Another day, another promise broken

Charlie Savage, reporting for the New York Times, states that:

Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.

The significance of this tactic was not lost on Glenn Greenwald, who stated:

So that appears to be a consensus: Guantanamo — the closing of which was one of Obama's central campaign promises — will still be open as of 2013, by which point many of the detainees will have been imprisoned for more than a decade without charges of any kind and without any real prospect for either due process or release, at least four of those years under a President who was elected on a commitment to close that camp and restore the rule of law. [emphasis in the original]

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Guantánamo

Democracy Now’s monday after report on the G-20

 

We are an empire now….

Writing for his Atlantic blog, Andrew Sullivan augments the Greenwald critique of the Washington Post's recently stated position (see this below along with the link it contains) on torture prosecution by exclaiming:

The longer I have lived in Washington, the more corrupt it appears. That includes large swathes of the press. The cooptation of the Washington Post by the torture-mongers should therefore come as no surprise — and Obama's refusal to investigate torturers is a reflection of his own so-pragmatic-it's-cynical belief that such matters do not really count for much — certainly not as much as a successful presidency. This is not a conspiracy. It's just the kind of elite corruption you usually see in banana republics with no rule of law and a coopted press.

It is surely fortunate — or would unfortunate be the better word to use? — that the United States yet to become a banana republic, for the middle class in the United States will not fare well when it attains this level of development. The signs indicating this fate are there, of course. Nevertheless, the country remains best characterized as a global empire and the only military superpower, and, as such, the arrogance of power has become its normal condition. Denial is an ordinary complement of such arrogance, so the fact that denial is a common feature of American politics follows as a matter of course.

Rule of law or rule by law?

Do we have a choice?

These are questions a reasonable and thus concerned citizen of the United States might ask at this juncture given the abuse of governmental power that is now all-too-common. Glenn Greenwald has often brought to our attention the institutional failures that produce these kinds of abuses. But he truly excels in holding the establishment press accountable for its willing complicity in the commission of these crimes. Most recently the Washington Post, as Greenwald makes plain, joined the Bush and Obama regimes as a defender of the kind and degree of torture 'authorized' by the infamous Bush regime torture memos (.pdf). Should we be surprised that the Post advocates sacrificing the over-aggressive foot soldier that exceeded the limits specified by the Bush regime's torture memos while permitting John Yoo (the principal author of the torture justification), his co-conspirators and the American governmental system as a whole to remain unmolested by the law? No, we should not find this surprising, and I would expect Greenwald also found the Post's position utterly predictable and contemptible. He continues:

That, in a nutshell, is the twisted Washington mentality when it comes to lawbreaking: when political crimes become so blatant and extreme that they can no longer be safely excused (Watergate, Iran-contra, Abu Ghraib), then it's necessary to sacrifice some underlings who carried out the crimes by prosecuting them, but — no matter what else happens — the high-level political officials responsible for the crimes must be shielded from all accountability. In ordinary criminal justice, what typically guides prosecutions is the opposite mindset: namely, a willingness to immunize low-level soldiers in order to ensure that the higher-level criminals suffer the consequences of their crimes. But when it comes to crimes committed by political officials in America's Versailles culture, only the pawns are subjected to the rule of law while the monarchs and their highest royal court aides are immunized.

Greenwald continues by using the rest of his column to debunk the tired rationalization the Post offered to defend those who authorized the whole wretched torture business. He concludes his piece by observing:

If, as appears to be the case, this is the principle by which we're now governed — presidential acts in blatant violation of clear statutes are no longer crimes if a DOJ lawyer justifies it in advance, even using legal reasoning found to be in bad faith — then, by definition, Presidents are literally no longer bound by the rule of law. If the crimes are embarrassing enough, we'll find a Lynndie England — or some obscure, easily demonizable, extra-sadistic CIA interrogator — to scapegoat and punish in order to pacify the citizenry and create the illusion that the rule of law still prevails. But the one thing that remains off-limits in Washington culture above all else is subjecting high-level political officials to the rule of law when they commit crimes. The low-level scapegoating which the Post today endorses is the approach which, by all accounts, Eric Holder is likely to pursue.

The United States — a proud nation, a nation of laws, of a Constitution, of the Constitution. Yet America is not today — if it has ever been — a nation in which every person is equally subject to the law. Rather, the law and the Constitution have mostly been instruments the powerful, the favored and the well-placed used to pursue their peculiar ends. This corruption of the republic is quite evident today. The corruption has lately become so obvious that if the actions of the elite betray their intentions, their sensibilities and their political culture, then it follows that they believe justice is something meant only for the weak.

One might consider this kind of justice an instance of "street justice" — a harsh form of rule originating on Wall Street and K Street.

The DoD: Freedom’s ally

Dennis Loo recently learned that the Department of Defense now considers protest to be a low level form of terrorism!

The American Civil Liberties Union has already protested the DoD's infringement on an American citizen's basic rights. The ACLU's response can be read here.

Ah, this may be one of those prison camps that don’t exist

As per Paul Craig Roberts:


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Obama takes after “Slick Willie”

While addressing Barack Obama's recent National Security speech, Marjorie Cohn rightly asserts:

The pressure [produced mostly by the Reactionary Noise Machine] has caused Obama to buckle [on his decision to close Guantanamo Bay prison]. Timed to coincide with a Cheney speech to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, Obama announced an appeasement plan to deal with the 240 remaining Guantánamo detainees. Parts of his plan would threaten the very foundation of our legal system — that no one should be held in custody if he has committed no crime.

"Unsurprisingly, Republicans are jubilant" with the new Obama, according to Joanne Mariner. They are elated, in Mariner's reckoning, because they can now plausibly represent "…Obama's reversal as a belated embrace of the Bush administration's war on terror, their tone is unabashedly triumphant." Obama's stance has been called "Cheneyism-without-Cheney," an apt depiction of a president who has done little more than to provide a bit of whitewash to America's empire and its criminal actions.

By applying the term appeasement in this instance Cohn thereby invokes the Munich Pact of 1938 which sealed the Sudetenland's fate and has come to represent a cynical and foolish real politics in action, a display of cowardice in the face of a mortal threat and the willingness of the powerful to betray the weak in order to gain meager advantages. Her use of the term also indirectly calls to mind Bill Clinton's infamous triangulation strategy, the net effect of which was to move the Democratic Party rightward without, however, slaking the crude desires of the reactionaries. Briefly put, it can be argued that Bill Clinton prepared the country for the militarism and authoritarianism of the George W. Bush regime with his triangulation strategy. He managed this feat by making a Republican program appear normal and inevitable. Appeasement is thus a powerfully critical symbol in this case. By relying upon this power Cohn suggests that Obama's new prisoner detention policy amounts to his capitulation to America's neoconservatives, militarists and imperialists, which is to say, to an evil within our midst.

Finally, it can be said that Obama's latest position not only advocates illegal and unconstitutional actions and institutions, as must be the case given America's treaty commitments and its constitutional safeguards against this kind of behavior, it also effects his greatest betrayal of the Americans who voted for him in the last election, a political outcome that clearly reflected a deep popular dissatisfaction with the kind of policies Obama now promotes. It is clear today that America's electoral mechanism and party system lack the power needed to restrain America's criminal state. More is needed if the country wishes to effectively refuse to become a massive gulag.

An emerging campaign to disbar Bush’s torture lawyers

The organizer of the campaign: Velvet Revolution. A page dedicated to the campaign may be found here, and includes the rationale behind the campaign, the names of the lawyers targeted, the supporting documentation and lists of individual and organizational campaign endorsers.

So far, as every politically sentient being knows, the Bush apparatchiks who organized and justified America's recent torture regime have escaped justice. This campaign would be a start.

Some crimes of the greedy, reckless and self-absorbed

Drawing upon Hannah Arendt's famous analysis of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi regime, the destructive potential a modern administrative system harbors within and, of course, upon the Holocaust as a manifestation of that destructive potential, Shoshana Zuboff contends that: "The economic crisis has demonstrated that the banality of evil concealed within a widely accepted business model can put the entire world and its peoples at risk." Indeed, it can, for how might one assess a deep global economic crisis but as an systemic event that puts millions — if not billions — at risk? What also might one say about those individuals, groups and organizations responsible for the crisis? Zuboff continues by asking:

Shouldn't those businesses be held accountable to agreed international standards of rights, obligations, and conduct? Shouldn't the individuals whose actions unleashed such devastating consequences be held accountable to these moral standards?

Her answer:

I believe the answer is yes. That in the crisis of 2009 the mounting evidence of fraud, conflicts of interest, indifference to suffering, repudiation of responsibility, and systemic absence of individual moral judgment produced an administrative economic massacre of such proportion that it constitutes an economic crime against humanity.

Zuboff fails to provide a remedy for these crimes which were so neatly woven into the fabric of the modern world that they became perceptible to common folk long after the disaster began to snowball. This absence is unsurprising since the blame for the crisis properly extends to individuals, organizations and groups worldwide. We live in a globalized and globalizing world. The key problem: How might so many with so much power be brought to justice? The task is daunting. Yet parsimony in practice is possible. This potential derives from the fact that the major portion of the blame for the latest crisis falls upon the putative "masters of the universe." They earned this blame because with power comes responsibility. It is for similar reasons that countries like Great Britain and the United States deserve a special share of the blame since "[t]he use of force to configure a 'liberal' world economy (as Marx and Later Rosa Luxemburg argued) is what Pax Britannica [and later Pax Americana] was really about," according to Mike Davis (295). It is undisputable that the Western imperial powers gave shape to the modern world. Consequently they should at least be assigned responsibility for the world they have created and from which they have taken so much.

Prisons for the surplus population

It's a profitable growth industry

A recent CorpWatch report states that:

While the nation's economy flounders, business is booming for The GEO Group Inc., a private prison firm that is paid millions by the U.S. government to detain undocumented immigrants and other federal inmates. In the last year and a half, GEO announced plans to add a total of at least 3,925 new beds to immigration lockups in five locations. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the U.S. Marshals Service, which hire the company, will fill the beds with inmates awaiting court and deportation proceedings [links added].

GEO reported impressive quarterly earnings of $20 million on February 12, 2009, along with an annual income of $61 million for 2008 – up from $38 million the year before. But the company's share value is not the only thing that's growing. Behind the financial success and expansion of the for-profit prison firm, there are increasing charges of negligence, civil rights violations, abuse and even death.

Naturally circumstantial evidence of financial corruption has emerged:

The Tacoma lockup, site of the most recent GEO controversy, is located on top of a former toxic waste dump that borders coastal wetlands near the Port of Tacoma, Washington. In August 2008, the firm announced plans to expand its 1,030-bed Northwest Detention Center to 1,575 beds, "to help meet the increased demand for detention bed space by federal, state, and local government agencies around the country."

Just four months after GEO's announcement, ICE notified government contractors that the agency was looking for a contractor-owned and -operated detention facility. According to federal procurement data, the new facility should be capable of providing 1,575 beds — the same number GEO was set to build – to be completed no later than September 2009 — the same date GEO had set for the completion of its own construction project.

Lorie Dankers, ICE spokeswoman in Washington state, implied that the similarity in numbers and date was a coincidence. "I would never comment, nor have I in the past, on what GEO is doing and why they're doing it. That's a business decision that GEO made," said Dankers. "To insinuate that there was some kind of connection, or that they has [sic] some inside information as to the request, that would be incorrect."

Dankers added that ICE's request for more space is still in the "pre-solicitation" phase, meaning that there is no guarantee a contract will be offered, and the agency is simply requesting information from contractors to "guage [sic] interest."

"I don't have any information one way or the other as to what would happen," Dankers said. "I think often times, if I had to speculate, they see where there's a need. I think they're always looking for opportunities."

That GEO Group — they're real Merican go-getters!