Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Bush's 4th term off to enthusiastic start


President Obama has nominated John Brennan as his next director of the CIA. On Monday, Obama said, "He has worked to embed our efforts in a strong legal framework. He understands we are a nation of laws. In moments of debate and decision, he asks the tough question and he insists on high and rigorous standards."

This is Obama's second attempt to nominate Brennan as head of the CIA. He tried to do so in 2009, but was met with backlash among Democrats because of who John Brennan is. John Brennan served as chief of staff to CIA Director George Tenet during the Bush administration. He was complicit in Bush's torture and rendition programs. Obama stepped off after the backlash, and instead named Brennan as his counterterrorism chief, where over the last four years, he has possessed just as much influence as he would've as CIA director, if not more. Brennan was chair of the "Terror Tuesday" sessions at the White House, put together lists of people for Obama to assassinate without due process, and spearheaded Obama's drone program, which is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people, many of them children.

As Andrew Sullivan said in 2008, "if Obama picks [Brennan], it will be a vindication of the kind of ambivalence and institutional moral cowardice that made America a torturing nation. It would be an unforgivable betrayal of his supporters and his ideals." Like the rest of America's establishment liberals, Sullivan has once again abandoned whatever the hell he pretended to stand for in 2008. He said on Monday, "I'm not as inclined to oppose him this time around, in part because torture has ended, and in part because he is increasingly one of the good guys on the drone program... People change. If Brennan has Obama's trust in restricting and managing drone strikes with much less lee-way for the CIA, he's performing a vital service in morally re-callibrating the war against the remnants of al Qaeda." Sullivan is wrong, the United States is still kidnapping and torturing people under this president.

Did you know there are still Nazi war criminals alive, in hiding, to this very day? A few are arrested every year. Well, according to Andrew Sullivan, these Nazis are completely forgiven. In fact, they were vindicated of all wrongdoing just a couple years after the fall of Third Reich, simply by the passage of time. Because hey, people change, you know? As long as my comforting figurehead trusts torturers and war criminals, who am I to have an opinion of my own?

Greenwald put it brilliantly, as always:

"By blocking any form of criminal and civil accountability for these acts, President Obama has transformed what were once universally unspeakable and taboo beliefs into little more than respectable, garden-variety political disagreements. The president's nomination on Monday of John O. Brennan, a Bush-era C.I.A. official, to head the C.I.A. illustrates how complete this disturbing process now is. In late 2008, when Brennan was rumored to be Obama's leading choice as C.I.A. director, a major controversy erupted because of Brennan's overt support for Bush's programs of rendition and torture... Yet just a little over four years later, Obama obviously believes that Brennan's involvement in and/or support for these programs is no bar to his confirmation as C.I.A. director.

"That's because, following Obama's lead, the country has decided to ignore the fact that it committed grievous crimes as part of the "War on Terror." Obama's Orwellian decree that we must "look forward, not backward" has convinced huge numbers of citizens to sweep this all under the rug and pretend it never happened. That is what explains how Brennan went from radioactive and unconfirmable in 2008 to uncontroversial in 2013."

Last Sunday, Barack Obama signed the 2013 NDAA into law. It wastes a horrific $633 billion dollars for Washington's worldwide pointless military operations, in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. This should be outrageous enough, but also included in this act is an amendment that effectively overturns the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. This act barred the U.S. government from disseminating propaganda on the American people. The NDAA also suspended habeas corpus. NDAA 2012 had this as well, so we've had no right to trial for a year now -- but once again, Obama signed a law that allows the government to lock up any American they want, for as long as they want, without any charge or trial. An amendment was actually added to NDAA 2013, which passed unanimously by the Senate, that would've given limited protections to American citizens. It would've only protected citizens who were abducted within U.S. borders. However, the amendment was stripped from the legislation without any explanation.

And curiously, the controversy surrounding this year's NDAA doesn't even revolve around the indefinite detention, like it did last year. It's about shutting down Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp, which NDAA 2013 makes virtually impossible. That whole issue is irrelevant though, and it's incredibly sad to see so many people focusing on it, when there are much more terrible things the NDAA did. So what if Guantanamo Bay is shut down? That doesn't do anything for the prisoners being kept there -- the vast majority of them for over a decade without being charged with a single thing, and over half of whom have been cleared for release. If Guantanamo Bay is shut down, they'll just be transferred to other prisons on American soil. That's why Obama couldn't shut it down the first time he tried -- not because Congress loves Guantanamo, but because both dems and republicans didn't want those prisoners on American soil. "Guantanamo" is just a silly political buzzword, and shutting it down wouldn't do a damn thing, when everything that made it infamous is still in place.

Additionally, Barack Obama isn't ending the war in Afghanistan in 2014, and this fact has been out there for close a year now. Every time Obama said he was ending the war in 2014 on the campaign trail was an outright lie. The New York Times reported that the top American commander in Afghanistan has just submitted three proposals for a post-2014 Afghanistan. All of them require American boots on the ground. The worst would leave 20,000 troops until 2024. I doubt Obama's most ardent supporters will care very much, since they still seem to cling onto the lie that Obama "ended" the war in Iraq -- in spite of the facts that he simply followed Bush's pullout deal, that he tried to break it and keep thousands of troops there, and that we still have a heavy presence of private contractor mercenaries.

There was a lot of speculation before the election that, once Obama won, he could stop playing politics and really start getting things done. It's okay, just vote for him, because we're about to see the real Obama. As the Nation magazine put it last month, "With re-election safely behind him, we hope Obama will be bolder in his second term. He should diversify his inner circle of economic advisers and cabinet appointees to include more progressive voices."

Obama decided to nominate a Bush-era war criminal to head the CIA even with "re-election safely behind him," so it should be pretty god damn obvious by now that the "real" Obama isn't coming to save us. There isn't going to be a resurrection of FDR or Abraham Lincoln in a superhero outfit. What we're going to see over the next four years is more painful austerity, more social security and welfare cuts, more union busting, more free trade and outsourcing, more drilling and pipelines and fracking, possibly a war or two in Syria or Iran, more police state policies and erosions of civil liberties, and laying the groundwork for decades of neocolonialism in Afghanistan. That's what voting for the "lesser of two evils" has accomplished -- the exact same things if you had voted for a Republican.

Reluctant Obama voters don't seem to have any concept of how political leverage works. If you want the president to stop doing illegal things and taking away your rights, you're not supposed to say outright that you're going to vote for him no matter what, and proceed to cross your fingers and beg. You put your foot down and refuse to give him your vote until he answers to you. If he doesn't answer to you, then you vote for someone who does. That's supposed to be what a democracy is -- dêmos, "people" and kratos, "power". In our extremely undemocratic political process, elections are the only time the people ever have any semblance of power. After an election is over with, we have absolutely no say whatsoever in what a politician does, until the next election cycle. We can sign petitions, we can pout and complain, we can stand in street and hold a sign, but they're the ones who write laws and decide policy at the end of the day -- not us. Obama's supporters may understand that the president suspended habeas corpus, that he assassinates American citizens -- or as they always painfully put it, the president "isn't perfect" -- but whenever the time comes to put some bite into their bark, they never fail to check the box without question. In the end, it really makes no difference whether they agree with Obama's totalitarian policies or not, because their consistent vote gives him permission to continue building them up and putting them in place.

And he will continue to do so. The election is over, he doesn't have to answer to voters anymore, so who's going to stop him? Four years ago, Andrew Sullivan said, "if Obama picks [Brennan], it will be a vindication of the kind of ambivalence and institutional moral cowardice that made America a torturing nation." Two days ago, an intelligent person like Sullivan began a sentence with: "If Brennan has Obama's trust..." That, more than anything else, defines Obama's legacy. His biggest accomplishment was shifting the Democratic party into Bush-era Republicans. If it makes you uncomfortable that your government has suspended habeas corpus, that it's torturing human beings in secret black sites, that it's abusing anti-"terror" legislation to monitor law-abiding activists, protestors, and journalists without warrants, then hey -- rest easy by putting your unwavering trust in a tough, swaggering brand name who you could see yourself having a beer with.