[Peace-discuss] Unconstitutional Obama

[C. G. Estabrook]

	George W. Obama
	After his first year, Obama shows his true face
	By Nat Hentoff
	published: January 12, 2010

	What a disappointment a year makes.

Before President Obama, it was grimly accurate to write, as I often did in the 
Voice, that George W. Bush came into the presidency with no discernible 
background in constitutional civil liberties or any acquaintance with the 
Constitution itself. Accordingly, he turned the "war on terror" over to Dick 
Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—ardent believers that the Constitution presents grave 
obstacles in a time of global jihad.

But now, Bush's successor—who actually taught constitutional law at the 
University of Chicago—is continuing much of the Bush-Cheney parallel government 
and, in some cases, is going much further in disregarding our laws and the 
international treaties we've signed.

On January 22, 2009, the apostle of "change we can believe in" proclaimed: 
"Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of my presidency." But 
four months into his first year in command, Obama instructed his attorney 
general, Eric Holder, to present in a case, Jewel v. National Security Agency, a 
claim of presidential "sovereign immunity" that not even Dick Cheney had the 
arrant chutzpah to propose.

Five customers of AT&T had tried to go to court and charge that the government's 
omnipresent spy, the NSA, had been given by AT&T private information from their 
phone bills and e-mails. In a first, the Obama administration countered—says 
Kevin Bankston of Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing these citizens 
stripped of their privacy—that "the U.S. can never be sued for spying that 
violated federal surveillance statutes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance 
Act, or the Wiretap Act."

It is one thing, as the Bush regime did, to spy on us without going to court for 
a warrant, but to maintain that the executive branch can never even be charged 
with wholly disregarding our rule of law is, as a number of lawyers said, 
"breathtaking."

On the other hand, to his credit, Obama's very first executive orders in January 
included the ending of the CIA "renditions"—kidnapping terrorism suspects off 
the streets in Europe and elsewhere and sending them for interrogation to 
countries known to torture prisoners. However, in August, the administration 
admitted that the CIA would continue to send such manacled suspects to third 
countries for detention and interrogation.

Why send them to a foreign prison if they're not going to be tortured to extract 
information for the CIA? Oh, the U.S. would get "guarantees" from these nations 
that the prisoners would not be tortured. That's the same old cozening song that 
Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush used to sing robotically.

President Obama also solemnly pledged to have "the most open administration in 
American history." Nonetheless, his Justice Department lawyers have already 
invoked "state secrets" to prevent cases brought by victims of the CIA 
renditions from being heard.

In February, in a lawsuit brought by five graduates of CIA "black sites" before 
the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, one of the judges, visibly 
surprised at hearing the new "change" president invoking "state secrets," asked 
the government lawyer, Douglas Letter, "The change in administration has no 
bearing on this?"

The answer: "No, your honor." This demand for closing this case before it can be 
heard had, he said, been "thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials 
within the new administration, [and] these are authorized positions."

Said the torture graduates' ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner: "Much is at stake in this 
case. If the CIA's overboard secrecy claims prevail, torture victims will be 
denied their say in court solely on the basis of an affidavit submitted by their 
torturers."

Barack Obama a torturer? Not exactly. In this particular case, the torture 
policy had been set by George W. Bush. President Obama is just agreeing with his 
predecessor. Does that make Obama complicit in these acts of torture? You decide.

What is clear, beyond a doubt—and not only in "rendition" cases, but in other 
Obama validations of what Dick Cheney called the necessary "dark side" of the 
previous administration—has been stated by Jameel Jaffer. Head of the ACLU's 
National Security Project, he is the co-author of the definitive evidence of the 
Bush-Cheney war crimes that Obama is shielding, Administration of Torture 
(Columbia University Press).

After the obedient Holder rang the "state secrets" closing bell in the San 
Francisco case, Jaffer described the link between the Bush and Obama 
presidencies: "The Bush administration constructed a legal framework for 
torture, but the Obama administration is constructing a legal framework for 
impunity."

It's become an Obama trademark: reversing a vigorous position he had previously 
taken, as when he signed into law the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance 
Act) Amendments Act that, as a senator, he had vowed to filibuster as a protest 
against their destruction of the Fourth Amendment. And now he's done it again. 
His government is free to spy on us at will.

For another example of the many Obamas, the shifting president had supported the 
release of photographs of Bush-era soldier abuses of prisoners in Iraq and 
Afghanistan. (The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York had approved the 
publication of these "intensive interrogations.") But Obama changed his mind, 
and Defense Secretary Robert Gates flat-out censored the photos. Not 
surprisingly, the Roberts Supreme Court agreed with Gates and Obama and 
overruled the Second Circuit.

In a December 5 editorial, The New York Times helped explain why Obama—who 
doesn't want to "look backward" at Bush cruelties—changed his mind: "The photos 
are of direct relevance to the ongoing national debate about accountability for 
the Bush-era abuses. No doubt their release would help drive home the cruelty of 
stress positions, mock executions, hooding, and other 'enhanced interrogation 
techniques' used against detainees and make it harder for officials to assert 
that improper conduct was aberrational than the predictable result of policies 
set at high levels."

Barack Obama may well go down in history as the President of Impunity for Bush, 
Cheney, and, in time, himself, for continuing the CIA "renditions."

But he will also be long remembered as the President of Permanent Detention. At 
the Supreme Court in 1987, in U.S. v. Salerno, Justice Thurgood Marshall, 
strenuously dissenting, warned: "Throughout the world today there are men, 
women, and children interned indefinitely, awaiting trials which may never come 
or which may be a mockery of the word, because their governments believe them to 
be 'dangerous.' Our Constitution . . . can shelter us forever against the 
dangers of such unchecked power."

Not forever. The Obama government is working to assure that its purchase of the 
supermax prison, the Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois, will be the 
permanent forced residence of certain Guantánamo terrorism suspects who can't be 
tried in our regular courtrooms because—gasp—they have been tortured, preventing 
the admission of "incriminating" statements they have made or—"state secrets" 
again!—a due process trial "would compromise sensitive sources and methods."

Like torture.

I increasingly wonder whose Constitution Barack Obama was teaching at the 
University of Chicago. China's? North Korea's? Robert Mugabe's? Glenn Greenwald, 
a former constitutional lawyer, whose byline I never miss on the Internet, asks: 
"What kind of a country passes a law that has no purpose other than to empower 
its leader to suppress evidence of the torture it inflicted on people?"

You may not be surprised to learn that my next book—to be published by Cato 
Institute, where I'm now a senior fellow—will be titled, Is This America?

I often disagree with ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero—though I'm almost 
always in synch with his lawyers in the field—but Romero is right about Obama 
creating "Gitmo North": "While the Obama administration inherited the Guantánamo 
debacle, this current move is its own affirmative adoption of those policies. It 
is unimaginable that the Obama administration is using the same justification as 
the Bush administration used to undercut centuries of legal jurisprudence and 
the principle of innocent until proved guilty and the right to confront one's 
accusers. . . . The Obama administration's announcement contradicts everything 
the president has said about the need for America to return to leading with its 
values. American values do not contemplate disregarding our Constitution and 
skirting the criminal justice system."

If Dick Cheney were a gentleman, instead of continuing to criticize this 
president, he would congratulate him on his faithful allegiance to many 
signature policies of the Bush-Cheney transformation of America.

But never let it be said that President Obama is neglecting the patriotic 
education of America's young. On December 13, Clint Boulton reported on 
eweek.com, "The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Berkeley's Samuelson Clinic 
have sued the Department of Justice and five other government organizations 
(including the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) for 
cloaking their policies for using Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks 
to investigate citizens in criminal and other matters. [The plaintiffs] want to 
know exactly how, and what kinds of information, the feds are accessing from 
users' social networking profiles."

Maybe Dick Cheney can ask Barack to confirm him as a friend on Facebook.

Charlie Savage, the Times ace reporter of constitutional violations, chillingly 
shows how Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin got to the core of the 
consequences of our "yes, we can" president by predicting that "Mr. Obama's 
ratifications of the basic outlines of the surveillance and detention policies 
he inherited would reverberate for generations. By bestowing bipartisan 
acceptance on them," Mr. Balkin said, "Mr. Obama is consolidating them as 
entrenched features of government."

Do Congressional Democratic leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi give a damn 
about this historic legacy of the Obama administration that they cluelessly help 
to nurture by providing lockstep Democratic majorities for?

Do you give a damn?

http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/1593965

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