The Helmand Incident

Ah, the U.S. Marines, Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children; you dress them up in really cool dress uniforms, but you really can’t take them anywhere. If you have been hiding under a rock, or have been attempting to forget this little bit of idiocy, let me fill you in on the particulars. It seems a U.S. Marine sniper team decided to participate in a little cinema verite’ in Helmand Province. Whoever came up with the brilliant idea of documenting a war crime is definitely regretting his decision now. The video got on the wild wonderful web, and the rest as they say, is history .

A three star general is now been tasked to find out the who, what, when, where and why of the incident. And well, if you know how the military works, that means that sniper team is about to have the entire chain of command land on top of them like a ton of bricks. By the time the military justice system is done with them, they will be ground down to a fine powder. The military is going to strip them of everything they have, including their birthdays.

I am not too worried about those five junior servicemembers, their doom is sealed. What I am worried about is how that incident happened in the first place. The Helmand incident did not happen in a vacuum. There has been a serious breakdown in what the military calls “good order and discipline.”

We are in four wars of choice gentle reader and the military is starting to seriously crack under the pressure. Iraq is still an area of concern, ditto Libya, Afghanistan is on a rolling boil and our efforts in Pakistan are careering about like a New Years drunk on a icy patch of road.

Our effort in Afghanistan, where the incident happened, has now passed a decade. Afghanistan is the longest military effort ever attempted by the U.S. Servicemembers are now on fifth and sixth tours, plus more, in the badlands of the Hindu Kush. It has been a long, hard, haul; with not much to show for it. Forget all the happy talk coming from the brass hats and high level politicians, out in the field the reality is not so rosy. Ask any trooper what is really going on when s/he is not being minded by mid-level officer and s/he will unload a long diatribe about how ineffective the whole nation building effort is.

We saw this in Vietnam, when the brass hats and high level politico were issuing all manner of happy talk that had no relation to the grim realities in the field.  Fortunately the All-Volunteer Military is still a much better outfit than the conscript armies of Vietnam.

But lets not fool ourselves, the fault does not lie in the present military as much as it does in the nation. Our leadership is rotten to the core. Not a one of them has any notion of what national service is. Not a one has any true understanding of what sacrifice to the nation really means. Look at the very heights of the political class. Neither Barack Hussein Obama, nor Willard Romney has spent one minute in the military. I doubt either one of their very deep staff has one person who has served in an active duty capacity. Only Vice President Joe Biden can claim a family member in the military, and that is as a reservist and a JAG officer; still not a trigger-puller to be found. The separation between the military and the political elites could not be more profound.

Still, it should be no surprise that our elites do not serve because most of us do not serve. The military and military family members make not even one percent of the population. Military service is concentrated in the working class and the lower middle class. Some of the middle class do serve, but almost none of the upper middle class serve and the wealthy have not been in the fray in any  meaningful way since World War 2.

This is why a clueless Dana Loesch can treat the Helmand incident like no big deal. This is why she can treat the whole notion of armed conflict like a Chuck Norris movie, or the latest installment of the Call Of Duty video game series. Dana Loesch has never had to hump a sixty pound ruck, nor get into full battle rattle, nor fire a weapon in her life. She never had to ride a slab of steel in broiling sun of the Persian Gulf, nor get tossed about in that same vessel in the brutal cold of an Alaskan winter. She has never had to stand a post, do a watch, work ridiculous hours, be separated from loved ones, nor had to deal with the countless incidents of “ hurry up and wait” every soldier, sailor, Coastguard man, Marine, or Airman plus their family members have to on a regular basis.  War for people like Loesch is a lark, an outsized team sport with guns, you root for the home team and abuse the opponents. Not for these arm chair generals the finer points of the Geneva Conventions. Not for these sunshine patriots the discipline of core values.

This is not to excuse the actions of the Marine sniper team, but I am not in the least surprised by their actions. If you have ever served with Marines, or have been around them for any amount of time you will understand that the ground pounders are not blessed with high levels of intellectual wherewithal. In other word the grunts can be rather foolish. They tend to do foolish things, not thinking of the consequences. Even in peacetime junior Devil Dogs find, um, interesting ways of getting into trouble. Now add to that tendency to act before thinking the stresses of a fire fight. Add to those stresses a mission that is ill-defined and going exactly nowhere. Add to that long, repeated deployments with no end in sight. Add to that the feeling that their own country is oblivious of the sacrifices they make day in, day out.  Add all those things together plus a lowering of standards for inductees and you have all sorts of kindling lying around for just the right match.

Those five Marines will be held accountable for their actions. Brother, are they going to be held accountable. But they are only  the tip of an ice burg. Our endless war against terrorism is corrupting and corroding our military. From the black site prisons run by the Air Force, to the farce that is Guantanamo Bay, run by the Navy, and beyond to the shadow drone war fought in too may places to enumerate, we are tasking our military with ever more dirty deeds. Is it any surprise that when the mission boils down to “act like Visigoths on the rampage” that our military acts like, well, Visigoths on the rampage?

The incident in Helmand is the result of an interventionist foreign policy gone off the rails. It is a reflection of a deeply dysfunctional government unable to set priorities; unable to discern the true National Interest from chaff.

This is your nation, the victory junkie. It got its first good hit during Gulf War One and has been looking for its next high ever since. Time for an intervention gentle reader, time to take away the crack pipe of military action before this addiction gets any worse. Time to seek a twelve step program and clean up our act. We cannot afford this drug anymore. We are going economically and morally bankrupt chasing this high of military victory, of world hegemony.

Tortured Logic

It is truly perverse how the present Fox News inspired Republican Party behaves. It only took twenty-four hours for the push-back against the Administration’s success in Abbottabad to begin.  The very first flowering of the new meme was seen in the Murdock operated Wall Street Journal. It was there in plain sight, a tiny bit of worthless opinion wedged in the story as fact.  You had to go deep into the story, the lead was buried, but it was there none the less : enhanced interrogation had provided at least some of the leads that lead to OBL’s hideout.   What began as a whisper has become a thing shouted from the rooftops : torture works.

To have to go over this particular bit of ground is painful. It is not just that this meme is demonstrably false, that it is a big fat lie. It is that even if true, even if torture provides actionable intelligence, the means still do not justify the ends.

There is something profoundly icky about how much the Right Wing gets its torture groove on. There is a foul reek of sexual needs denied. The whole structure oozes of repressed homoerotic sadomasochistic urges mixed with toxic authoritarianism. The pleasure, the shear joy, that Conservative commentators project when discussing torture is off-putting; you feel an overwhelming desire to take very long shower.

These commentators will not be deterred, they will not even pause in delivering their message of mayhem. They most certainly will not let facts get in the way. They are going for the lizard brain; no detours. To be a true warrior in the battle against terror one must surrender any notions of decency. It seems that the only way to defeat the evil bastards of terrorism is to become an even bigger, even more evil, bastard yourself.

These right-wing warriors accept no limits. Black Site Prisons, extraordinary rendition, Gitmo, indefinite detention, and “enhanced interrogation” are all acceptable. As a matter of fact these methods are more than acceptable, they are the only way to deal with the bad guys. If you are unwilling to become an utter savage, you are obviously a lily-livered coward.

How acting like a perfect Visigoth became the acme of policy is no real mystery. There is a reason that Republicans are attempting to legitimize the methods of the Mongol hordes. It is to set up the old trope that Democrats are weak on defense. In this brave new world only utter depravity towards our adversaries is acceptable. Anything less than wholesale barbarism is weakness. Is your head hurting yet? It should be.

We are a very long way from the thoughts of our first President. We are a very long way from first principle. How is it that when Washington had his back up against a wall, he was able to treat the despised Hessians fairly, but we are unable to do the same against Al Qaeda? Washington was in an existential struggle against the greatest military power of the  age; we are dealing with a rag-tag bunch of nihilists one step above a street gang. Washington was dead set against torture; we have babbling fools who extol the virtues of torture every chance they get.

These fools should be marginal characters. They should be on a soap box on some street corner yelling their obscenities to the pigeons. Instead they occupy positions of trust. They are T.V. personalities, politicians, academics, commentators, Congressmen and Senators. In short they are people who are supposed to know better.

So how did these people loose their grip on reality? Why are they peddling this tripe? It is more than just justifying the programs of the Bush-Cheney Administration. That is only the very top layer of this effort. Those who interpret this push for torture as just a desperate attempt to latch the failed efforts of Bush-Cheney to the successful efforts of Team Obama are only looking at the surface. Republicans have to “prove” torture works. They have to then carry that premise forward so they can beat up Obama for his reluctance to use torture. That way they reset the meme that Democrats are weak because they are unwilling to use this “proven” method of getting to the bad guys. Welcome to crass political considerations.

You expected decency from this lot? The ends justify the means for these people. And the ends is the permanent Republican ascendancy. The end is the permanent delegitimizing of the Democratic party by any means necessary. Only the Republican Party represents “Real America” (tm) And because this is the “Real America” it can do no wrong; no quarter asked or given, no holds bared, might makes right, just win baby.

Now some would say this is a good thing; that the Republicans have gone so far off the reservation that they will “loose the middle,”  hogwash.  The middle is whatever the political elites say it is. It is a flexible, mutable thing, it is totally plastic. The middle can be moved, and it has been moved. The middle in the 21st Century is much more tilted to the right than it was in the middle of the 20th Century.  As long as Neo-Liberals and “Moderate” Democrats keep playing defense the nation will continue its rightward march.

Instead of passively waiting for the Republicans to step on a rake, Democrats should be blasting the Elephants 24/7 on torture. People should not be just loosing elections for their support of torture, they should be loosing their livelihoods. Supporting torture should brand you as a tin-foil hatted crazy, not fit for any job requiring a scintilla of responsibility. Supporting torture should brand you a pervert, as one who perverts the very essence of our nation. It should brand you as a moral reprobate, as worse than a child molester. People who support torture should not be seen as tough, as being hard edged, as leaders or doers, they should be seen as pond scum.  Torture is wrong, end of discussion, end of drill. Anyone who says different is being willfully ignorant, a troll, or overcompensating for their own cowardice.

The TEA Party faithful are more than willing to beat their breast about taking back the country and how much they love the Constitution. It is an odd type of love they show for that document. There are some gaping holes in their infatuation with our founding document; not much love for the the Forth nor Fifth Amendments and the thrill is gone for the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments too. I haven’t seen the TEA Party set wave their muskets nor stage a tricornered hat protest against Gitmo, FISA , sneak and peak nor any other parts of the police state set up by W and Obama. They were more than happy to have any random brown person harassed by TSA, but did draw the line when those same government workers wanted to scan their junk. I guess it is a very situational love they have of the Constitution, with lots of cut-outs and exceptions.

This is a rather simple argument. It is that common decency should be exactly that: common. It should be our default. It should be our rock; that we treat even our worst opponents decently. We are supposed to be the civilized ones, our opponents are supposed to be the barbarians. There should be a wide and noticeable difference in the two behaviors. Our opponents want to drag our nation down to their level. They want us thinking with out lizard brains. They want us living in fear. Why, in God’s name, should we accommodate them?

Caught Between Scylla and Charybdis

The news about President Obama's Guantanamo decision is not at all surprising. Yet again we see the price of dawdling and delay. Obama's cool, calm, and measured response to, well damn near everything, is a two-edged sword. Sometimes it is a good thing; it prevents the type of "leadership" that a John McCain or a George W. Bush indulges in. When your default is to think from the gut and/or run around like your hair is on fire, bad decisions will happen. McCain campaign was fatally damaged by the gut decisions of Sarah Palin as V.P. and the attempt by the McCain campaign to postpone the first debate. It looked less than an example of deliberate leadership than an example of a poorly run Chinese Fire Drill.

The reverse side of the coin is that sometimes, actually quite often, Obama has a deer-in-the-headlights moment. While he ponders the possibilities and muses about the best possible outcomes, the opposition runs over him like a big rig rolling over a hapless armadillo on a Texas highway. Gitmo is just one example.

Obama was handed an epic mess on Gitmo. It was a shop of horrors. It was illegal on various different fronts. It was a violation of our obligations as laid down by the Geneva Accords. It was a possible violation of the Fourth Amendment and other portions of the Constitution of the United States. The word "possible" is only used because the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to fully weigh in on Gitmo. The Court has had a few chances to step into the breach but has so far has artfully dodged the invitation. As a violation of common sense and morals Gitmo has few equals.

Gitmo was the Bush-Cheney hair-on-fire response to 9/11. Having been caught napping by Osama Bin Laden's not-so-happy campers, W and friends went on epic hunt for Al Qaeda types in the badlands of Afghanistan. The Bushies vacuumed up any male that vaguely resembled a terrorist. The operating parameters where imprison/snatch first, ask questions later.

The second problem with the operation was that the questions were asked much later. Not only was there a problem with the timing, there was a problem with the method. Charming methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, vicious dogs, temperature extremes, and others were used. The intelligence gathered by these methods was less than fabulous.

Even worse, the tactics looked very much like torture; this despite a get-out-of-jail memo written by a hack lawyer in the government's employ. The legal reasoning of John Yoo was straight out of opposite land. http://www.justice.gov/olc/warpowers925.htm . Yoo's memo was an argument that owed more the philosophy of the Divine Right of Kings, than to anything based in the constitution. It was a bad faith document designed to cover epic lawlessness, and set up a legal limbo on the island of Cuba.

That legal limbo was incredibly effective. For almost eight years many detainees rotted in prison, with absolutely no legal recourse to speak of. Bush was able to run out the legal clock, and hand over Gitmo, as is, with no warranty, to Barack Obama. Candidate Obama thought he had the solution to the clunker he was given; President Obama soon discovered that there was no such easy solution.

The major problem for the new President was that some of the detainees were honest-to-goodness bad guys. They were men whose whole reason for being was to harm the government of the United States of America, and its citizens. They could not just be set loose to cause grave harm. Thanks to Bush and Cheney, they could not be tried either. No self-respecting court in the land would hear the case. Unlike John Yoo, real lawyers know what constitutes torture; they know what constituted a perversion of justice. They would have no choice to dismiss the charges, with extreme prejudice. They would have no choice but to release the detainees due to governmental misconduct.

Such a result would be a disaster. It would release some seriously bad actors into the wild. Who knows what death and mayhem they would be able to commit before we could capture them again? Who knows if they could be captured again? There a lot of lawless places in the world where they could go to ground. So there is a legitimate concern for not letting them go—the protection of lives.

The legitimate concern of protection of lives also neatly dove-tails with the political protection of Obama's backside. Cynics may claim that this was the primary consideration of the Administration. If it was a consideration, it could not have been played any worse. Obama managed to enrage his left-wing base, and give the right-wing a treasure-trove of brickbats to toss at his head. His cautious and considered deliberations about the prisoners left the door wide open for Republican fear mongering. Gitmo was held up as the only facility that could possibly hold these nefarious, death-dealing, Islamic terrorists (be afraid, be very, very afraid.) Never mind that the Government has plenty of facilities that could securely hold these men. Never mind that it would be rather hard for these men to just blend in with the local populous, even if they managed to escape. Never mind that they would have an even harder time of getting out of the U.S. to join up with their fellows. No, the only place that could hold them was the P.R. disaster and legal black-hole of Gitmo.

Sad to say, but after a year of cautious plodding by the Obama Administration, and their utter failure to provide any pushback to the Right-Wing noise machine, almost 60% of the electorate now believes that Gitmo should remain open. Thus, once more, is the plodding Armadillo of Obama overtaken and crushed, by the tractor-trailer of the Republican Party. Caution and deliberation where overmatched by nimbyism and fear mongering. It only gets worse from here.

It gets worse because the Obama Administration has come up with an epically awful solution to the Gordian Knot that is the detainee issue. The solution that was worked out was to gather some more line, and add some half-hitches, a passel of tug-boat hitches, a Yosemite bowline or two, and nice hang man's noose to the mass. Such is the legal legerdemain that is the Obama proposal. Some detainees will be "tried" in New York City. It will be a wonderful bit of spectacle, worthy of Joe Stalin's efforts during the purges. It will be quite the gathering of Kangaroos. Other detainees will be delivered into the tender mercies of the Military Justice system, as further amended by a railroading construction known as the Military Tribunals. It is a form of justice so suspect, that Military Prosecutors have deserted the process in protest. No small feat that. But the lowest level of this legal hell will be occupied by forty some detainees. They will continue to be held without charge, without possibility of release, without any recourse whatsoever. So much for habeas corpus, so much for the Fifth, Fourth and Eighth Amendments, so much for the rule of law for these men; and so long to our legal protections as well.

This is the ultimate result of not understanding the difference between pragmatism and prudence. It is the result of not understanding the difference between what can be done, and what should be done. It is what happens when you let a convenient compromise cloud an inconvenient truth. Sometimes there is no "third way;" sometimes there is only the devil and the deep blue sea. The strictures of the exclusionary rule of the U.S. Constitution, and the precedent set by the Geneva Accords lead to only one correct solution to the issue of the detainees—release on their own recognacense. But what the law demands, neither domestic security nor political reality can abide. Thus the creation of a totally bogus process that gives the lie to the words "legal proceedings." As it is now constructed, it is a process that only a small coterie of Washington insiders see any value in. Everyone else holds the process in contempt. The right sees no need for the process in the first place. The accused are utterly evil, and should be left to fester in the hole they now find themselves. The guilt of these people is self evident, no trail is needed. The left sees the process as both pointless and evil. The rest of the unwashed middle wonder why the Administration is making such a fetish of a legal procedure that is obviously designed for the sole purpose of convicting the accused. They sympathize with the right wing mostly, if the end result is going to be conviction. "Why bother?" is the question they ask. It is a good question; what exactly is the point of Obama's fastidious procedure? What is the need for this thin white-wash of legal mumbo-jumbo, if the results are preordained? Is this just some pointless bureaucratic exercise so that some nameless Government drones can place a tick mark on some obscure check list? Are we doing this to provide cover for few functionaries deep in the bowels of the National Security Apparatus? Sure looks like it. Sure looks like a typical D.C. exercise in covering posteriors. It sure looks like a pointless, grubby, amoral and ultimately degrading farce.

Be On the Lookout For Portland, Oregon or Why the TSA is a farce.

" [O]ur government is incompetent and it doesn't matter whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge, even as the latter circle the wagons. This many years after 9/11 and we still can't get it down that someone on a terrorist watch list should have extra screening?"--Taylor Marsh. (http://bit.ly/6fx6JT)

"Mr Abdulmutallab's file was marked for a full investigation should he ever reapply for a visa.

His name was also added to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (Tide) watch list, which contains the details of around 550,000 people with suspected connections to terrorism but does not prevent them from flying internationally." BBC News (http://bit.ly/70fn5l)

In these two quotes one has the gist of why TIDE, the so called terrorist watch list, is a non-starter. Look at that number hard; the government is supposed to be watching half a million individuals. That is near the population of Portland, Oregon in 1998. (http://bit.ly/7mP1uh) Name one democratic institution that could accomplish such a herculean task with even an iota of competence. Name one democratic nation that would even attempt such a Sisyphean task other than the U.S.

After the 9/11 attacks, the conventional wisdom wanted an organization like DHS in the worst way; and that is exactly what we as a nation got. George W. Bush did not want DHS in the first place, so when forced to create the Department, he made it as dysfunctional as possible. Remember that Bernard Kerrick came within inches of being the first Head of DHS. In a way, it is a shame he did not get the nod. A mobbed-up incompetent at least would have a good excuse for his failure to deliver. As it was, the U.S. got Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff. Janet Napolitano continues in the fine tradition of political trivia quiz answers that run DHS.

The problems with DHS go deeper than the political mediocrities that run it. There is a fatal flaw in the very design of the Department; it is just too big. The shear mass of DHS, the multitude of agencies that it oversees, are too much for even the best of leaders. DHS is very much a remake of that 1958 cult movie classic The Blob. Under its purview are TSA, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration Customs Enforcement, The Secret Service, FEMA, and the Coast Guard. Thus DHS is less an organic whole than a metastatic cancer.

DHS is systemically unable to perform its multiple mandates. It cannot execute its deliverables. It is going in too many directions at once. As a governmental institution, DHS is very much like the old H.E.W. Health Education and Welfare workers used to describe their (dis)organization as Halls of Eternal Warfare. When Education was peeled off as its own department, Health and Human Services, as the new department was called, was a less unfocused and dysfunctional department.

Truth be told, it is a good thing that DHS is such an entropic mess; the Department, if it was ever functional, would be an existential threat to democracy. The very idea of the "homeland" has a creepy authoritarian feel to it. It carries a faint whiff of fascism, a slight flavor of Nazi toxin.

Take a good, long, hard look at the Continental United States. Look at the east, gulf and west coasts, look at the northern and southern borders, how do you defend it? How do you lock down the myriad Ports of Entry, the rivers, lakes and streams? How do you keep people from crossing the trackless desserts to the south or the deep woods to the north? How do you secure the Sea Ports, the Air Ports, the Bus Stations and the Rail Stations? How do you do this without shredding freedom of movement? You don't.

You certainly cannot do it with a laundry list of "persons of interests" that numbers more than half a million. Abdulmutallab was able to waltz onto a plane because our security apparatus was flooded with white noise. There is no way even the most vigilant of TSA employees could possibly be on the lookout for a list of names the size of Portland, Oregon. That is not a workable scenario; it is an absurdity that even Kafka could not dream up on one of his more depressive days.

The only way one makes an institution like DHS "work" is if you copy the writ, strategy and tactics of the NKVD or the Gestapo. You would have to toss our constitutional protections out the window. You would have to turn just about every U.S. citizen into a snitch like the East German Stasi used to do. Granted with Gitmo, FISA, Extraordinary Rendition, Sneak and Peek Warrants, and Military Tribunals the U.S. is well on its way to such a state, but is that really where we want to go? Are we really going to surrender our unalienable rights to a bunch of nere-do-well nihilists? Are we really going to submit our freedoms to the tender mercies of some modern day Visigoths who hide behind the religion of Islam? Will we really concede our freedoms to bunch of feckless bureaucrats for a mumbled promise of security? Remember the words of the third President of the United States "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one." The system that really worked on that fateful flight was of an aware and proactive citizenry. Given a choice which would you prefer as your security DHS, or a sucker punch to a terrorist delivered by a pissed-off Missouri gal of Scotch-Irish ancestry? Go with the Missouri gal every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Betrayal

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Obama on Friday resumed -- with expanded legal protections -- the Bush administration's controversial system of military trials for some Guantanamo Bay detainees.
…

Obama said he supports the idea of the military commissions but opposes the version of the law that had been governing such trials in recent years: the Military Commissions Act put in place under the Bush administration in 2006, but subsequently struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

The president said military commissions "are appropriate for trying enemies who violate the laws of war, provided that they are properly structured and administered." But, he said, the 2006 act "failed to establish a legitimate legal framework and undermined our capability to ensure swift and certain justice against those detainees."
He said he plans to enhance due process rights for detainees held at the U.S. facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in order to improve the widely criticized approach created by his predecessor.

More at CNN. (http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/14/obama.military.tribunal/index.html)

Snip

How wrong is this? Let us count the ways.

First and foremost these Kangaroo courts are fundamentally contaminated by the use of torture by the U.S. on the detainees. Obama is forced to use the ruse of a Military Court proceeding because no civilian court would deem to hear these cases. The charges would be thrown out of court due to prosecutorial abuse. Given the undisputed facts of the case, the prolonged holding of the suspects without habeas corpus, the refusal of the government for the suspects to know the charges against them, the lack of representation for the accused for large portions of the proceeding, and the total lack of review by Supreme Court of the actual law under which these men are accused the whole process makes a mockery of the rule of law.

The farcical nature of these courts is further illuminated by the fact that they will allow hearsay evidence. Are the President and his Attorney General serious about this? Hearsay evidence has not been allowed into any court of law in the U.S. since the founding. Hearsay has been disallowed in court as a point of common law even longer than that. Now Obama is going to allow the game of telephone to be played out in a supposed court of law? Again , is he serious about this? Is that willing to trash long standing traditions of the rule of law for some will-of-the-wisp? Is he really going to try to unscrew the pooch?

Let’s be clear on what is happening here. People who have sat in a black hole for more than seven years will be subjected to further Kafkaesque persecutions disguised as a legal proceeding held under the color of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Mind you there is an excellent argument that they should never have been subject to military law in the first place. They sure as hell did not sign up to be members of the U.S. military and there is an honest question whether these men were active combatants at the time of capture. Even if they were mujaheddin fighters battling against U.S. forces it still does not give the U.S. the right to hold them indefinitely or to try them under special procedures that may violate the Constitution in particular and do violate the rules of simple human decency in general.

Even if these men are in Bushite terms “the worst of the worst” it does not excuse their rough-shod treatment at Gitmo and Bagram. The accused may be perfect Visigoths, but that does not give us excuse to act like the Mongol Hoards in retaliation.

So why on God’s good green earth is Barack Obama, Constitutional scholar and law school professor countenancing such a violation of basic democratic principles? Because, Obama is a crass, unprincipled, politician. He is at base a compromiser without set of core values.

Read his books or listen to them via audible. Drill down to the heart of his presentation and you will find nothing there. There is nothing more than facile centrism and pointless middle ground seeking. His “post partisanship” has always been a cop-out. It has been a way to offend as few people as possible and fool as many people as possible that he sympathizes with them. It has always been a “word fog” as Taylor Marsh puts it. It is fog that conceals a man with nothing more than a technocratic mind set.

Obama is continuing the farce of the Commissions because George W. Bush put him in an awful bind. Bush set up a lawless, cruel and self-destructive structure that has been short-handed to “Gitmo.” It was and is nothing more than a recreation of the Soviet Gulag by the United States. The whole sorry mess from “extraordinary rendition” to the “black site prisons” was xeroxed from the Soviet and Chinese Communist system of oppression and control. It was a reverse engineering of the Manchurian Candidate system that was part and parcel of the Communist abuses encountered by US servicemembers in Korea and in Vietnam. Instead of “American Imperialists” being fed into the meat grinder it was Muslim Extremists and Al Qaeda Types. It was the same abuse of human rights right down to the beating to death of people the interrogators knew were innocent of all and any charges.

Now the right thing to do would be to flatly state to the American people “because of the rampant lawlessness of the previous administration there is no legal way to prosecute any of the Gitmo detainees no matter how justly deserving of punishment they may be. I am forced by the Constitution and the founding principle of the rule of law to release all the detainees as soon as practicable.” Of course such a course of action would cause every Republican head in the United States to explode. Then because the Republicans would raise the roof, most Democrats would cave into pressure exerted by the Elephants. The ether would be awash in charges of Democrats being “soft on terror” or “coddling terrorists” or Democrats being “cowards” and “surrender monkeys.” Democrats would be more than willing to prove how spineless they are by refusing to stand up against Republican outrage. Obama would be totally without a friend in Washington, it is coin flip if Bo would remain loyal to him.

Thus doing the right thing is political non-starter. Obama will take the coward’s way out. He will slink behind a politically popular and beltway safe “compromise. He will get kudos for following the beltway's conventional wisdom. He will tinker around the edges of policy and call it change, just like he has done since the beginning. Obama only moves boldly when it is easy to be bold. Lilly Ledbetter was a slam dunk; SCHIP even more so. “Reviewing” Gitmo really took no skin off of anyone’s nose. Actually making a stark rejection of Bush’s illegal, immoral and cruel detainee policy—that would piss off some very powerful beltway players and Obama is all about keeping everyone happy, everyone other than the Progressive base.

The real question now is, what is the Progressive base going to do about this? Obama has already sold out to the Wall Street bankers with the massive transfer of wealth that is the bank bail out program. The top one tenth of one percent will get a massive infusion of money from the rest of the 99.9%. It will be the exact opposite of what happened under the New Deal and a continuation of the Democratic Party’s capitulation to the corporatist elites. Economically Obama is a disciple of the Chicago School and is as doctrinaire a free market believer as Alan Greenspan ever was. He is definitely no friend of the blue collar worker and has done squat for the real victims of Wall Street’s casino mentality. Will the progressive wing of the party give yet another pass to Barak Obama or will it finally stand for something?

The biggest complaint Progressives had against the Republican Party was its lock-step adherence to Bush’s policy. Even when there was the odd protest against King George from conservative principle it never transformed itself into a vote against W.’s legislative agenda. You had the spectacle of Republicans arguing against the broad increase in executive power that the Military Commissions Act represented who then turned right around and voted for that very same bill. The good limited government types in the Elephant Party abandoned their birthright to the Progressive Democrats.

Now the shoe is definitely on the other foot and it is now up to the Progressive Wing of the Democratic Party to stand clearly for the Civil Rights and the Rule of Law it holds so dear. Do the Grass Roots; DFA, Move On, etc. have the courage of their convictions and the honor to oppose Obama’s slide into political convenience? Will the Progressives let him once again take the easy “compromise” that the beltway thinks is pragmatic or will the left once and for all stop being afraid of its own values and its own strength? Will the left for once drop foolish identity politics and stand for the overarching values that bind all forward thinking people of good faith or will it trade its birthright for a pot of beans? Will it surrender its belief in justice and fair play for mumbled promises of Health Care reform or for energy policy reform, or for a lesbian on the Supreme Court or just the fear that it can not oppose the first African American President lest it be seen as racist?

The sooner the Progressive and other Democrats see Obama for what he truly is, just a smart and savvy politician who was able to ride a wave of revulsion and populist anger into office the better it will be for all concerned.

Shelby Steel, curse his conservative soul, was partially correct about Obama. Obama is a bound man, a conciliator, a Black man that White America can feel comfortable with. A major part of his candidacy was the facile promise that his election would magically correct the long troubled history of Race in America; that we could somehow easily put behind us the cruel legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. This was a large part of the “transformative” myth of Barack Obama. In his gene pool and in his life story there is the myth of a man who bridges the divide between black and white, who is the best part of us—African soul and flinty Kansas values leavened with the Aloha spirit and seasoned with Chicago grit. Obama marketed himself as the embodiment of change, as the anti-Bush and the anti-Hillary, as not the same-old,same old. It was bullpucky.

Obama was and is just another Centrist Democrat who must be constantly badgered by the Progressive Movement to do anything closely approximating the right thing to do. He is just another Bill Clinton, an amoral huckster and policy wonk with no philosophical core; just another deeply damaged soul attempting to achieve personal affirmation via high office. Obama rubbed Bill Clinton in the wrong way because Obama was Bill Clinton only more so and in Black Face. It infuriated Bill Clinton that someone could use his moves and improve on them.

In another place and another time Obama’s instinct for compromise and his willingness to go the extra mile to reach a consensus would be laudable. This is not that time. Obama’s failure is not to understand that sometimes the consensus of the best and brightest leads to disaster. His failure is to not understand that some things can not be compromised, that certain principles are inviolate, certain truths are self evident and not up for negotiation. Since Obama is unaware of these salient facts it is up to the Progressive Movement to remind him of those basic truths. Is the movement up to the challenge or is it going to reduce itself to mindless cheer leading and finally become the Obama-bots the right accuses it of being? The betrayal of Progressive Core values by Obama is manifest, does Progressive Movement cave into political “reality” and gamesmanship or does it finally stand up for what believes in?

Gitmo- Going, Going, Gone?

US judge suspends Guantanamo trial

The US judge trying the case of a Canadian Guantanamo detainee has agreed to suspend the trial.

Judge Patrick Parrish said on Wednesday that the trial of Omar Khadr, who was arrested in Afghanistan at the age of 15, would be suspended for 120 days.

Barack Obama, the US president, has requested that 21 military tribunals at the US detention centre be halted for the same time period.

Other judges trying Guantanamo cases are expected to rule on the presidential request in due course.

Obama's request was among his first actions as president, after being inaugurated on Tuesday.

The Obama administration is aiming to review the legal system for prosecuting alleged terrorists.

Khadr is accused of killing a US soldier with a grenade in Afghanistan in 2002 and has been held for seven years.

The 21 cases include the trials of five people accused of plotting the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US.

Prior to his inauguration, Obama said he would close down the Guantanamo Bay detention centre.

Jamil Dakwar, the director of the human rights programme at the American Civil Liberties Union, said Obama's request was a positive step but "the president's order leaves open the option of this discredited system remaining in existence".

Source Al Jazeera English