Last night, Rachel Maddow took President Obama to task for his backtracking on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. And rightly so.
Video clip here.
June 6, 2009
Salon article on Obama letdowns
I was pleased to see an article in Salon today about Obama letdowns, Obama’s trail of broken promises. The article ruminates on the high value of holding politicians accountable to their campaign promises, and then lists 3 letdowns. Interestingly, we haven’t covered any of these letdowns here:
It started in December when he was asked why he was making Hillary Clinton his chief diplomat after criticizing her qualifications and promising Democratic primary voters that his views on international relations were different than hers. He responded by telling the questioner “you’re having fun” trying “to stir up whatever quotes were generated during the course of the campaign.” The implicit assertion was that anyone expecting him to answer for campaign statements must just be “having fun” — and certainly can’t be serious.
A few months later, in reversing a five-year-old commitment to support ending the Cuban embargo, Obama offered no rationale for the U-turn other than saying he was “running for Senate” at a time that “seems just eons ago” — again, as if everyone should know that previous campaign promises mean nothing.
At least that was a response. After the New York Times recently reported that “the administration has no present plans to reopen negotiations on NAFTA” as “Obama vowed to do during his campaign,” there was no explanation offered whatsoever. We were left to recall Obama previously telling Fortune magazine that his NAFTA promises were too “overheated and amplified” to be taken literally.
It’s true that politicians have always broken promises, but rarely so proudly and with such impunity.
Compared to the other civil liberty issues that we focus on here, we don’t think theses issues are such a big deal. But it’s great to see an overtly Obama-critical piece in a liberal publication like Salon.
June 1, 2009
Obama’s new “Preventative Detention” Policy
This is scary stuff folks. Greenwald has the facts:
(1) What does “preventive detention” allow?
It’s important to be clear about what “preventive detention” authorizes. It does not merely allow the U.S. Government to imprison people alleged to have committed Terrorist acts yet who are unable to be convicted in a civilian court proceeding. That class is merely a subset, perhaps a small subset, of who the Government can detain. Far more significant, “preventive detention” allows indefinite imprisonment not based on proven crimes or past violations of law, but of those deemed generally “dangerous” by the Government for various reasons (such as, as Obama put it yesterday, they “expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden” or “otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans”). That’s what “preventive” means: imprisoning people because the Government claims they are likely to engage in violent acts in the future because they are alleged to be “combatants.”
Once known, the details of the proposal could — and likely will — make this even more extreme by extending the “preventive detention” power beyond a handful of Guantanamo detainees to anyone, anywhere in the world, alleged to be a “combatant.” After all, once you accept the rationale on which this proposal is based — namely, that the U.S. Government must, in order to keep us safe, preventively detain “dangerous” people even when they can’t prove they violated any laws — there’s no coherent reason whatsoever to limit that power to people already at Guantanamo, as opposed to indefinitely imprisoning with no trials all allegedly “dangerous” combatants, whether located in Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, Western countries and even the U.S.
June 1, 2009
What exactly is the Obama DOJ position on state medical marijuana laws?
In March, Eric Holder stated that the DOJ would no longer raid distributors of medical marijuana who were compliant with the laws in their state.
But now, the DOJ is conflicting with the principles implied by that position, and not intervening in just such a case, even after the judge in that case specifically postponed it while he awaited a response from the DOJ. The DOJ not only chose not to intervene, but explicitly stated that prosecuting Lynch is consistent with the DOJ’s position.
The Justice Department announced over the weekend that it will not intervene in the case of Charlie Lynch, the California man convicted on federal charges of drug distribution despite the fact that his business was legal under California law. The federal judge in Lynch’s case had postponed Lynch’s sentencing to inquire if the Obama administration might want to back off, given Attorney General Holder’s recent statements about not prosecuting medical marijuana distributors who are complying with state and local law.
It would be merely disappointing had the DOJ based its decision not to intervene on the fact that a verdict had already been rendered in Lynch’s case. But the DOJ response goes much further, specifically stating that the entire prosecution of Lynch is consistent with the government’s new position on medical marijuana, as laid out by Holder. It’s hard to say, then, exactly what distinguishes Obama’s position on medical marijuana from Bush’s. Lynch sought out and received assurance from state and local authorities that he was in complete compliance with state and local law. If that isn’t enough to meet Holder’s new policy, what is?
June 1, 2009
Civil liberties and torture letdowns from April
I’ve had these two stories in the queue for a while — check them out:
There are no excuses for ongoing concealment of torture memos
New and worse secrecy and immunity claims from the Obama DOJ
June 1, 2009
Obama Administration Sides with the RIAA
The Obama administration for the first time is weighing in on a Recording Industry Association of America file sharing lawsuit and is supporting hefty awards of as much as $150,000 per purloined music track.
Two top lawyers in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department are former RIAA lawyers: Donald Verrilli Jr. is the associate deputy attorney general who brought down Grokster and fought to prevent a retrial in the Jammie Thomas case. Then there’s the No. 2 in the DOJ, Tom Perrilli. As Verrilli’s former boss, Perrilli argued in 2002 that internet service providers should release customer information to the RIAA even without a court subpoena.
… parts of the government’s brief sounded as if it was taken from the RIAA’s public relations playbook.
April 9, 2009
On Distrust…
Today, Chris Bowers staked out a case for not trusting the Obama Administration. Tomorrow, he promises to compile the opposite, the case for trust.
But today’s post is worth a read. Relevant to our blog here, is the following:
Because President Obama flip-flopped on FISA: Finally, I don’t trust President Obama himself because he flip-flopped on FISA due to right-wing pressure in the campaign. During the primaries, he vowed to fight telecom immunity tooth and nail, but once the primaries were over, he just flat-out flipped his position. This was a straightforward case where President Obama changed a position as a result of shifting political pressure. The conclusion I drew from that event is that it is possible to change Obama’s public positions if there was enough political pressure for him to change, and that such pressure was necessary because he was willing to cave into right-wing demands if they applied enough pressure.
In short, FISA was the “distrust and pressure” object lesson for me. From that point on, there could be no benefit of the doubt. If you wanted Obama to side with you, simply trusting him and supporting him would not suffice. Distrust and pressure became requirements.
Strongly agree.
March 23, 2009
Obama’s Critics
Thers, over at Whiskey Fire, makes an astute observation:
There’s a kind of bias that comes from paying too close attention to the news cycle, with who “wins the week,” and so forth, and this often causes miscalculations — to keep it simple, Obama just is not threatened right now. No matter how many “gaffes” he makes, or is pretended to have made, so what? The GOP has nobody and nothing, and can’t take advantage of them.
The joke is that Obama probably is politically vulnerable right now, but from the left, which is where the genuinely substantive criticism is coming from. That the Liberal Media is unable to even imagine such a reality tells you everything you need to know about our ridiculous public discourse.
I agree!
March 18, 2009
February and March Letdowns
Well, we’ve now got an active administration facing one of the most challenging periods in American history, and there are bound to be plenty of compromises, and the occasional out-and-out… Letdown.
February and March have been filled with news, some of which hasn’t gotten much buzz. Here is a dump of my backlog of Letdowns from the past several weeks:
1. Justice Department Stands Behind Bush Secrecy In Extraordinary Rendition Case
The Justice Department today repeated Bush administration claims of “state secrets” in a lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan for its role in the extraordinary rendition program. Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen was brought on behalf of five men who were kidnapped and secretly transferred to U.S.-run prisons or foreign intelligence agencies overseas where they were interrogated under torture. The Bush administration intervened in the case, inappropriately asserting the “state secrets” privilege and claiming the case would undermine national security. Oral arguments were presented today in the American Civil Liberties Union’s appeal of the dismissal, and the Obama administration opted not to change the government position in the case, instead reasserting that the entire subject matter of the case is a state secret.
Glen Greenwald’s coverage:
- “Obama fails his first test on civil liberties and accountability — resoundingly and disgracefully”
- Is Obama Embracing The Lawless, Omnipotent Executive
The sad saga continues through January. From a Salon Column by Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc. v. Bush plaintif lawyer Jon B Eisenberg:
In yet another public filing with Judge Walker on Feb. 27, the government lawyers informed him that the government’s previous secret filings in the Al-Haramain case contain “an inaccuracy” that “cannot be set forth on the public record.” The “inaccuracy” is described only in secret filings accompanying the public filing. It appears that high officials in the Bush administration asserted a falsehood or falsehoods in their previous secret filings with the court, which the Obama administration is attempting to keep secret. What could that “inaccuracy” be? We haven’t a clue, because … it’s a secret!
2. Obama Administration Declares Proposed IP Treaty a ‘National Security’ Secret
…like Bush before him, Obama is playing the national security card to hide details of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement being negotiated across the globe.The White House this week declared the text of the proposed treaty a “properly classified” national security secret, in rejecting a Freedom of Information Act request by Knowledge Ecology International.
…
If ratified, leaked documents posted on WikiLeaks and other comments suggest the proposed trade accord would criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, subject iPods to border searches and allow internet service providers to monitor their customers’ communications
(Be sure to go view the Wired story — you don’t want to miss the heartbreaking graphic at the top)
3. An Enemy Combatant by any other name still does not have civil liberties
The Obama administration said Friday that it would abandon the Bush administration’s term “enemy combatant” as it argues in court for the continued detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in a move that seemed intended to symbolically separate the new administration from Bush detention policies.
But in a much anticipated court filing, the Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain terrorism suspects there without criminal charges, much as the Bush administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration.
Also see Glenn Greenwald’s coverage.
