of the Constitution and the judiciary, that the dominant Justices of that era (Brennan, Marshall, Douglas, Black) are the iconic liberal judges of the 20th century, and that those decades produced the most vital safeguards for core Constitutional guarantees and critical limits on executive power, Obama -- as I said yesterday -- should at least specify which decisions he finds "erroneous" and illegitimate. But the imperial decree has been issued and that's apparently all you need to know:

The White House declined to identify rulings that Mr. Obama believes relied on judicial activism.

The absolute dumbest political platitude in the vast canon of right-wing idiocies has long been the premise that courts act improperly -- are engaged in "judicial activism" -- whenever they declare a democratically enacted law invalid on the ground that it is unconstitutional.

[elfismiles]

Lotsa links in the OP at the link:

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=825

Prosecuting a Tortured Child: Obama's Guantanamo Legacy
By Andy Worthington
Published 05/04/10

Since coming to power 15 months ago, promising to close Guantánamo within a year, and suspending the much-criticized military commission trial system for terror suspects, President Obama's zeal for repudiating the Bush administration's "war on terror" detention policies has ground to a halt.

The rot set in almost immediately, when the new administration invoked the "state secrets doctrine" last February, to combat a lawsuit brought by several men subjected to "extraordinary rendition" and torture, and was sealed last May, when Obama delivered a major national security speech in which he announced that the military commissions were back on the table, and also announced his intention to continue holding some prisoners at Guantánamo without charge or trial.

In November, Attorney General Eric Holder set the seal on the administration's two-tier justice system for terror suspects at Guantánamo by announcing that five men would face federal court trials for their alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks, but that five others would face trial by military commission, in a revamped version of the "terror courts," approved by Congress over the summer.

This year, Obama disappointed critics in the United States, and those scrutinizing his activities around the world, by failing to close Guantánamo within a year as promised, and by failing to set a new deadline for the prison's closure, but last week his administration pressed ahead with what may well be viewed as the single most disappointing failure to repudiate the cruel, chaotic and unjust policies of the Bush administration's "war on terror": the trial, by military commission, of Omar Khadr.

A Canadian citizen, Khadr was just 15 years old when he was seized by U.S. forces after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, in which he allegedly threw a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier, Sgt. Christopher Speer, and was taken first to the U.S. prison at Bagram airbase, and then to Guantánamo, where he remains to this day. I have been covering his case since June 2007, when his first pre-trial hearing took place in the commissions' first reincarnation, after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2006 that the original version, the brainchild of Dick Cheney and his legal counsel David Addington, was illegal.

For nearly three years, therefore, I have watched as a disturbingly shambolic and misconceived excuse for a judicial system has attempted, without success, to prosecute Omar Khadr, and the many failures of this endeavor have not been resolved through Congress' tweaking the system last summer.

The shame and disgrace of prosecuting a child

Firstly, and most important, Khadr was a child when seized. This meant nothing to the Bush administration, and it is clear that it also means nothing to the Obama administration either. Back in May 2003, when the story first broke that juvenile prisoners were being held at Guantánamo (and research indicates that at least 22 juveniles were held in total), Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld impatiently told a press conference, "This constant refrain of ‘the juveniles,' as though there's a hundred children in there -- these are not children," and General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added that they "may be juveniles, but they're not on the Little League team anywhere. They're on a major league team, and it's a terrorist team, and they're in Guantánamo for a very good reason -- for our safety, for your safety."

This rhetoric played well with those who hold that everyone is accountable for their actions, whatever their age, but in a more enlightened world, of which the United States is technically a part, juveniles -- defined as those under the age of 18 when the crime they are accused of committing took place -- "require special protection" according to the Optional Protocol to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, on the involvement of children in armed conflict, to which the United States is a signatory. The Optional Protocol specifically recognizes "the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities," and requires its signatories to promote "the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict."

It would be difficult to find a more appropriate case of a child who was "particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities" than Omar Khadr, who spent much of his childhood in Afghanistan, taken there by his father, an alleged fundraiser for Osama bin Laden, and yet, as I demonstrated in the first of my weekly columns for The Future of Freedom Foundation, back in October 2008, Khadr has never received "physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration," because a detailed plan submitted by four doctors to the Defense Department in January 2003, entitled, "Recommended Course of Action for Reception and Detention of Individuals Under 18 Years of Age," was completely ignored.

The problem of invented war crimes charges

Beyond this most glaringly obvious problem with Omar Khadr's trial (and his nearly eight years in detention), another fundamental problem with Obama's decision to proceed with prosecuting a former juvenile prisoner in the first U.S. war crimes trial since Nuremberg concerns the basis of the charges against Khadr. On an intuitive level, critics of Khadr's trial have, from the beginning, recognized that there is something horribly skewed about redefining the internationally accepted laws of war so that one side in an armed conflict -- the United States -- can kill whoever it wants with impunity, whereas its opponents are viewed as terrorists, or, when brought to trial, as those who have committed "murder in violation of the law of war."

Lt. Col. David Frakt, who knows more about the laws of war than Congress or officials in either the Bush or Obama administrations, has long pointed out that the military commissions are fundamentally flawed because they contain "law of war offenses" invented by Congress, including "providing material support to terrorism" and "murder in violation of the law of war." As he explained last week, as Khadr's trial got underway, the latter was introduced by the DoD in 2003, when it was defining the crimes eligible for trial by military commission, as "murder by an unprivileged belligerent." He added:

This status-based definition conflated two different concepts -- unprivileged belligerents and war criminals. Under Article 4 of the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention it is clear that while a member of an organized resistance movement or militia may be an unprivileged belligerent (because of not wearing a uniform or failing to carry arms openly, for example) he may still comply with the laws and customs of war, so not all hostile acts committed by unprivileged belligerents are war crimes. Attacks by unprivileged belligerents which comply with the law of war (in that they attack lawful military targets with lawful weapons) may only be tried in domestic courts. In Iraq, for example, insurgents who try to kill Americans by implanting roadside bombs are properly arrested and tried before the Central Criminal Court of Iraq as common criminals. Attacks by unprivileged belligerents which violate the law of war, such as attacks on civilians or soldiers attempting to surrender, or using prohibited weapons like poison gas, can be tried in a war crimes tribunal.

When Congress revived the commissions in 2006 (after Congress ruled them illegal), "murder by an unprivileged belligerent" became "murder in violation of the law of war." However, as Lt. Col. Frakt explained, the distinction appeared to be cosmetic, and, crucially, judges in the only two full trials that ever took place (those of Salim Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul), as well as the judge in the case of Mohamed Jawad (released in August 2009), rejected the supposed crime, "each ruling that the mere status of unprivileged belligerency was insufficient to prove a violation of the law of war."

Despite Lt. Col. Frakt's alerting Congress to these problems last summer, lawmakers left the definition of "murder in violation of the law of war" unchanged in the new version of the commissions, but, astonishingly, DoD officials added an "official comment," explaining that "an accused may be convicted in a military commission ... if the commission finds that the accused engaged in conduct traditionally triable by military commission (e.g., spying; murder committed while the accused did not meet the requirements of privileged belligerency) even if such conduct does not violate the international law of war." In other words, as Lt. Col. Frakt explained, "a detainee may be convicted of murder in violation of the law of war even if they did not actually violate the law of war."

The first flawed week of Omar Khadr's pre-trial hearings

This new twist in the absurdly ill-conceived commissions did not permeate the first week of pre-trial proceedings in Omar Khadr's case, although it will undoubtedly surface should the trial actually go ahead in July, and his defense team has not yet flagged up Khadr's age on capture as a campaigning issue. Even so, there was more than enough incompetence and manipulation at work to indicate that President Obama's decision to revive the commissions will, in all probability, lead not only to protracted legal challenges, but also to international indignation at the failure of both the administration and Congress to deliver justice to the prisoners at Guantánamo.

As dozens of journalists geared up for the pre-trial hearings at Guantánamo last Tuesday, having experienced the logistical nightmare that makes trials at the naval base such a poor idea on the basis of expense and practicability alone, they received their first notification of the chaos that, without fail, marks the proceedings as little more than a dark farce. The first day's hearing was delayed so that everyone could review the commission manual, which was not signed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates until the evening of April 27, and now had to be downloaded and printed out in a part of the world where technology is often stranded in, at best, the late 20th century.

Although Khadr turned up for the delayed start of the first day's hearings, which commenced on Wednesday afternoon, he essentially boycotted the rest of the week's proceedings, when, whether deliberately or not, he highlighted the kind of excessive security measures that pass for normal at Guantánamo. On day two, after complaining of eye pain, apparently brought on by conjunctivitis, he refused to don blackout goggles for his trip from his cell to the courtroom in a windowless vehicle, telling his escort, Marine Capt. Laura Bruzzese, "You're trying to humiliate me." Although he was persuaded to attend later that day, he again refused to attend on day three, complaining that a waistband search for contraband "comes too close to his genitalia in the way it's being done," as Barry Coburn, one of his military defense lawyers, explained. On Saturday, he refused again, telling Capt. Bruzzese, "I'm not going, nothing is starting at 0730."

In the courtroom, meanwhile, discussions focused on the reliability of the evidence gathered by the government during Khadr's interrogations. Khadr's defense team has long maintained that Khadr, who was badly wounded at the time of his capture, having been shot twice in the back, was subjected to brutal treatment in the U.S. prison at Bagram, and later at Guantánamo, which rule out any self-incriminating statements he may have made as the "fruits of torture." As I explained in a major review of Khadr's case in November 2007:

According to his own account, reported by Amnesty International, he "asked for pain medication for his wounds but was refused," said that "during interrogations a bag was placed over his head and U.S. personnel brought military dogs into the room to frighten him," and added that he was "not allowed to use the bathroom and was forced to urinate on himself." Like many other prisoners, he was also hung from his wrists, and explained that "his hands were tied above a door frame and he was forced to stand in this position for hours." An article in Rolling Stone, in August 2006, added further details, noting that he was "brought into interrogation rooms on stretchers, in great pain," and was "ordered to clean floors on his hands and knees while his wounds were still wet."

Most of the above seems to have taken place in Bagram, where brutality was so commonplace at the time of Khadr's stay there that at least two prisoners died of wounds inflicted by their guards just months after his departure. However, the abuse continued in Guantánamo, where, it should be noted, he arrived around the time that a regime of humiliation, isolation, and abuse, including extreme temperature manipulation, forced nudity, and sexual humiliation, had just been introduced, by reverse-engineering torture techniques used in a military program designed to train U.S. personnel to resist interrogation if captured, in an attempt to increase the meager flow of "actionable intelligence" from the prison. As I explained in 2007:

He told his lawyers that he was "short-shackled by his hands and feet to a bolt in the floor and left for five to six hours," and that "occasionally a U.S. officer would enter the room to laugh at him." He also said that he was "kept in extremely cold rooms," "lifted up by the neck while shackled, and then dropped to the floor," and "beaten by guards." In one particularly notorious incident, the guards left him short-shackled until he urinated on himself, and then "poured a pine-scented cleaning fluid over him and used him as a ‘human mop' to clean up the mess." As if further humiliation was required, he added that he was "not provided with clean clothes for several days after this degradation."

In contrast to Khadr's claims, the government has proposed that he was treated humanely, and that he offered up self-incriminating information voluntarily. Robert Fuller, an FBI agent who interviewed Khadr at Bagram in October 2002, testified on Wednesday that his interrogations of Khadr were "conversational" and "non-confrontational," adding, "We never put our hands on Mr. Khadr," and stating that Khadr spoke "openly, confidently and comfortably about al-Qaeda" and admitted to throwing the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer. Fuller's testimony continued on Thursday, and on Friday, a young female Navy Reservist (identified only as "Agent Number 11") also spoke about non-coercive interrogations, this time at Guantánamo.

As Michelle Shephard explained in the Toronto Star, the former interrogator told the court that, "over the course of 12 interviews, which began in the prison hospital when Khadr arrived [at Guantánamo] on Oct. 28, 2002, he agreed to talk while they shared M&Ms and fig newtons." Claiming that she was chosen to interrogate Khadr in the hope that he would relate to her as a "mother figure," she also stated that their rapport was so good that Khadr told her, "I'd rather be in the booth with you than bored in my cell."

Whether this is true or not, "Agent Number 11" inadvertently revealed the general futility of cooperating with the interrogators in Guantánamo, when she explained that "He knew if he was cooperative it would expedite his repatriation back to Canada" -- a claim that was clearly groundless. She also said that he confessed to throwing the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer "like it was done in the movies," adding that he said "he checked his watch just before throwing the grenade to note the time." Military defense lawyer Lt. Col. Jon Jackson challenged this as "odd," according to Shephard, "especially since ... Khadr was bleeding from his head and blinded in one eye by shrapnel by that time" -- or, in another possible scenario, was unconscious and face-down beneath a pile of rubble.

Did Omar Khadr throw the grenade?

The question of whether or not Khadr even threw the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer is crucial to his case, of course, and on day three of the hearings (on Saturday), these claims and counter-claims were addressed. Back in March 2008, it was revealed that there were two versions of a report describing the firefight, both written by the commander of the Special Forces unit responsible for capturing Khadr, who is identified only as "Lt. Col. W."

In the first version, "Lt.-Col. W" stated that the person who had thrown the grenade had been killed, This, of course, would rule out Khadr as the suspect, but in the revised version, "Lt. Col. W" changed a single line to note that the person who threw the grenade was "engaged," thereby implicating Khadr, who was the only non-U.S. survivor of the firefight. On Saturday, "Lt. Col. W." testified by video link from the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania, claiming that he had changed his report for "history's sake," but only because he had initially believed that Khadr had died. He said that he changed it, several years after the event, after being visited by military investigators.

This sounds plausible, but, as Michelle Shephard noted, his revised report "appears to conflict with a March 2004 statement written by a commando identified only as OC-1, which states that after the grenade was thrown he shot two fighters -- one fatally," demonstrating that two men were alive at the time the grenade was thrown (Khadr and another insurgent), and that, as a result, either of them could have thrown the grenade.

How this will all pan out is unknown at present, as the defense team has not yet had the opportunity to present its evidence, including the alarming claim, mentioned above and made last October when Khadr's defense team released previously classified photos, that Khadr could not have thrown the grenade because, at the time, he was buried face-down under a pile of rubble.

Will a plea deal save Omar Khadr (and Obama) from the perils of a trial?

Pre-trial hearings are continuing this week at Guantánamo, and, to be honest, anything could happen. According to some of the first reports last week, prosecutors offered Khadr a plea bargain before the hearings even began -- proposing that he would serve five years in a U.S. prison in exchange for pleading guilty to the war crimes charges against him -- but the defense team turned down the offer. However, on Saturday the Washington Post claimed that the Obama administration was actively seeking a plea agreement. A senior official, speaking of the proposed trial in July, which would be the first trial under Obama to go ahead, told the Post, "This is not what you would choose to open with. Khadr has become a cause, and this is not a case that will demonstrate the strength and validity of military commissions."

This seems rather disingenuous, as the administration clearly knew what it was doing when Khadr's name was put forward last November, but maybe Obama has finally found his conscience, and is getting cold feet. After all, as Lt. Col. David Frakt declared authoritatively last week:

The Administration's decision to press forward with the first war crimes trial of a child soldier in modern history is unfathomable. That the Administration would then try to ensure a conviction by attempting to rewrite the law to create a new war crime is reprehensible.

If an administration that promised "hope and change" is not definitely to become one tarred as an advocate of the "unfathomable and reprehensible," Obama needs to move fast. Changing the plea bargain to one that frees Khadr after a much shorter period of time than five years would be a good start; and scrapping the commissions immediately afterwards would be a sensible way to follow up.

Copyright © 2010 Future of Freedom Foundation

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=825

[Simulist]

Like his predecessor, Barack Obama is a dreadful excuse.

How anyone who claims to be a person of conscience can support him — even to the slightest degree — is completely beyond me.

[RocketMan]

Like his predecessor, Barack Obama is a dreadful excuse.

How anyone who claims to be a person of conscience can support him — even to the slightest degree — is completely beyond me.

At the White House Correspondents' Dinner Imperial Schmoozefest he joked about sending Predator drones after the Jonas Brothers. Jokes about Predator drones, with which he's waging an illegal war on Pakistani territory. Stay classy, Barry!

Keith Olbermann called him out on that, at least.

[elfismiles]

Obama drone joke: Was it offensive?
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/201 ... ffens.html

At the White House Correspondents' Dinner Imperial Schmoozefest he joked about sending Predator drones after the Jonas Brothers. Jokes about Predator drones, with which he's waging an illegal war on Pakistani territory. Stay classy, Barry!

Keith Olbermann called him out on that, at least.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Voting for a president these days is a little like selecting which seven-year-old is going to fly the jet you're on — a jet that's being maneuvered by ground-based radar.

Good one! To me it seems like voting for the President of your high school. Knowing full well that the President of the student body has absolutely nothing to do with the actual running of the school.

That's left to the professionals.

We did that ina high school class, using proportional representation.

The most unpopular kid won. Tho looking back I think alot more people voted for him than admitted it. (It put me off voting for years as I thought the whole thing was rigged or a scam.) Our class was the in the equivilent of a civil war for the rest of the year. The poor guy who got elected never got a minute of peace. When he had to stand up in front of class and report on stuff he was constantly booed and people held up signs claiming he was a tool of the teachers... or simply calling him a piece of shit.

I feel a bit sorry for him now. I'll bet he is no fan of "democracy" or the "masses" these days.

[Alaya]

@ sunny's and elf's posts:

oh god and oh god

i just feel like saying that

if it weren't for what we did in the 60s, i bet he never woulda got selected

Hope and Change = Lies and Betrayal

[Cedars of Overburden]

I just started a thread on the activism board that I think some people who are posting here might be interested in. It's called "Strike Against the Left."

[Jeff]

Since spill, feds have given 27 waivers to oil companies in gulf

By Marisa Taylor | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico.

The waivers were granted despite President Barack Obama’s vow that his administration would launch a “relentless response effort” to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the gulf. One of them was dated Friday — the day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he was temporarily halting offshore drilling

The exemptions, known as “categorical exclusions,” were granted by the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) and included waiving detailed environmental studies for a BP exploration plan to be conducted at a depth of more than 4,000 feet and an Anadarko Petroleum Corp. exploration plan at more 9,000 feet.

“Is there a moratorium on off shore drilling or not?” asked Peter Galvin, conservation director with the Center for Biological Diversity, the environmental group that discovered the administration’s continued approval of the exemptions. “Possibly the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history has occurred and nothing appears to have changed.”

MMS officials said the exemptions are continuing to be issued because they do not represent final drilling approval.

To drill, a company has to file a separate application under a process that is now suspended because of Salazar’s order Thursday.

However, officials could not say whether the exemptions would stand once the moratorium is lifted.

MMS’ approvals are expected to spark new criticism of the troubled agency and the administration’s response to the spill.

Salazar announced Thursday that there’d be no new offshore drilling until the Interior Department completes the safety review process requested by Obama. The department is required to deliver the report to the president by May 28.

Given the MMS approvals, however, Galvin said the administration’s pledge appears disingenuous.

“It looks to me like they’re misleading the public,” he said.

...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/07/9 ... iving.html