Salon: Glenn Greenwald

A media orgy of rumors, speculation and falsehoods

Glenn Greenwald — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:07:00 PST

Last night, right-wing blogger (and law professor) Glenn Reynolds promoted this media analysis from right-wing blogger (and Los Angeles Assistant District Attorney) Patterico regarding coverage of the Fort Hood shootings. Patterico wrote: "Whenever there is breaking news, it’s good to keep a few things in mind: . . . Always follow Allahpundit" -- referring to one of the two bloggers at Michelle Malkin's Hot Air site.

Upon reading that, I went to Hot Air to read what he had written, and it's actually quite revealing -- not in terms of what it reveals about Hot Air (that topic wouldn't warrant a post) but, rather, what it reveals about major media coverage of these sorts of events. Allahpundit's post consists of a very thorough, contemporaneous, and -- at times -- appropriately skeptical chronicling of what major media outlets were reporting about the Fort Hood attack, combined with his passing along of much unverified gossip and chatter from Twitter, most of which turned out to be false.

It's worth focusing on what the major media did last night, and one can use the Hot Air compilation to examine that. I understand that in the early stages of significant and complex news stories, it's to be expected that journalists will have incomplete and even inaccurate information. It's unreasonable to expect them to avoid errors entirely. The inherently confusing nature of a mass shooting like this, combined with the need to rely on second-hand or otherwise unreliable sources (including, sometimes, official ones), will mean that even conscientious reporters end up with inaccurate information in cases like this. That's all understandable and inevitable.

But shouldn't there be some standards governing what gets reported and what is held back? Particularly in a case like this -- which, for obvious reasons, has the potential to be quite inflammatory on a number of levels -- having the major media "report" completely false assertions as fact can be quite harmful. It's often the case that perceptions and judgments about stories like this solidify in the first few hours after one hears about it. The impact of subsequent corrections and clarifications pale in comparison to the impressions that are first formed. Despite that, one false and contradictory claim after the next was disseminated last night by the establishment media with regard to the core facts of the attack. Here are excerpts from Allahpundit's compilation, virtually all of which -- except where indicated -- came from large news outlets:

Number of shooters

The fact that at least three gunmen are involved already has Shuster and Miklaszewski mentioning similarities to the Fort Dix Six plot on MSNBC . . . two of the gunmen are still at large and one has fired shots at the SWAT team on the scene . . . . New details from CNN: One gunman "neutralized," one "cornered," no word on the third. . . . Whether there are two shooters or three seems to be in dispute at the moment, but there’s certainly more than one: The second shooting on the base evidently occurred at a theater. . . . Fox News says there are reports that the men were dressed in fatigues. . . . MSNBC TV says two shooters are in custody now. . . . it sounds like both shooters are military . . . According to MSNBC, there were three shooters. . . In case you're wondering whether the other two soldiers in custody were actual accomplices or just being questioned because they knew Hasan, Rick Perry just said at the presser he’s holding that all three were shooters. . . . Hearing rumblings on Twitter right now that Perry was wrong and that the two other "suspects" have now been released. Was Hasan, in fact, a lone gunman? . . . . According to the general conducting the briefing going on right now, he appears to be a lone gunman.

The fate of the shooter

One of the shooters is dead. . . One is dead, two more are in custody. Has there ever been a case of "battle stress" that involved a conspiracy by multiple people? . . . So poor and fragmented have the early media reports about this been that only now, after 9 p.m. ET, do we learn that … Hasan’s still alive. He’s in stable condition.

The weapons used

M-16s involved: . . . From the local Fox affiliate, how it all went down. Evidently McClatchy’s report of M-16s was wrong:

The shooter's background

According to Brian Ross at ABC, Hasan was a convert to Islam. . . . Contra Brian Ross, the AP says it’s unclear what Hasan’s religion was or whether he was a convert. . . . Apparently, one of Hasan’s cousins just told Shep that he’s always been Muslim, not a recent convert. . . .

I’m hearing on Twitter that Fox interviewed one of his neighbors within the last half-hour or so and that the neighbor claims Hasan was handing out Korans just this morning. Does anyone have video? . . . . "Brenda Price of KUSJ reported to Greta at 10:33: 'also, the latest I am hearing, this morning, apparently according to his neighbors, he was walking around kind of giving out his possessions, giving away his furniture, handing out the Koran…'" . . .: Evidently CNN is airing surveillance footage from a convenience store camera taken this just morning showing Hasan in a traditional Muslim cap and robe. . . "A former neighbor of Hasan’s in Silver Spring, Md. told Fox News he lived there for two years with his brother and had the word ‘Allah’ on the door."

Miscellaneous claims

Good lord — there’s a report from BNO News on Twitter that new shooting is being heard on the base. . . . For what it’s worth, an eyewitness report of Arabic being shouted during the attack: . . .Federal law enforcement officials say the suspected Fort Hood, Texas, shooter had come to their attention at least six months ago because of Internet postings that discussed suicide bombings and other threats. . . . The $64,000 questions: What was he doing at Fort Hood among the population if he thought suicide bombers were heroes?

Isn't it clear that anyone following all of that as it unfolded would have been more misinformed than informed?

The New York Times' Robert Mackey did an equally comprehensive job of live-blogging the media reports, and his contemporaneous compilation reflects many of these same glaring errors in the coverage: "CNN reports that two military sources say that the second gunman at Fort Hood is 'cornered' . . . Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison told Fox 4 News in Texas that one shooter was in custody and 'another is still at large' . . . CNN’s Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr reports that 12 people have been killed and up to 30 wounded. One of the dead is said to have been one of the gunmen. . . . Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, just revealed that earlier reports that the suspected gunman, Major Nidal Hasan, had been killed were incorrect. Major Hasan was wounded but remains alive."

Perhaps most irresponsible of all is the unverified claim that Hasan had written on the Internet in defense of suicide attacks by Muslims, even though the origins of those writings are entirely unverified. Similarly, certain news organizations -- like NPR -- used anonymous sources to disseminate inflammatory claims about Hasan's prior troubles allegedly grounded in activism on behalf of Islam. Much of this may turn out to be true once verified, or it may not be, but all of the conflicting, unverified claims flying around last night enabled many people to exploit the "facts" they selected in order to create whatever storyline that suited them and their political preconceptions -- and many, of course, took vigorous advantage of that opportunity.

I'm obviously ambivalent about the issues of media responsibility raised by all of this. It's difficult to know exactly how the competing interests should be balanced -- between disclosing what one has heard in an evolving news story and ensuring some minimal level of reliability and accuracy. But whatever else is true, news outlets -- driven by competitive pressures in the age of instant "reporting" -- don't really seem to recognize the need for this balance at all. They're willing to pass on anything they hear without regard to reliability -- to the point where I automatically and studiously ignore the first day or so of news coverage on these events because, given how these things are "reported," it's simply impossible to know what is true and what isn't. In fact, following initial media coverage on these stories is more likely to leave one misled and confused than informed. Conversely, the best way to stay informed is to ignore it all -- or at least treat it all with extreme skepticism -- for at least a day.

The problem, though, is that huge numbers of people aren't ignoring it. They're paying close attention -- and they're paying the closest attention, and forming their long-term views, in the initial stages of the reporting. Many people will lose their interest once the drama dissolves -- i.e., once the actual facts emerge. Put another way, a large segment of conventional wisdom solidifies based on misleading and patently false claims coming from major media outlets. I don't know exactly how to define what the balance should be, but particularly for politically explosive stories like this one, it seems clear that media outlets ought to exercise far more restraint and fact-checking rigor than they do. As it is, it's an orgy of rumor-mongering, speculation and falsehoods that play a very significant role in shaping public perceptions and enabling all sorts of ill-intentioned exploitation.

Pulsating diversity of views on the Post Op-Ed page

Glenn Greenwald — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:07:00 PST

"I know many readers, particularly liberals, feel we have too many conservative voices on the page. On the other hand, I hear from a lot of conservative readers who think we have too many people they consider too liberal (Dionne, Robinson, Meyerson, Marcus, et al.). We try to provide a range of views--no matter who is in power" - Fred Hiatt, Washington Post Editorial Page Editor, October 14, 2009.

_______

The Washington Post published a total of 8 Op-Eds and opinion columns today, from these individuals:

* Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey (bashing Obama for wanting to try 9/11 defendants in an actual court) * Neocon Charles Krauthammer (heralding the resurgent GOP fueled by "Obama's hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt") * Newt Gingrich and GOP Texas Gov. Rick Perry (Obama's health care plan would destroy America) * Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson (Obama has lost the American center and his health care plan will destroy Democrats) * Conservative economist Martin Feldstein, former chief economic adviser to Reagan ("Obamacare" will raise premiums and increase the number of uninsured) * Honduran coup defender Edward Schumacher-Matos (blaming Honduras' democratically elected President for "instigating mob rule" and criticizing both the American Right and Left for "extremism," while defending the administration-backed compromise) * CEO of BP (British Petroluem) Tony Hayward (dismissing efforts to reduce fossil fuel consumption as "simplistic" and advocating changes to cap-and-trade bill that would benefit BP) * Liberal Eugene Robinson (warning of the takeover of the GOP by the intolerant, ideological Right)

_____

So, to re-cap: The Post today has two former Bush officials, one former Reagan official, two right-wing politicians, a Fox News neocon, the CEO of America's largest oil and gas producer, a defender of the right-wing Honduran military coup leaders, and one liberal columnist. That overwhelming right-wing presence on the Post Op-Ed page is anything but unusual (the day after it fired Dan Froomkin, The Post published Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Hayden, Charles Krauthammer and an Iran-hawkish screed from David Ignatnius, preceded by Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Ramesh Ponnuru). And that's to say nothing of the always-pro-war Editorial Page itself, which typically advocates for those same positions.

The Post is obviously free to publish whatever it wants, but, wth some very rare exceptions, its Op-Ed page under Fred Hiatt now really is the leading outlet for neoconservatve and related right-wing advocacy. It is one of those outlets typically counted as part of the "Liberal Media" by right-wing self-victimizers and their media amplifiers, yet The Post's claimed devotion to airing a "wide range of views" is scarcely more credible than Fox News' "fair and balanced" slogan.

Criminal convictions of 22 CIA agents in Italy

Glenn Greenwald — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:06:00 PST

(updated below - Update II)

The criminal conviction of 22 CIA agents (and 2 Italian intelligence officers) by an Italian court yesterday -- for the 2003 kidnapping of an Islamic cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, off the street in Italy and his "rendition" to Egypt to be tortured -- highlights several vital points:

First, illustrating how these matters are typically distorted by the U.S. establishment media, note that CNN -- in the very first paragraph of its story -- claims that the CIA agents were convicted "for their role in the seizing of a suspected terrorist in Italy in 2003." What did Nasr allegedly do that warrants that "terrorist" label? Did he participate in the 9/11 attacks, or plan attacks on "the American homeland" or U.S. civilians? No. According to CNN, this is what makes him a "suspected terrorist":

He was suspected of recruiting men to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So the West invades, bombs and occupies Muslim countries, and when Muslims attempt to find people to fight against the West's invading armies, those individuals are deemed "terrorists." Or consider this quite informative 2005 Washington Post article, which details how the CIA's kidnapping derailed the Italians' criminal (i.e., legal) investigation of Nasr; that article explains:

Nasr was wanted by the Egyptian authorities for his involvement in Jemaah Islamiah, a network of Islamic extremists that had sought the overthrow of the government. The network was dispersed during a government crackdown in the early 1990s, and many leaders escaped abroad to avoid arrest.

The Egyptian government, long propped up by the U.S., is one of the most tyrannical and brutal in the world. But Egyptians who work to overthrow that government are deemed "terrorists" by the U.S., and we're apparently willing to kidnap them from around the world -- including from countries where they've received asylum -- and ship them back to our Egyptian friends to be imprisoned and tortured.

For many Americans -- probably most -- the word "terrorist" conjures up images of the people responsible for the 9/11 attack. For that reason, labeling someone a "suspected terrorist" can justify doing anything and everything to those individuals (after all, other than civil liberties extremists, who could object to the "seizing of a suspected terrorist" -- or their indefinite detention or torture?). It's therefore unsurprising that the U.S. Government would use the term "terrorist" so promiscuously and selectively (see John Cole's excellent contrast between what we deem to be "terrorism" when it happens to the U.S. versus what we deny is "terrorism" when done by the U.S.). It's a powerful term that can justify almost any government action.

But the U.S. media's willingness to mindlessly apply the term "terrorist" in exactly the subjective, self-serving way the U.S. Government dictates -- starkly contrasted with their refusal to use the far more objective term "torture" on the ground that the term is in dispute (i.e., disputed by the U.S. Government torturers) -- illustrates the establishment media's principal function: to serve American political power and justify whatever our government does. That's a major reason -- perhaps the primary one -- why the U.S. Government has been able to get away with everything it's done over the last decade. Those unseen victims of torture, rendition, indefinite detention and other government crimes are all just "terrorists," so who cares? In reporting on these convictions, CNN immediately and helpfully proclaims Nasr to be a "suspected terrorist" in a way that guts any meaningful definition of that term and -- in many minds -- justifies whatever was done to him, no matter how illegal.

It's worth asking this question: which sounds more like actual "terrorism": (a) kidnapping people literally off the street and shipping them thousands of miles away to be tortured with no legal process, or (b) what Nasr is "suspected" of having done?

Second, this incident underscores -- yet again -- that our political and media elite simply do not believe in the rule of law or accountability for high government officials. To the contrary, they explicitly believe that such officials should be entitled to break the law and be exempt from consequences. As but one example, here's a discussion on CNN last night about this matter between Wolf Blitzer and Jeffrey Toobin:

TOOBIN: This is a real criminal conviction in a country where we tend to honor reciprocal legal arrangements. So they are in a -- they are in no jeopardy as long as they are inside the United States, but, if they were to leave, they are potentially at risk for being jailed and brought to Italy. BLITZER: Because even if they went to a third country, like England, let's say, or France, Interpol could have a warrant out for their arrest. They have been convicted by an Italian court. TOOBIN: That's why this is such -- so troubling. It would one thing if they only had to stay out of Italy, but, because of Interpol, because of the reciprocal nature of these agreements, they are potentially at risk almost anywhere they go.

So according to Toobin, this is all "so troubling." Why? Because the people who were found by a duly constituted court to have committed a serious crime are faced with the risk that there might actually be consequences. After all, these are Americans who were part of the U.S. Government, and consequences for lawbreaking are simply not meant for them. Echoing Joe Klein's infamous Orwellian claim that torture shouldn't be prosecuted because the CIA is "asked to behave extra-legally for the greater good of the nation," Toobin added that "one of the things you do when you are a CIA agent, at least in part, is break the law of other countries" -- Toobin says that as though they have the right to do that without accountability, and without mentioning that causing people to be tortured is also a violation of U.S. law (after Nasr's kidnapping, the chief of the CIA's Milan office traveled to Egypt for three weeks to participate in his "interrogation").

Third, the glaring contrast between (a) the United States and (b) countries that (at least partially) adhere to the rule of law and precepts of accountability continues to grow. As we saw earlier this week, a U.S. appellate court ruled that American government officials are immune from consequences even when they abduct an innocent man and knowingly cause him to be tortured -- even after the Canadian government publicly disclosed its detailed investigation of that matter, publicly apologized to the victim, and paid him $9 million. Spain continues to pursue the possibility of criminal prosecution of our high government officials for war crimes even as our own government insists that our war criminals (at least all those but the lowest-level ones) should be immunized and we should look forward, not backwards. Our attempt to compile a "hit list" of Afghan citizens we intend to murder because we suspect them of drug trafficking prompted angry objections from Afghan officials that our plan violated due process and the rule of law.

And now an Italian court demonstrates actual judicial independence and adherence to equality under the law by holding American and Italian government kidnappers liable for their complicity in torture -- something our own government institutions have repeatedly failed and/or refused to do (Harper's Scott Horton has much more on the glaring contrast between U.S. and Italian political values that is reflected here).

Finally, this isn't about the past -- at least not exclusively. The U.S. Government continues to refuse even to comment on what it did here. The State Department yesterday expressed "disappointment" with the Italian court ruling -- just as it did when a British High Court recently ordered the disclosure of evidence of American torture. The DOJ continues to insist that no American courts can examine past rendition and torture cases on the grounds of secrecy. The Obama administration has explicitly decided to continue the "rendition" policy which led to Nasr's illegal kidnapping, albeit with the addition of anti-torture "safeguards" similar in language if not effect when compared to those in place under Bush (it remains to be seen to which countries these "rendered" suspects will be sent, and whether the renditions will be the illegal kind practiced by Bush/Cheney or the arguably "legalized" form that took place before that, beginning with Reagan through Clinton). And most notably of all, we continue to be a country which -- in the name of secrecy and national security -- insists that the rule of law and accountability simply do not apply to our highest government officials when they break the law. Fortunately, other countries -- slowly and incrementally -- are rejecting that pernicious view.

UPDATE: One of the convicted CIA agents admits to ABC News that they "broke the law" when kidnapping Nasr and claims, credibly, that everything they did was approved back in Washington.

This is as good a time as any to post this new and important 9-minute video from the ACLU (with whom I consult), in which you hear from numerous individuals who were abducted and held for years at Guantanamo with no charges or trial of any kind -- only to be released with no explanation, apology or accountability. This is really worth watching; like the absence of civilian deaths caused by our wars, it's the key missing piece from typical media coverage that really illustrates what we've been doing:

UPDATE II: Peter Bergen traveled to Italy to review all the court documents in this case and then to Egypt to interview Nasr. For the March/April 2008 issue of Mother Jones, he wrote an excellent and very detailed account of what was done to Nasr, who was responsible, and what lead the Italian prosecutors (who had been investigating Nasr) to pursue the case against the CIA agents (h/t Adam Serwer). It is well worth reading.

Stephanopoulos and Ledeen: together in the most accountability-free profession

Glenn Greenwald — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:05:00 PST

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

Michael Ledeen of National Review & American Enterprise Institute, writing in "Pajamas Media," January 4, 2007:

BREAKING NEWS --Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, is dead.

Associated Press, January 7, 2007 -- 3 days later:

Khamenei addressed hundreds of citizens of Qom, a holy city 80 miles south of Tehran, who gathered outside his residence in the city center.

Michael Ledeen of National Review & American Enterprise Institute, writing in "Pajamas Media," October 13, 2009:

Khamenei Said to be in Coma

Khamenei has had previous medical emergencies in the past, and recovered, but the source is excellent . . . Here is what he/she says: "Yesterday afternoon at 2.15PM local time, Khamenei collapsed and was taken to his special clinic. Nobody -- except his son and the doctors -- has since been allowed to get near him. His official, but secret, status is: 'in the hands of the gods'. . . . Outlook is uncertain but speculation is -- considering that he is in coma since more than 24 hours -- that he may not come out of his coma and/or that he may die very soon. . ." UPDATE (Wednesday Oct 14th): According to a bulletin from the Greens (Moussavi/Karroubi et al), there are widespread rumors in the Tehran Bazaar that Khamenei has died. The Greens say they cannot confirm it, but that there is an "abnormal atmosphere" in the streets, which almost certainly means there are more security people than usual. The bazaar will apparently be closed tomorrow, and perhaps Friday as well, pending developments.

George Stephanopoulos, ABC News, October 14, 2009:

Khamenei in Coma? Rumors rampant. Have been wrong before. If right, will ruling regime close ranks or break apart? Rafsanjani's moment? Necessitate a stall in nuclear talks? Here's more from Michael Ledeen.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, October 30, 2009:

Several Iranian websites, including the official site of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have published details of an unusual encounter between Khamenei and a student who publicly criticized the Iranian establishment. The encounter took place in an October 28 meeting between Khamenei and students in Tehran, during which the supreme leader said that questioning the disputed June 12 vote was the "biggest crime." According to the reports, a student from Sharif University, named by some websites as Mahmud Vahidnia, criticized the Iranian leader, state broadcast media, the post-election crackdown, and the closure of the reformist press -- for a whole 20 minutes.

This was beyond predictable. Michael Ledeen is one of the most dishonest and ludicrous jokes on the political scene. Will that stop George Stephanopoulos from using Ledeen as an expert source on Iran? No, of course not, because once one obtains Seriousness credentials in Washington, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct (other than petty sex scandals), and journalism is the most accountability-free profession that exists (which is how the person who did this, this and this can still be considered one of the nation's leading "experts" on the Middle East). If I spend the next 20 years announcing every six months that super-secret sources have confirmed the death of Kim Jong-il, will I be celebrated as a prescient and well-connected expert on North Korea once it finally happens?

One other thing: re-read what Stephanopoulos wrote and remember: establishment journalists are vital and irreplaceable because -- unlike bloggers -- they're deeply responsible and reliable, subject to rigorous fact-checking, and don't traffic in irresponsible gossip and rumors that they find on the Internet.

* * * * *

Two unrelated notes: (1) Jamie Killstein and Allison Kilkenny are two young, aspiring political commentators who have an excellent podcast show from New York; I was interviewed by them last week and that can be heard here (they spend a few mintues at the beginning discussing the interview, but the interview itself begins at roughly the 24:00 mintue mark); and (2) CBS News has an interesting article on the rapidly changing drug policy debate, featuring the report I did on drug decriminalization in Portugal.

UPDATE: Twitter gets results and credit where it's due: after I suggested to Stephanopoulos that he should be a bit more judicious about who he uses as an expert source for Iran, he posted this:

Just to underscore the point, The Guardian had an excellent article from a couple weeks ago dissecting what happened here, with this headline: "Ayatollah Khamenei dead? How rumours start -- Word that Iran's supreme leader had collapsed was soon amplified, embellished and picked up by news organisations." It notes:

Yesterday Ledeen repeated rumours that have been going around the Tehran Bazaar that Khamenei had died. But Ledeen has a track record in spreading misinformation, according to the US magazine Vanity Fair, which claimed he was linked in the false reports that Saddam Hussein tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger – one of the main pretexts for the invasion of Iraq. And in January 2007 he falsely reported Khamenei's death. Nevertheless, his latest rumour about Khamenei's possible death has been picked up by a number of respected bloggers and media organisations including ABC's George Stephanopoulos, the Jerusalem Post, and Pravda.

That's exactly the track record Ledeen has -- and has long had -- and yet he continues to be employed by National Review and was long employed as a "Freedom Scholar" by The American Enterprise Institute, which should be deemed dispositive in understanding what those organizations actually are. The fact that he's still deemed a Serious Expert by many news outlets speaks volumes about how they function, too. The broader point here is that Ledeen has plenty of company in that regard: other than Judy Miller, has the credibility of even a single media enabler or "expert" advocate of the attack on Iraq and its numerous lies been diminished in any way?

UPDATE II: From The New York Times, yesterday (h/t lysias)

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, lashed out at the United States in a speech on Tuesday, criticizing what he called an arrogant American attitude toward nuclear talks and saying the Obama administration had not followed through on its promises of change.

What an impressively rapid recovery from his protracted and life-threatening coma -- almost as miraculous as that time three years ago when he quickly bounced back from his own Ledeen-confirmed death. For the 2007 death announcement, even Michelle Malkin's Hot Air pronounced, in advance, that it would be a "major embarrassment" for Ledeen and "Pajamas Media" if it turned out the report was false. But Malkin's commentators forgot -- understandably so -- that there is no such thing as a "major embarrassment" when it comes to Serious neoconservative ~~propagandists~~ "analysts." What else could explain this?

UPDATE III: The New York Times has a discussion of the meaning (or lack thereof) of last night's election. My contribution is here.

Extreme unintended irony from a WH official

Glenn Greenwald — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:05:00 PST

(updated below)

From Ben Smith's Politico article on the surprisingly narrow victory by Michael Bloomberg in the New York mayoral race:

Bloomberg’s meager five-point win left Democrats pondering what might have been if New York’s Democratic donors hadn’t turned their back on Thompson, if its politicians had worked for him, and most of all if President Barack Obama had offered anything more than the lamest words of praise. "Maybe one of those Corzine trips could have been better spent in New York. Who knows?" remarked New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, who weighed his own run for mayor, referring to the White House’s devout attention to the New Jersey contest. "Maybe Anthony Weiner should have manned-up and run against Michael Bloomberg," shot back a White House official, who attributed the night’s results across the board to anti-incumbent fervor.

A White House official who is too cowardly even to attach his own name to his comments -- who has to hide behind Politico's permanently extended fetal wall of anonymity in order to criticize a member of Congress -- simultaneously accuses Anthony Weiner of being a coward and failing to "man-up." I've written extensively on what the promiscuous use of anonymity says about Beltway journalism, but the unwillingness of so many of the most powerful political officials to speak for attribution reflects how deceitful, manipulative and -- most of all -- fearful they are. Beltway mavens love to deride "bloggers" for writing anonymously, but at least even anonymous bloggers create pseudonyms that enable ongoing accountability; moreover, many of those anonymous bloggers are just ordinary citizens, with no power, who are too vulnerable to write under their real names. But powerful political officials who will spew insults and criticisms only while protected from accountability are just frightened and weak. The fact that one of those cowards, in this case, has to hide who he is while boldly accusing Weiner of being a coward -- the same Weiner who is willing to step up and criticize Obama with his name attached -- is unintended irony so extreme it's hard to express.

One other note: isn't it interesting how Washington elites love to condemn as authoritarian dictators certain political leaders in other countries who try to repeal term limits in order to stay in power (see Venezuela and Honduras -- but not Colombia), yet here we have one of America's richest oligarchs using his bottomless personal wealth to repeal a voter-enacted term-limit referendum, and then using that same wealth to win a third term and stay in power, and that's treated as a glorious expression of American democracy? Indeed, it was not all that long ago when Broderian trans-partisan fetishists were holding up that same oligarch as the ideal presidential candidate who would finally and single-handedly vanquish America's messy and unpleasant political disputes.

UPDATE: The New York Times has a discussion of the meaning (or lack thereof) of last night's election. My contribution is here.

A court decision that reflects what type of country the U.S. is

Glenn Greenwald — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:04:00 PST

It's not often that an appellate court decision reflects so vividly what a country has become, but such is the case with yesterday's ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Arar v. Ashcroft (.pdf). Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent. A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal's McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he's 17 years old. In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was "rendered" -- despite his pleas that he would be tortured -- to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured. He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured. Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing. I've appended to the end of this post the graphic description from a dissenting judge of what was done to Arar while in American custody and then in Syria.

In January, 2007, the Canadian Prime Minister publicly apologized to Arar for the role Canada played in these events, and the Canadian government paid him $9 million in compensation. That was preceded by a full investigation by Canadian authorities and the public disclosure of a detailed report which concluded "categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada." By stark and very revealing contrast, the U.S. Government has never admitted any wrongdoing or even spoken publicly about what it did; to the contrary, it repeatedly insisted that courts were barred from examining the conduct of government officials because what we did to Arar involves "state secrets" and because courts should not interfere in the actions of the Executive where national security is involved. What does that behavioral disparity between the two nations say about how "democratic," "accountable," and "open" the United States is?

Yesterday, the Second Circuit -- by a vote of 7-4 -- agreed with the government and dismissed Arar's case in its entirety. It held that even if the government violated Arar's Constitutional rights as well as statutes banning participation in torture, he still has no right to sue for what was done to him. Why? Because "providing a damages remedy against senior officials who implement an extraordinary rendition policy would enmesh the courts ineluctably in an assessment of the validity of the rationale of that policy and its implementation in this particular case, matters that directly affect significant diplomatic and national security concerns" (p. 39). In other words, government officials are free to do anything they want in the national security context -- even violate the law and purposely cause someone to be tortured -- and courts should honor and defer to their actions by refusing to scrutinize them.

Reflecting the type of people who fill our judiciary, the judges in the majority also invented the most morally depraved bureaucratic requirements for Arar to proceed with his case and then claimed he had failed to meet them. Arar did not, for instance, have the names of the individuals who detained and abused him at JFK, which the majority said he must have. As Judge Sack in dissent said of that requirement: it "means government miscreants may avoid [] liability altogether through the simple expedient of wearing hoods while inflicting injury" (p. 27; emphasis added).

The commentary about this case from Harper's Scott Horton perfectly captures the depravity of what our Government has done -- and continues to do -- to Arar. His analysis should be read in its entirety, and he concludes with this:

When the history of the Second Circuit is written, the Arar decision will have a prominent place. It offers all the historical foresight of Dred Scott, in which the Court rallied to the cause of slavery, and all the commitment to constitutional principle of the Slaughter-House Cases, in which the Fourteenth Amendment was eviscerated. The Court that once affirmed that those who torture are the “enemies of all mankind” now tells us that U.S. government officials can torture without worry, because the security of our state might some day depend upon it.

I want to add one principal point to all of this. This is precisely how the character of a country becomes fundamentally degraded when it becomes a state in permanent war. So continuous are the inhumane and brutal acts of government leaders that the citizens completely lose the capacity for moral outrage and horror. The permanent claims of existential threats from an endless array of enemies means that secrecy is paramount, accountability is deemed a luxury, and National Security trumps every other consideration -- even including basic liberties and the rule of law. Worst of all, the President takes on the attributes of a protector-deity who can and must never be questioned lest we prevent him from keeping us safe.

This is exactly why I find so objectionable and dangerous the ongoing embrace by the Obama administration of these same secrecy and immunity weapons. Obama had nothing to do with the Arar case -- all the conduct, and even the legal briefing, occurred before he was President -- but he has taken numerous steps to further institutionalize the core injustice here, including in cases that are quite similar to Arar: namely, that the Executive can use secrecy and national security claims to shield himself from the rule of law, even when he's accused of torture and war crimes. That's exactly what happened here, yet again. As Judge Parker wrote in dissent (click image to enlarge)

Identically, Judge Calabresi -- one of the most respected and non-ideological appellate judges in the country -- accused the majority of "utter subservience to the executive branch." Surely that's true, but it isn't only the Arar majority that is guilty of that. It is the nation as a whole -- drowning in infinite claims of "state secrets" and executive immunity and war necessity and the imperatives of "looking forward" -- that has meekly acquiesced to the pernicious idea that the President in an allegedly national security context must never have his actions disclosed, let alone judicially scrutinized and held accountable, no matter how criminal, brutal and inhumane those actions are.

**********************

Here's Judge's Sack's description of what was done to Arar in Syria, which accords perfectly with what the Canadian investigation found -- this is what our Government (both the executive and judicial branches) has continuously insisted it can purposely cause to happen without any accountability or even transparency (pp. 13-15):

Judge Sack's equally horrific description of exactly what the U.S. did to cause all of that to happen to Arar is here.

Ongoing U.S. efforts to protect and coddle Israel

Glenn Greenwald — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:03:00 PST

(updated below - Update II)

The latest Haaretz column by the outstanding and courageous Israeli columnist, Gideon Levy, is entitled "America, Stop Sucking Up to Israel," and it highlights one of the most bizarre political facts: criticism of Israeli actions is far more tolerated and permitted in Israeli political discourse than it is in America's. It's simply inconceivable that any establishment journalist or national politician would ever echo Levy's scathing indictments of Israel's conduct and his calls for the U.S. to apply serious pressure and even threats to coerce changes in Israeli behavior. After describing the increasingly conciliatory actions towards Israel by the Obama administration in exchange for nothing but obstinance, Levy writes:

Before no other country on the planet does the United States kneel and plead like this. In other trouble spots, America takes a different tone. It bombs in Afghanistan, invades Iraq and threatens sanctions against Iran and North Korea. Did anyone in Washington consider begging Saddam Hussein to withdraw from occupied territory in Kuwait? But Israel the occupier, the stubborn contrarian that continues to mock America and the world by building settlements and abusing the Palestinians, receives different treatment. Another massage to the national ego in one video, more embarrassing praise in another. Now is the time to say to the United States: Enough flattery. If you don't change the tone, nothing will change. As long as Israel feels the United States is in its pocket, and that America's automatic veto will save it from condemnations and sanctions, that it will receive massive aid unconditionally, and that it can continue waging punitive, lethal campaigns without a word from Washington, killing, destroying and imprisoning without the world's policeman making a sound, it will continue in its ways. Illegal acts like the occupation and settlement expansion, and offensives that may have involved war crimes, as in Gaza, deserve a different approach. If America and the world had issued condemnations after Operation Summer Rains in 2006 - which left 400 Palestinians dead and severe infrastructure damage in the first major operation in Gaza since the disengagement - then Operation Cast Lead never would have been launched. It is true that unlike all the world's other troublemakers, Israel is viewed as a Western democracy, but Israel of 2009 is a country whose language is force. . . . When Clinton returns to Washington, she should advocate a sharp policy change toward Israel. Israeli hearts can no longer be won with hope, promises of a better future or sweet talk, for this is no longer Israel's language. For something to change, Israel must understand that perpetuating the status quo will exact a painful price. Israel of 2009 is a spoiled country, arrogant and condescending, convinced that it deserves everything and that it has the power to make a fool of America and the world. The United States has engendered this situation, which endangers the entire Mideast and Israel itself. That is why there needs to be a turning point in the coming year - Washington needs to finally say no to Israel and the occupation. An unambiguous, presidential no.

It's simply impossible to imagine that sort of harsh and blunt critique being voiced by any establishment political commentator or national politician in the U.S. In fact, one finds the exact opposite trend of the one Levy advocates. As Levy suggests, and as Spencer Ackerman insightfully documents and condemns, the Obama administration appears to be rapidly retreating on what was once its promising and commendable demand that Israel cease all settlement growth. The U.S. is unwilling merely to demand from Israel a cessation of activity which is illegal in the eyes of the entire world and destructive to American interests.

Even worse, the U.S. Congress appears poised -- yet again -- to enact a meaningless though odious Resolution that has no purpose other than to shield Israel from criticism; place ourselves squarely on Israel's side no matter what it does; and once again obstruct war crimes investigations. That Resolution -- co-sponsored by two members of Congress from each party, including supreme AIPAC loyalist Howard Berman, the Democratic Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee -- would advance the repellent through all-too-familiar personal smears against U.N. investigator Richard Goldstone by urging that the U.S. "oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration" of Goldstone's report -- which found both Israel and Hamas likely guilty of "war crimes" in the war in Gaza -- on the ground that the Report was biased, flawed, one-sided, pre-ordained and false.

It's apparently not enough that the U.S. Government block all efforts to investigate its own war crimes while immunizing its own war criminals. Now the U.S. Congress has decided that they were elected to do the same for Israel. The reality is that Goldstone's report found that both Hamas and Israel committed war crimes in the war in Gaza, but the focus of the report was on Israel because the number of civilian deaths it caused was -- as usual -- many times the magnitude caused by Hamas. Just to get a flavor for what the U.S. Congress is poised to endorse and protect, here is Goldstone himself, being interviewed by Bill Moyers, describing what he saw as part of his war crimes investigation (h/t Siun):

BILL MOYERS: I mean, there are allegations in here, some very tough allegations of Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed civilians who pose no threat, of shooting people whose hands were shackled behind them, of shooting two teenagers who’d been ordered off a tractor that they were driving, apparently carrying wounded civilians to a hospital, of homes, hundreds, maybe thousands of homes destroyed, left in rubble, of hospitals bombed. I mean there are some questions about one or two of your examples here, but it’s a damning indictment of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, right? RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well, it is outrageous, and there should have been an outrage. You know, the response has not been to deal with the substance of those allegations. I’ve really seen or read no detailed response in respect of the incidents on which we report. BILL MOYERS: Why is that? RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well, you know, I don’t know. I suppose people hate being attacked. There’s a knee-jerk reaction to attack the messenger rather than the message. And I think this is typical of that. And of course, a lot of the allegations, I certainly don’t claim anything like infallibility. But I would like to see a response to the substance, particularly the attack on the infrastructure of Gaza, which seems to me to be absolutely unjustifiable. BILL MOYERS: What did you see with your own eyes when you went there? RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well, I saw the destruction of the only flour-producing factory in Gaza. I saw fields plowed up by Israeli tank bulldozers. I saw chicken farms, for egg production, completely destroyed. Tens of thousands of chickens killed. I met with families who lost their loved ones in homes in which they were seeking shelter from the Israeli ground forces. I had to have the very emotional and difficult interviews with fathers whose little daughters were killed, whose family were killed. One family, over 21 members, killed by Israeli mortars. So, it was a very difficult investigation, which will give me nightmares for the rest of my life.

Any decent human being would react with horror and disgust at such a report and demand a full investigation and accountability. But the members of Congress in both parties -- predictably -- are doing the opposite: they're condemning the report itself, demonizing those who prepared it, and demanding that investigations be suppressed. As Levy says, why would Israel ever feel constrained to stop any of its behavior when it knows that the U.S. Government is unwilling and/or unable to do anything but subserviently cheer it on?

Just to underscore how permissive Israeli political debates are as compared to the U.S., consider the recent actions of the often admirable J Street, which is supposed to be devoted to challenging the AIPAC-imposed orthodoxies of U.S. policy towards Israel. In his rather cringe-inducing attempt to convince The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg of his Seriousness credentials, J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami dutifully affirmed to Goldberg numerous requisite "pro-Israel" claims -- among other things, equating Walt/Mearsheimer with anti-Semites and categorically opposing any use of America's military aid package to induce changes in Israeli behavior. As Andrew Sullivan correctly observed about that:

What's interesting here is that J-Street's head insists that the only serious lever the US has over Israel should be taken off the table before any deal is even negotiated. This is the lefty, peacenik, goddamned hippie position! Military aid, mind you, is already formally illegal because of Israel's secret nuclear bomb program (which no American president can, you know, mention), but is retained because, well, because it would never be repealed by the Congress. And so Netanyahu knows he can do anything he wants without any real blowback from the US. And he has about as much interest in a two-state solution as I have in marrying a woman. This leaves the US with no leverage over a central party in critical discussions which indeed affect the national security of Americans. In what other case does that apply?

J Street even recently issued a rather mealy-mouthed statement on the Congressional Resolution to condemn the Goldstone Report. I have almost nothing but good things to say about J Street -- they are fighting a difficult and largely noble battle -- but the fact that not even this group, devoted to orthodoxy-busting, is willing to get anywhere near what Gideon Levy advocates illustrates how constricted American debates over Israel continue to be compared to Israel's.

As this highly revealing exchange between Hillary Clinton and Pakistani journalists over the meaning of "terrorism" reflects, nothing destroys our efforts to improve our image in the Muslim world as these blatant double standards do (blatant, that is, to virtually everyone outside of the U.S. and much of Western Europe). Even Iran's dissident leaders point to America's double standards on Israel to justify their own government's conduct. It's so obvious as to require no explanation that we cannot and will not be taken seriously in our campaigns against "terrorism" and "war crimes" when we are not only willing, but eager, to exempt ourselves and Israel from those sermons. But after some initial, impressive steps from Obama, we are continuing to do that as much as ever, probably to Israel's detriment and certainly to our own.

UPDATE: Obviously related to all of this, Matt Yglesias and Mother Jones' Nick Baumann document a defamatory and reckless (though quite typical) smear campaign led by neocon character assassins Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard and Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, against National Iranian American ~~Iranian-American~~ Council founder Trita Parsi. Parsi is guilty of the crime of opposing punitive military actions and harsh sanctions against Iran and therefore must be impugned and discredited. America's Israel-related orthodoxies are always enforced by individuals like these -- the most discredited neocons among us, uniformly advocates of the attack on Iraq, and fixated on one issue only: Israel (one of the most vile examples was the recent, blatantly racist attempt by a former AIPAC and Israeli official to impugn J Street on the ground that it has supporters who are Arab and Muslim). Few things are more urgent than putting an end to their destructive tactics.

UPDATE II: On an unrelated note: Alan Grayson has received much attention for his unusually aggressive political rhetoric, but more important, he has been very innovative in highlighting critical substantive issues, many of which I've written about here -- from the Fed's opaque transactions to oozing lobbyist influence and defense contractor corruption. As a result of all of that, and due to his being in a difficult district, he has become one of the GOP's prime targets for defeat in 2010. Today, he is holding a "money bomb" to assist in his re-election, and those who wish to participate can pledge to his campaign here.

Obama's latest use of "secrecy" to shield presidential lawbreaking

Glenn Greenwald — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 02:02:00 PST

The Obama administration has, yet again, asserted the broadest and most radical version of the "state secrets" privilege -- which previously caused so much controversy and turmoil among loyal Democrats (when used by Bush/Cheney) -- to attempt to block courts from ruling on the legality of the government's domestic surveillance activities. Obama did so again this past Friday -- just six weeks after the DOJ announced voluntary new internal guidelines which, it insisted, would prevent abuses of the state secrets privilege. Instead -- as predicted -- the DOJ continues to embrace the very same "state secrets" theories of the Bush administration -- which Democrats generally and Barack Obama specifically once vehemently condemned -- and is doing so in order literally to shield the President from judicial review or accountability when he is accused of breaking the law.

The case of Shubert v. Bush is one of several litigations challenging the legality of the NSA program, of which the Electronic Frontier Foundation is lead coordinating counsel. The Shubert plaintiffs are numerous American citizens suing individual Bush officials, alleging that the Bush administration instituted a massive "dragnet" surveillance program whereby "the NSA intercepted (and continues to intercept) millions of phone calls and emails of ordinary Americans, with no connection to Al Qaeda, terrorism, or any foreign government" and that "the program monitors millions of calls and emails . . . entirely in the United States . . . without a warrant" (page 4). The lawsuit's central allegation is that the officials responsible for this program violated the Fourth Amendment and FISA and can be held accountable under the law for those illegal actions.

Rather than respond to the substance of the allegations, the Obama DOJ is instead insisting that courts are barred from considering the claims at all. Why? Because -- it asserted in a Motion to Dismiss it filed on Friday -- to allow the lawsuit to proceed under any circumstances -- no matter the safeguards imposed or specific documents excluded -- "would require the disclosure of highly classified NSA sources and methods about the TSP [Terrorist Surveillance Program] and other NSA activities" (page 8). According to the Obama administration, what were once leading examples of Bush's lawlessness and contempt for the Constitution -- namely, his illegal, warrantless domestic spying programs -- are now vital "state secrets" in America's War on Terror, such that courts are prohibited even from considering whether the Government was engaging in crimes when spying on Americans.

That was the principal authoritarian instrument used by Bush/Cheney to shield itself from judicial accountability, and it is now the instrument used by the Obama DOJ to do the same. Initially, consider this: if Obama's argument is true -- that national security would be severely damaged from any disclosures about the government's surveillance activities, even when criminal -- doesn't that mean that the Bush administration and its right-wing followers were correct all along when they insisted that The New York Times had damaged American national security by revealing the existence of the illegal NSA program? Isn't that the logical conclusion from Obama's claim that no court can adjudicate the legality of the program without making us Unsafe?

Beyond that, just consider the broader implications of what is going on here. Even after they announced their new internal guidelines with great fanfare, the Obama administration is explicitly arguing that the President can break the law with impunity -- can commit crimes -- when it comes to domestic surveillance because our surveillance programs are so secret that national security will be harmed if courts are permitted to adjudicate their legality. As the plaintiffs' lawyers put it last July (emphasis in original), government officials:

seek to transform a limited, common law evidentiaryprivilege into sweeping immunity for their own unlawful conduct. . . . [They] would sweep away these vital constitutional principles with the stroke of a declaration, arrogating to themselves the right to immunize any criminal or unconstitutional conduct in the name of national security. . . .

For that reason, as they pointedly noted the last time the Obama DOJ sought to compel dismissal based on this claim: "defendants' motion is even more frightening than the conduct alleged in the Amended Complaint." Think about that argument: the Obama DOJ's secrecy and immunity theories are even more threatening than the illegal domestic spying programs they seek to protect. Why? As the plaintiffs explains (click image to enlarge)

Can anyone deny that's true? If the President can simply use "secrecy" claims to block courts from ruling on whether he broke the law, then what checks or limits exist on the President's power to spy illegally on Americans or commit other crimes in a classified setting? By definition, there are none. That's what made this distortion of the "state secrets" privilege so dangerous when Bush used it, and it's what makes it so dangerous now. Back in April, 2006 -- a mere four months after the illegal NSA program was first revealed, and right after Bush had asserted "state secrets" to block any judicial inquiry into the NSA program -- here is what I wrote about the Bush administration's use of the "state secrets" privilege as a means of blocking entire lawsuits rather than limiting the use of specific classified documents:

[Q]uite unsurprisingly, the Bush administration loves this doctrine, as it is so consistent with its monarchical view of presidential infallibility, and the administration has become the most aggressive and enthusiastic user of this doctrine . . . . As the Chicago Tribune detailed last year, the administration has also used this doctrine repeatedly to obstruct any judicial proceedings designed to investigate its torture and rendition policies, among others . . . . This administration endlessly searches out obscure legal doctrines or new legal theories which have one purpose -- to eradicate limits on presidential power and to increase the President's ability to prevent disclosure of all but the most innocuous and meaningless information.

That was the prevailing, consensus view at the time among Democrats, progressives and civil libertarians regarding Bush's use of the state secrets privilege: that the privilege was being used to exclude the President from the rule of law by seeking to preclude judicial examination of his conduct. Plainly, Obama is now doing the same exact thing -- not just to shield domestic surveillance programs from judicial review but also torture and renditions. Is there any conceivable, rational reason to view this differently? None that I can see.

Note, too, how this latest episode eviscerates many of the excuses made earlier this year by Obama supporters to justify this conduct. It was frequently claimed that these arguments were likely asserted by holdover Bush DOJ lawyers without the involvement of Obama officials -- but under the new DOJ guidelines, the Attorney General must personally approve of any state secrets assertions, and Eric Holder himself confirmed in a Press Release on Friday that he did so here. Alternatively, it was often claimed that Obama was only asserting these Bush-replicating theories because he secretly hoped to lose in court and thus magnanimously gift us with good precedent -- but the Obama administration has repeatedly lost in court on these theories and then engaged in extraordinary efforts to destroy those good precedents, including by inducing the full appellate court to vacate the decisions or even threatening to defy the court orders compelling disclosure. In light of this behavior, no rational person can continue to maintain those excuses.

Is there any doubt at this point that, as TalkingPointsMemo put it in a headline: "Obama Mimics Bush on State Secrets"? Or can anyone dispute what EFF's Kevin Bankston told ABC News after the latest filing from the Obama DOJ:

The Obama administration has essentially adopted the position of the Bush administration in these cases, even though candidate Obama was incredibly critical of both the warrantless wiretapping program and the Bush administration's abuse of the state secrets privilege.

Extreme secrecy wasn't an ancillary aspect of the progressive critique of Bush/Cheney; it was central, as it was secrecy that enabled all the other abuses. More to the point, the secrecy claims being asserted here are not merely about hiding illegal government conduct; worse, they are designed to shield executive officials from accountability for lawbreaking. As the ACLU's Ben Wizner put it about the Obama DOJ's attempt to use the doctrine to bar torture victims from having a day in court: "This case is not about secrecy. It's about immunity from accountability." That's what Obama is supporting: "immunity from accountability."

What makes this most recent episode particularly appalling is that the program which Obama is seeking to protect here -- the illegal Bush/Cheney NSA surveillance scheme -- was once depicted as a grave threat to the Constitution and the ultimate expression of lawlessness. Yet now, Obama insists that the very same program is such an important "state secret" that no court can even adjudicate whether the law was broken. When Democrats voted to immunize lawbreaking telecoms last year, they repeatedly justified that by stressing that Bush officials themselves were not immunized and would therefore remain accountable under the law. Obama himself, when trying to placate angry supporters over his vote for telecom immunity, said this about the bill he supported:

I wouldn't have drafted the legislation like this, and it does not resolve all of the concerns that we have about President Bush's abuse of executive power. It grants retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that may have violated the law by cooperating with the Bush administration's program of warrantless wiretapping. This potentially weakens the deterrent effect of the law and removes an important tool for the American people to demand accountability for past abuses.

Yet here is Obama doing exactly the opposite of those claims and assurances: namely, he's now (a) seeking to immunize not only telecoms, but also Bush officials, from judicial review; (b) demanding that courts be barred from considering the legality of NSA surveillance programs under any circumstances; and (c) attempting to institutionalize the broadest claims of presidential immunity imaginable via radically broad secrecy claims. To do so, he's violating virtually everything he ever said about such matters when he was Senator Obama and Candidate Obama. And he's relying on the very same theories of executive immunity and secrecy that -- under a Republican President -- sparked so much purported outrage. If nothing else, this latest episode underscores the ongoing need for Congressional Democrats to proceed with proposed legislation to impose meaningful limits and oversight on the President's ability to use this power, as this President, just like the last one, has left no doubt about his willingness to abuse it for ignoble ends.

"What journalists are supposed to do"

Glenn Greenwald — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:31:00 PDT

(updated below - Update II)

David Brooks today says he wanted to write a column about Obama's pending decision over Afghanistan, and in order to write this column, this is what he tells us he did: "For the past few days I have tried to do what journalists are supposed to do." Sounds intrepid. What, exactly, is it that "journalists are supposed to"?

As he describes it, Brooks "called around to several of the smartest military experts [he] know[s] to get their views on these controversies." These are people "who follow the war for a living." He wrote down (at least some of) what they said. He then passed it on without quoting -- or even identifying -- a single one of these experts. That's his whole column.

In a shocking coincidence, the views of these unnamed, handpicked, anonymous "experts" all happen to coincide perfectly with Brooks's own warrior views and, more generally, with clichéd neoconservative pablum: Obama must prove that he's just like Churchill and Lincoln -- that he possesses the toughness and determination that tough guy War Presidents exude: "tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion" -- which can only happen if he escalates the war in Afghanistan. If he doesn't do that, it will that prove Obama is weak and too "intellectually sophisticated" to be a real War President. "Their first concerns are about Obama the man," Brooks informs us about his invisible friends. The only thing missing from the trite Kristolian playbook is the accusation that Obama will be just like Neville Chamberlain if he doesn't send more troops to vanquish the Afghan Hitlers.

So apparently, this is what "journalists are supposed to do." They call handpicked invisible people on the phone and then write columns summarizing what they claim they said without identifying or describing a single one of them. Did he talk to Max Boot or one of the decorated members of the elite war-cheering Kagan family or similar discredited war-lovers from the American Enterprise Institute and The Brookings Institution? Who knows. He doesn't say. He just faithfully serves as a mindless stenographer for hidden people whose credibility you're told to accept even as they do nothing but spout manipulative, vapid idiocies about Churchillian Resolve designed to promote endless war. In that regard, Brooks has certainly accomplished -- as he usually does -- the typical establishment journalist's conception of "what journalists are supposed to."

* * * * *

This morning, at 8:20 a.m. EST, I'll be on Democracy Now talking about a variety of issues. Local listings and live video feed is here. Also, the segment I taped yesterday with Bill Moyers should be available on the PBS site later today -- here. I'm traveling home tonight, so regular posting activities should resume on Saturday or, at the latest, on Sunday.

UPDATE: The Democracy Now segment I did this morning, covering a wide range of issues, is here:

UPDATE II: Here is the three-part segment I taped yesterday with Bill Moyers:

Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh and Afghanistan

Glenn Greenwald — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:30:00 PDT

Ongoing travel will make writing difficult today, so I'll post several television segments I did this morning and last night. First is a debate over Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy with former Bush official and standard neocon Dan Senor, on Dylan Ratigan's MSNBC program from this morning:

Secondly, here is the segment I did last night with Rachel Maddow on the personal benefits received from large health care and pharmaceutical corporations by Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh as a result of their servitude to those industries; my participation begins at roughly the 5:00 mark of the clip:

Finally, here is a segment I did this morning on Ratigan's show with Eliot Spitzer regarding the ongoing Wall Street abuses and the government's ever-expanding acquiescence to them:

Judging from the few times I've appeared on that program, Ratigan seems to be making a conscious effort to expand the scope of political debates that take typically place on cable news shows -- debates which are, with rare exception, painfully constricted and formulaic (see his monologue from a couple of weeks ago on Goldman Sachs as an example of the type of content one does not usually hear on such programs). Having substantive discussions in formats like this is inherently difficult -- that, paradoxically, is one of the values of the format, for reasons Noam Chomsky best explained here -- but I think, without knowing for certain, that Ratigan is attempting to conduct less constrained and conventional discussions. I don't want to overstate the case -- it's more just a general and preliminary impression -- but I think it's worth watching for.

The universality of war propaganda

Glenn Greenwald — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:29:00 PDT

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

I'm traveling still today, but I wanted to note an amazing Op-Ed that was referenced in a book I'm reading: the Op-Ed is by Nikolai Lanine, published in The Toronto Globe and Mail in November, 2006. Lanine was drafted into the Russian Army at the age of 18 and spent several years as part of the Russian occupying force in Afghanistan. Thereafter, he moved to Canada, and in 2006, his wife's first cousin, a medic in the Canadian Army, was killed in Afghanistan. Lanine wrote this column after attending his funeral, and recounted what he and his comrades in the Russian Army believed they were doing in Afghanistan:

I identified with the Canadian soldiers at the funeral mourning the loss of their friend. Like them, I went to Afghanistan believing in "fighting terrorism" and "liberating Afghans." During my first mission, we were protecting refugees escaping an area that was under attack by the mujahedeen. I was deeply affected by their misery, and by the poverty and suffering of the Afghan people in general. In my mind, our presence was "helping Afghans," particularly with educating women and children. My combat unit participated in "humanitarian aid" - accompanying doctors and delivering food, fuel, clothing, school and other supplies to Afghan villages.

It was only later that I began to wonder: Did that aid justify our aggression ?

Exactly the same quandaries arose which the U.S. confronts today, and the same justifications were concocted to dismiss them:

It is hard to kill people without demonizing them. In 1988, my unit accidentally hit an Afghan wedding party. My friend, whose mortar shells had killed innocent people, was shocked when he learned of it. Some soldiers, however, were indifferent. "That village supports the resistance, anyway," they said. Like NATO now, we didn't count "their" casualties. As another friend, Alexander, would later write : "We thought that all of them - old and young - were insurgents." Alexander, to save his unit, had called in artillery that destroyed a village from which the mujahedeen were attacking. People of the villages hit by our air strikes became hostile and turned to the resistance. More attacks by insurgents led to more Soviet strikes. After 10 years of such a tragic cycle, more than a million Afghans were dead and millions more had fled their devastated country. Also, ignored by many, a powerful religious force of militant Islamic movements grew under the pressure of foreign aggression. In 1989, during negotiations between my regiment and the most radical militants from the area, a mujahed told my friend : "We’ll take our revenge to your country." And they did. The backlash spilled out and hit not only the former Soviet Union and Afghans themselves in the 1990s, but also America on 9/11. The vicious cycle I witnessed in the 1980s - violence causing violence - is still continuing. At Andrew’s funeral, the shock and disbelief on the faces of his military friends were all too familiar. So were the official speeches. And the Canadian media coverage seemed like an echo of the Soviet press. "Positive changes are evident. However, it would be premature to say that Kandahar is not a ’hot spot’ any more," the Soviets said in the 1980s. "Things have improved," one Canadian newspaper said now, yet "significant problems" remain. "Development is occurring" in Kandahar, the paper added, just like a Soviet journalist had observed in 1988.

Of course, back then it was Russia who was fighting -- and the U.S. which was funding and arming -- the very religious extremists who, today, we insist are such an existential threat that we must fight endless wars to extinguish them. That's what is most striking about war propaganda: no matter how many times it's re-cycled, regardless of by whom and for which wildly divergent ends, it never loses its efficacy.

UPDATE: One can't help but contrast these two news articles, both appearing in the last few days:

The Washington Post, Saturday:

A U.S. military hit list of about 50 suspected drug kingpins is drawing fierce opposition from Afghan officials, who say it could undermine their fragile justice system and trigger a backlash against foreign troops. The U.S. military and NATO officials have authorized their forces to kill or capture individuals on the list, which was drafted within the past year as part of NATO's new strategy to combat drug operations that finance the Taliban. The list is thought to include people with close ties to the Afghan government and others who have served as intelligence assets for the CIA and the U.S. military, according to current and former U.S. and Afghan officials.

The New York Times, today:

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials. The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

So we're so intent on exterminating Afghan drug "kingpins" that we're compiling secret lists of the ones we will murder on sight -- except perhaps for those we've been keeping on our payroll and who have been organizing private militias for us, though perhaps we'll kill them, too. What an excellent war.

And for those who have become convinced that we're there to help Afghan women -- just as Soviet troops believed -- read this, from Balkin's Brian Tamanaha, on the fate of women under the Afghan warlords we've been empowering.

UPDATE II: Whether you believe that the Soviets were Evil Communists while we are Kind-Hearted Freedom-Spreaders -- or whether you believe that the Soviet Army intentionally targeted Afghan civilians while we desperately seek to avoid that and feel deep remorse when it happens -- is absolutely irrelevant to the points being made here. Debates about "equivalency" between the Soviet and U.S. occupations of Afghanistan have nothing to do with anything I've written. That said, that cartoon distinction seems rather inconsistent with Lanine's account, to say nothing of things like Shock and Awe and our fun new Hit List (and, needless to say, it's a universal rule of humanity that our wars and invasions and occupations are always better and kinder and more noble than theirs -- regardless of who the "Ours" and "Theirs" are).

UPDATE III: Tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m., I'll be on Dylan Ratigan's MSNBC show -- in studio -- debating these various issues with Dan Senor, former Bush spokesman in Iraq. I'm also taping a segment with Bill Moyers tomorrow afternoon about many of these issues that will be available online this weekend. More details once I know them.

And tonight at 9:00 p.m., I'll be on The Rachel Maddow Show, talking about Joe Lieberman, among other things.

Former Marine captain resigns in protest of Afghanistan war

Glenn Greenwald — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:28:00 PDT

(updated below)

Matthew Hoh, a former Marine captain with combat experience in Iraq, resigned last month from his position with the Foreign Service, where he was the the senior U.S. civilian in the Taliban-dominated Southern Afghanistan province of Zabul, because he became convinced that our war in that country will not only inevitably fail, but is fueling the very insurgency we are trying to defeat. Hoh's resignation is remarkable because it entails the sort of career sacrifice in the name of principle that has been so rare over the last decade, but even more so because of the extraordinary four-page letter (.pdf) he wrote explaining his reasoning.

Hoh's letter should be read in its entirety, but I want to highlight one part. He begins by noting that "next fall, the United States' occupation will equal in length the Soviet Union's own physical involvement in Afghanistan," and contends that our unwanted occupation combined with our support for a deeply corrupt government "reminds [him] horribly of our involvement in South Vietnam." He then explains that most of the people we are fighting are not loyal to the Taliban or driven by any other nefarious aim, but instead are driven principally by resistance to the presence of foreign troops in their provinces and villages (click on image to enlarge):

How long are we going to continue to do this? We invade and occupy a country, and then label as "insurgents" or even "terrorists" the people in that country who fight against our invasion and occupation. With the most circular logic imaginable, we then insist that we must remain in order to defeat the "insurgents" and "terrorists" -- largely composed of people whose only cause for fighting is our presence in their country. All the while, we clearly exacerbate the very problem we are allegedly attempting to address -- Terrorism -- by predictably and inevitably increasing anti-American anger and hatred through our occupation, which, no matter the strategy, inevitably entails our killing innocent civilians. Indeed, does Hoh's description of what drives the insurgency -- anger "against the presence of foreign soldiers" -- permit the conclusion that that's all going to be placated with a shift to a kind and gentle counter-insurgency strategy?

Relatedly, Hol points out the transparent fallacy of the claim that we will reduce -- rather than worsen -- the problem of Terrorism by occupying Muslim countries with a massive military presence:

Hoh's observations are entirely consistent with David Rohde's account of his seven-month hostage ordeal with the Taliban: namely, the longer we occupy Afghanistan, the more people we kill and imprison without charges, the greater the central fuel of terrorism -- anti-American hatred -- rises, not only in Afghanistan but across the Muslim world. As the Pentagon's own commissioned Report from 2004 concluded:

Negative attitudes and the conditions that create them are the underlying sources of threats to America's national security . . . Direct American intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for Islamic radicals.

Hoh told The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung that he's "not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love" and that he believes "there are plenty of dudes who need to be killed," adding: "I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys." Plainly, there's nothing ideological about his conclusions; they're just the by-product of an honest assessment, based on first-hand experiences, of how our ongoing occupation of that country is worsening the very problem we're allegedly there to solve.

* * * * *

I'll be traveling both today and tomorrow, causing further posting to be light to non-existent, so I'll highly recommend three related items: (1) this excellent interview by The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss of Afghanistan/Pakistan specialist Christine Fair, strongly debunking each claim made by advocates of ongoing war in Afghanistan; (2) this disturbing analysis from Digby of how DEA agents are being deployed to Afghanistan -- arguably deployed without their consent into combat -- signaling how "our two abstract, endless Orwellian wars --- the War on Drugs and the War on Terror --- have officially merged"; and (3) this not particularly novel but nonetheless significant column from The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, arguing that Obama "has to decide to start bringing the troops home."

UPDATE: Today alone, another 8 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan by multiple "insurgent attacks," for a total of 55 in October, the deadliest month in that country for American soliders since October, 2001. Here's how Capt. Hoh ended his resignation letter:

Calling for greater religious strife with Islam

Glenn Greenwald — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:27:00 PDT

(updated below - Update II)

The New York Times today, in the form of Ross Douthat's column, has published what could fairly be described as a call for a Christian religious war -- certainly metaphorical and perhaps literal -- against Islam. Douthat praises recent efforts by Pope Benedict to recruit disaffected Anglicans back into the Catholic Church by dispensing with the last half-century's practice of religions "being exquisitely polite to one another." Douthat claims -- approvingly -- that Benedict's current recruitment efforts are grounded in "Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam." Declaring Islam to be "Christianity's most enduring and impressive foe," Douthat says that many Christians want confrontation -- not accommodation, "conciliation," or "appeasement" -- with Islam, and thus may flock to the Catholic Church to get behind Benedict's forceful denunciations of the faith of 25% of the world's population:

Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason -- and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world. By contrast, the Church of England’s leadership has opted for conciliation (some would say appeasement), with the Archbishop of Canterbury going so far as to speculate about the inevitability of some kind of sharia law in Britain. There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.

So, Douthat excitedly suggests, Anglicans may unite behind the Catholic Church out of eagerness to directly "confront" and denounce -- rather than accommodate -- Islam, which, the leader of this movement argues, is incompatible "with the Western way of reason." Increased attacks by Christians on Islam is supposed to be a good thing? And is an institution which demands acceptance from its followers of "papal infallability" -- and ingrains in them disturbed and warped sentiments about sex like this -- really an ideal candidate to lead the crusade in defense of "the Western way of reason"? How ironic that someone who is virtually calling for a worldwide religious conflagration is simultaneously condemning his targets for lacking "Western reason."

It's obviously true that some Islamic extremists are inherently incompatible "with the Western way of reason," but that's just as true of Christian extremists and Jewish extremists and a whole array of other kinds of extremists. And some measures taken in the name of accommodating Islam are in tension with core liberties -- just as laws enacted in order to impose Judeo-Christian dogma are.

But the claim that Islam itself -- and the world's 1.5 billion Muslims -- cannot be accommodated by, or peacefully co-exist with, Western values or Christianity specifically is bigotry in its purest and most dangerous form. It's hard to imagine anything more inflammatory, hostile and outright threatening than a call for Christians of all denominations to unite behind the common cause of fighting against Islam as Christianity's most "enduring and impressive foe." No more "conciliation" or appeasement. What, exactly, does Douthat have in mind for vanquishing the Islamic menace from Europe? What weapons will this "united Anglican-Catholic front" employ against its reason-hating enemy? Which "accommodations" of Islam exactly should cease?

Just today, the French Foreign Minister predicted/threatened an Israeli attack on Iran. Leading American political and media elites routinely advocate and threaten an American attack on that same country. Over the weekend, Afghan officials angrily objected to a "hit list" compiled by the U.S. military of alleged drug kingpins in their country whom we intend to murder on sight without a trial. The U.S. is actively waging war in three Muslim countries simultaneously while it has supported Israel in bombing three others (including Gaza) in the last three years alone. One leading U.S. general explicitly said the invasion of Iraq was about vindicating the Christian God against the Islamic one. Two weeks ago, several members of Congress depicted the presence of Muslim interns as some sort of grave internal threat. And now a columnist in America's leading newspaper approvingly and breathlessly predicts that Christians will set aside their dogmatic differences in order to unite against Islam on the ground that it is an enemy of reason and cannot be accommodated by the West.

Who exactly are the threatening, hostile and belligerent parties here? Who is actually at war with "the Western way of reason"?

UPDATE: Is the John Hagee/Joe Lieberman alliance of right-wing American Jews and evangelical Christians -- based on the premise that God demands that all land, including the West Bank and Gaza, be possessed by Jews -- devoted to the advancement of "the Western way of reason"? Is the platform of the Texas GOP -- which calls for the criminalization of all sex between gay adults; the denial of all custody rights to gay people, even over their own children; the teaching of creationism in all public schools; and the denial of medical care to prisoners other than those who can pay for it -- an example of "the Western way of reason"? How about the Catholic Church's proselytizing against birth control in areas of the world drowning in poverty, AIDS and overpopulation? Are torture, Guantanamo, Bagram, disappearing people, immunizing war criminals and multiple decade-long wars shining examples of "the Western way of reason"? How about invading a country on totally false pretenses, shattering and destroying it, and causing the deaths of at least 100,000 human beings?

Hey - look over there. Muslims. They're waging war on reason and taking over. We have to unite to stop them.

UPDATE II: From CNN today:

The Israeli government has ruled out setting up an independent investigative body that would interview Israeli military personnel about allegations that the military committed war crimes during its offensive against Hamas earlier this year. According to an Israeli government official, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday met with representatives from the Defense, Justice and Foreign ministries to discuss the 575-page report -- approved by the U.N. Council for Human Rights earlier this month -- which accuses both Israel and the Palestinian movement Hamas of "actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity" during the three-week offensive which ended in January. . . . The U.N. report, based on a fact-finding mission led by South African former jurist Richard Goldstone, calls for both Israel and Hamas to independently investigate the alleged human rights violations cited in the report. . . The prime minister suggested that "he would not agree to any proposal that would mean that soldiers or officers would be interrogated outside of the army investigations," the official said.

Is that another example of "the Western way of reason" that Muslims simply can't manage to understand or accept? Along those lines, here's Matt Yglesias contrasting the reaction of Hamas with the reaction of Israel to the Goldstone report.

NYT condemns what it calls "Obama's cover-up"

Glenn Greenwald — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:27:00 PDT

(updated below)

The New York Times Editorial Page has long been one of the most reliable and vocal pro-Obama outlets in the nation. When they endorsed him for President, they praised his "strength of will, character and intellect, sober judgment and a cool, steady hand," attributes they said he possesses in "abundance," and predicted he would provide "sensible leadership, compassionate leadership, honest leadership and strong leadership." Throughout this year, their praise of him has been fulsome and their criticisms rare and restrained. Most recently, they made numerous arguments as to why he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. I could go on, but I assume the pro-Obama bona fides of The New York Times Editorial Page are well established.

That's what makes this morning's scathing condemnation of Obama so notable. As suggested by the editorial's headline -- "The Cover-Up Continues" -- the NYT accuses Obama of complicity in shielding Bush war crimes from disclosure and accountability, and worse, details the numerous, radical Bush/Cheney powers embraced by Obama in order to accomplish this. It begins this way:

The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up. We have had recent reminders of this dismaying retreat from Mr. Obama’s passionate campaign promises to make a break with Mr. Bush’s abuses of power, a shift that denies justice to the victims of wayward government policies and shields officials from accountability.

The numerous examples provided by the NYT are all well-known to readers here. Contrary to the central strawman invariably raised by his defenders, none of the complaints is grounded in the objection that Obama "has failed to act quickly enough" to repudiate Bush/Cheney abuses. Let's repeat that: none of the criticisms of Obama from the NYT today -- or from civil libertarians generally -- is grounded in the complaint that he hasn't acted quickly enough. The opposite is true: the complaint is that he has actively and affirmatively embraced those very policies as his own -- the very policies which Democrats and liberals almost unanimously claimed for years they found so offensive and dangerous -- and he has vigorously defended them and repeatedly applied them in numerous circumstances.

The NYT documents only a fraction of the examples where this is true: Obama's embrace of both Bush's arguments and threats to coerce a British court to keep concealed details of how Binyam Mohamed was tortured ("an inappropriate threat that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton repeated"); Obama's ongoing assertions of the same radically broad "state secrets" privilege used by Bush/Cheney to block judicial review of presidential lawbreaking ("the Obama administration has repeated a disreputable Bush-era argument"); the fact that Obama "has aggressively pursued such immunity in numerous other cases beyond the ones involving Mr. Mohamed"; and Obama's "flip-flop last May [when he] decided to resist orders by two federal courts to release photographs of soldiers abusing prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq," a decision that just culminated in a successful White House effort, led by Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, to "create[] an exception to the Freedom of Information Act that gave Secretary of Defense Robert Gates authority to withhold the photos."

All of that is independent of the numerous other areas where Obama has actively embraced many of the most controversial Bush/Cheney "counter-Terrorism" policies (or, more accurately: policies that were controversial when it was Bush rather than Obama defending them): indefinite detention schemes, military commissions, renditions, denial of habeas corpus rights to "War on Terror" prisoners, etc. etc. Perhaps most incriminating of all is this sentence from the NYT Editors, after noting Obama's "justification" for doing all of this:

We do not take seriously the government’s claim that it is trying to protect intelligence or avoid harm to national security.

In other words -- according to one of the President's most supportive media outlets -- the Obama administration is advancing false and pretextual claims of "national security" in order to justify radical secrecy and immunity powers: claims that should not even be "taken seriously." Does that sounds familiar?

All of this vividly underscores a vital point. There is simply no way that a person with even the most minimal levels of intellectual integrity could have objected to these actions during the Bush years yet defend them now that Obama is doing them, or even refrain from objecting just as loudly. What would it say about a person who spent years warning of the dangers posed by these very policies, yet found ways to excuse them now that there's a new President who is affirming and further institutionalizing them?

The fact that Obama has done good things in other areas or "is not as bad as Bush" in this realm doesn't negate that fact in any way. Those who were genuinely horrified by radical Bush/Cheney secrecy and immunity claims -- as opposed to those who pretended to care about those things because it was an effective Bush-bashing tool for partisan gain -- have no choice but to reach the conclusion which the NYT Editors today propounded: "The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up."

* * * * *

Quite related to the last point: over the weekend, two of The Huffington Post's best reporters -- Sam Stein and Ryan Grim -- reported what has long been apparent (and echoed by other outlets such as TPM): namely, that while Obama repeatedly claims in public to support a "public option" for health care reform, the Obama White House, in private, has been actively opposing attempts to include that provision in the final health care bill, a priority of very high importance to many of his progressive supporters.

As a result, Obama-venerating readers of Daily Kos this morning have declared Huffington Post to be suspect, untrustworthy, and even "right-wing" in a top recommended diary. A poll accompanying that dairy finds that 57% of readers believe that Huffington Post -- which just recently hired Dan Froomkin as its Washington Bureau Chief -- "is turning conservative." In other words, Huffington Post reported on facts which reflect poorly on the leader and which contradict what they are eager to believe. Anyone who does that must be discredited, impugned and declared to be the enemy. That way, the unpleasant facts can be dismissed away by attacking those who point them out, and fantasies of the leader can be blissfully maintained. Doesn't that also sound familiar?

UPDATE: In yet another largely pro-Obama outlet -- The Nation -- Julian Sanchez sounds the same theme in the context of the Obama administration's efforts to block any reforms to the Patriot Act and FISA (h/t Andrew Sullivan):

We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place. . . . We've watched the formula play out with Guantánamo Bay, torture prosecutions and the invocation of "state secrets." We appear to be on the verge of doing the same with national security surveillance.

Sanchez details how Obama blocked the very Patriot Act and FISA reforms he not only supported when he was a Senator, but also ones he promised he would undertake when attempting to placate supporters of his who were furious that he'd violated his campaign promise by supporting the Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping and telecom immunity FISA revisions. As Sanchez also describes, and as I detailed here, all of that was accomplished by disseminating pure and deceitful fear-mongering surrounding the Zazi terrorist investigation. At some point, these examples -- and those who point them out -- will pile up so high that it will be impossible for all but the blindest Obama loyalists to pretend they don't exist.

"America's Priorities," by the Beltway elite

Glenn Greenwald — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 05:25:00 PDT

Something very unusual happened on The Washington Post Editorial Page today: they deigned to address a response from one of their readers, who "challenged [them] to explain what he sees as a contradiction in [their] editorial positions": namely, the Post demands that Obama's health care plan not be paid for with borrowed money, yet the very same Post Editors vocally support escalation in Afghanistan without specifying how it should be paid for. "Why is it okay to finance wars with debt, asks our reader, but not to pay for health care that way?"

The Post editors give two answers. They first claim that Obama will save substantial money by reducing defense spending -- by which they mean that he is merely decreasing the rate at which defense spending increases ("from 2008 to 2019, defense spending would increase only 17 percent") -- as well as withdrawing from Iraq. But so what? Even if those things really happen, we're still paying for our glorious, endless war in Afghanistan by borrowing the money from China and Japan, all of which continues to explode our crippling national debt. We have absolutely no ability to pay for our Afghan adventure other than by expanding our ignominious status as the largest and most insatiable debtor nation which history has ever known. That debt gravely bothers Beltway elites like the Post editors when it comes to providing ordinary Americans with basic services (which Post editors already enjoy), but it's totally irrelevant to them when it comes to re-fueling the vicarious joys of endless war.

The Post attempts to justify that disparity with their second answer, which perfectly captures the prevailing, and deeply warped, Beltway thinking: namely, escalating in Afghanistan is an absolute national necessity, while providing Americans with health care coverage is just a luxury that can wait:

All this assumes that defense and health care should be treated equally in the national budget. We would argue that they should not be . . . Universal health care, however desirable, is not "fundamental to the defense of our people." Nor is it a "necessity" that it be adopted this year: Mr. Obama chose to propose a massive new entitlement at a time of historic budget deficits. In contrast, Gen. McChrystal believes that if reinforcements are not sent to Afghanistan in the next year, the war may be lost, with catastrophic consequences for U.S. interests in South Asia. U.S. soldiers would continue to die, without the prospect of defeating the Taliban. And, as Mr. Obama put it, "if left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans."

Actually, a recent study from the Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance documented that "nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance" in America. Whatever the exact number, nobody doubts that lack of health insurance causes thousands of Americans to die every year. If you're Fred Hiatt and you already have health insurance, it's easy to dismiss those deaths as unimportant, "not fundamental," not a "necessity" to tend to any time soon. No matter your views on Obama's health care reform plan, does it really take any effort to see how warped that dismissive mentality is?

But it becomes so much worse when one considers what we're ostensibly going to do in Afghanistan as part of our venerated "counter-insurgency" mission. In an amazingly enlightening interview with Frontline, military expert Andrew Bacevich explains what that supposedly entails:

I think the best way to understand the term "counterinsurgency" is to understand what the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps today mean by that term. What they mean is an approach to warfare in which success is to be gained not by destroying the enemy but by securing the population. The term "securing" here means not simply keeping the people safe, but providing for the people a series of services -- effective governance, economic development, education, the elimination of corruption, the protection of women's rights. That translates into an enormously ambitious project of nation building. . . . John Nagl says that in effect we are engaged in a global counterinsurgency campaign. That's his description of the long war. Now, think about it. If counterinsurgency, according to current doctrine, is all about securing the population, if securing the population implies not simply keeping them safe but providing people with good governance and economic development and education and so on, what then is the requirement of a global counterinsurgency campaign? Are we called upon to keep ourselves safe? To prevent another 9/11? Are we called upon to secure the population of the entire globe? Given the success we've had thus far in securing the population in Iraq and in Afghanistan, does this idea make any sense whatsoever? Can anybody possibly believe that the United States of America, ... facing a federal budget deficit of $1.8 trillion ... has the resources necessary to conduct a global counterinsurgency campaign? Over what? The next 20, 50, 80 years? I think [there] is something so preposterous about such proposals. I just find it baffling that they are treated with seriousness by supposedly serious people.

So according to The Washington Post, dropping bombs on, controlling and occupying Afghanistan -- all while simultaneously ensuring "effective governance, economic development, education, the elimination of corruption, the protection of women's rights" to Afghan citizens in Afghanistan -- is an absolutely vital necessity that must be done no matter the cost. But providing basic services (such as health care) to American citizens, in the U.S., is a secondary priority at best, something totally unnecessary that should wait for a few years or a couple decades until we can afford it and until our various wars are finished, if that ever happens. "U.S. interests in South Asia" are paramount; U.S. interests in the welfare of those in American cities, suburbs and rural areas are an afterthought.

As demented as that sounds, isn't that exactly the priority scheme we've adopted as a country? We're a nation that couldn't even manage to get clean drinking water to our own citizens who were dying in the middle of New Orleans. We have tens of thousands of people dying every year because they lack basic health care coverage. The rich-poor gap continues to expand to third-world levels. And The Post claims that war and "nation-building" in Afghanistan are crucial while health care for Americans is not because "wars, unlike entitlement programs, eventually come to an end." Except, as Bacevich points out, that's false:

Post-Vietnam, the officer corps was committed to the proposition that wars should be infrequent, that they should be fought only for the most vital interests, and that they should be fought in a way that would produce a quick and decisive outcome. What we have today in my judgment is just the inverse of that. War has become a permanent condition.

Beltway elites have health insurance and thus the costs and suffering for those who don't are abstract, distant and irrelevant. Identically, with very rare exception, they and their families don't fight the wars they cheer on -- and don't even pay for them -- and thus get to enjoy all the pulsating benefits without any costs whatsoever. Adam Smith, all the way back in 1776, in An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, described this Beltway attitude exactly:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies . . .

Lounging around in the editorial offices in the capital of a rapidly decaying empire, urging that more Americans be sent into endless war paid for with endless debt, while yawning and lazily waving away with boredom the hordes outside dying for lack of health care coverage, is one of the most repugnant images one can imagine. It's exactly what Adam Smith denounced. And it's exactly what our political and media elite are.

The Washington Post's 2002 "reporting" on Iran

Glenn Greenwald — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:25:00 PDT

Anyone who believes the establishment media in the U.S. learned even a single lesson from what happened with Iraq should immediately read this featured Washington Post article by Joby Warrick, which gravely and frighteningly warns that Iran's Qom nuclear facility "was intended explicitly for making highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons." It's filled with one alarmist claim after the next (all anonymously provided, needless to say), such as this: "That number is too small to furnish fuel for a civilian power plant, but just big enough to supply Iran annually with up to three bombs' worth of weapons-grade fuel, the former officials said" and "Qom could produce enough bomb-grade fuel for two to three bombs annually."

The issue isn't whether you believe Iran desires to develop nuclear weapons; it's obviously possible (even rational) that they do. The issue is the painfully reckless, transparently irresponsible, and Iraq-replicating "journalistic" methods for disseminating these war-fueling assertions. In perfect 2002 fashion, Warrwick does not have a single named source for these scary allegations; instead, this is who fed him these claims: "many U.S. and European intelligence officials" and "two former senior U.S. officials" and "intelligence officials from the United States and allied nations" and "a senior Middle East-based intelligence official" (one wonders, in vain, which "allied nation" and which "Middle-East based" country might have whispered these things?). And while Warwick provides a cursory paragraph devoted to denials by Iranian officials of these accusations, he does not include a single expert or named source to dispute these claims. It's a purely one-sided, unquestioning and entirely anonymous series of dubious, unverified, fear-mongering assertions that can have no purpose other than to create the most sinister picture of the "Iranian threat" possible.

In other words, it's the exact pattern used to lead the country to attack Iraq. Beltway reporters like Warwick have learned nothing and establishment media institutions are just as devoted as ever to beating war drums on command. What else could possibly explain a shoddy, trashy article like this making it past a team of editors? And just imagine how much worse it would get if the U.S. government actually wanted to bomb Iran. All of this is happening while, at least from all appearances, the White House wants to avoid that outcome.

Benjamin Netanyahu's definition of "war crimes"

Glenn Greenwald — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:25:00 PDT

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded yesterday to the U.N. Report finding Israel guilty of war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity by pointing out that Hamas committed war crimes -- a fact nobody disputes but which doesn't exonerate Israel in any way. Netanyahu argued, accurately, that Hamas committed four types of war crimes, one of which is this: "they've been holding our captured soldier, Gilad Shalit, without access to the Red Cross, for three years."

So holding prisoners without providing access to the Red Cross is a "war crime"? Who knew?

The CIA quietly moved scores of detainees out of its own "black site" prisons in recent years and turned them over to foreign governments, refusing to provide the International Red Cross any information about their treatment or whereabouts, according to a report made public this week. There is substantial reason to believe that these "ghost detainees" included some high-profile suspects, including Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan-born jihadist captured in Afghanistan whose claims about ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were prominently used by top Bush administration officials to justify the war in Iraq, according to human-rights activists who have closely followed the issue. Following the U.S. invasion, al-Libi recanted those claims, saying he fabricated his story about Iraq-Qaeda ties in order to get his interrogators to stop their abusive treatment of him. After his recantation became known in 2004, U.S. government officials dropped all public references to him and he was never heard from again -- even though he was once hailed as the U.S. military's first big "catch" after the 9/11 attacks. When Red Cross officials later pressed for information about what happened to such "ghost" detainees, U.S. government officials insisted they were returned to their country of origin under assurances they would be given "humane" treatment, the report states. But the Red Cross was never given access to the detainees -- nor told anything about what happened to them after they were sent back. Nor were U.S. State Department officials given details of the transfers or details about the nature of the "assurances" of humane treatment provided by foreign intelligence services to the CIA, according to a former top Bush administration official who was aware of the transfers but who asked not to be publicly identified because the issue remains highly classified. "This issue has been hiding in plain sight -- but nobody has connected the dots," said the former official. The Red Cross remains "gravely concerned" that a "significant number" of these prisoners may have been subjected to abusive treatment -- and that the organization "has not received any clarification of the fate of these persons," the report states.

So according to Netanyahu's own definition, the U.S. committed "war crimes" continuously and in numerous cases. We didn't merely imprison them secretly and without allowing Red Cross access -- a "war crime" by itself, according to the Israeli Prime Minister -- but we abused these disappeared prisoners to induce them to provide information to "justify" an aggressive war against Iraq, one that resulted in the deaths of at least 100,000 people, almost certainly many times that number. Robert Jackson, the lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, said in his Closing Argument of the case against the Nazis that "the central crime in this pattern of crimes" was not genocide or mass deportation or concentration camps; rather, "the kingpin which holds them all together, is the plot for aggressive wars."

Just looking at what Netanyhau said constitutes "war crimes," can anyone anywhere possibly doubt that the U.S. committed them -- gravely, deliberately and continuously? Does that matter at all? Isn't it so striking how we don't even bother with the pretense of caring about that, let alone imposing even symbolic consequences on those responsible?

Tucker Carlson and the right's perpetual self-victimhood

Glenn Greenwald — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:24:00 PDT

(updated below)

The number one rule of American politics: the greatest, most insatiable need of the standard conservative is to turn themselves into oppressed little victims. In The Daily Beast today, Tucker Carlson devotes his entire column to complaining that Obama is "bullying" Fox News, absurdly claiming that the White House and liberals are trying "to use government power to muzzle opinions they don't agree with." Needless to say, Carlson doesn't say a word about the endless -- and far worse -- attacks by the Bush White House on a whole array of media outlets, ones that went far beyond mere criticisms.

But far more delusional is Carlson's central complaint: that "the press decide[d] to go along with all of this" -- meaning Obama's criticisms of Fox. He echoes the typical, woe-is-us conservative whine: "Why is the press corps giving the White House a pass for behavior it would never have tolerated from other administrations?" He righteously condemns what he calls "the press corps' shameful silence" on the Obama/Fox conflict and alleges that "hardly anyone in the press says a word" about this matter.

Is Tucker Carlson lying or just completely ignorant of the subject matter on which he's opining? The press has been anything but "silent" about this. It's been a virtual consensus from establishment pundits and journalists of every type that the Obama White House is doing something terribly wrong by criticizing Fox. And as usual for the vapid, group-think, script-repeating, mindless wind-up dolls who compose the Beltway press corps, they even have their own endlessly repeated platitudes for condemning Obama's criticisms of Fox: it's Nixonesque. Enemies List. Also as usual, they are echoing the theme propounded by Karl Rove on Fox: "We heard this before from Richard Nixon. And we have this White House prone to that kind of attitude. . . . This is the White House engaging in its own version of the media Enemies List."

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus wrote two items condemning the Obama White House, saying it has "a Nixonesque -- Agnewesque aroma" and that the Fox criticisms were "dumb" and "weak." Intoning underneath a photo that read: "President Obama's ENEMIES," CNN's Anderson Cooper said: "this White House is starting to look like another White House" -- meaning Nixon's -- "and the comparisons are not flattering." Just yesterday on NPR, NPR's Ken Rudin condemend the Fox criticisms as "Nixonesque" and accused liberals of cheering on an "enemies list," while The New York Times' David Carr sat beside him and said the President was being "heavy-handed." CNN's David Gergen urged the White House to cease attacking Fox, and "even on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' Monday, the panelists largely came out against the White House's war against Fox News." Frequent Fox News critic David Zurawick of The Baltimore Sun condemned the criticisms and "compared the current administration to the White House of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew." Numerous other media figures have sung the same tune.

All that hand-wringing rhetoric: why? Because the Obama administration threatened to criminally prosecute Fox? Or because the adminstration surveilled its reporters' telephone calls? Or illegally obtained their telephone records? Or shot missiles at hotels in which they were staying? Or dropped bombs on their offices? Or imprisoned them for years without charges? Or barred Fox reporters from riding on administration planes? Or conspired to "weed out" any critical voices from being heard on network and cable news programs? No, those are all things that the Bush administration did to reporters (see the links) -- all well above and beyond the numerous, constant rhetorical attacks from the Bush White House on media organizations they perceived to be hostile. Where was Tucker Carlson when that was happening, or Ruth Marcus, or Anderson Cooper, or David Carr?

There has been a horde of media figures rushing to condemn the Obama administration merely for criticizing Fox's "reporting." Many of these same media figures -- probably most -- were silent in the face not only of identical Bush White House attacks on reporters they disliked, but far more serious and actual threats to press freedom over the last eight years.

Yet perpetual self-victimizer Tucker Carlson has to ignore all these facts -- literally pretend they don't exist -- and completely reverse reality, all so he can whine about how unfair everything is to conservatives like him, how the BigBadLiberalMedia won't criticize Obama even though they were so terribly and harshly critical of Bush. Just compare actual reality to Carlson's complaints about "the press corps' shameful silence" and his claim that "hardly anyone in the press says a word" about Obama's criticisms of Fox. That huge, disturbing and disturbed disparity illustrates how petulant conservatives literally create their own demented reality, where they always get to be the put-upon victims.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports that when the White House tried to exclude Fox from a round of interviews with Treasury Department official Kenneth Feinberg, "Fox’s television news competitors refused to go along," insisting that Fox be included. Even Charles Krauthammer, on Fox, praised the media for standing up for Fox: "what happened today was other news organizations -- admirably and on principle -- standing up and saying no." And Fox News itself credited NBC White Correspondent Savannah Guthrie as "the first reporter to hold President Obama to account for his aides' 'attacks' on Fox News," when she questioned him with hostility about the criticisms.

Numerous establishment journalists have strongly condemned the Obama White House for its criticisms of Fox -- exactly the opposite of Carlson's complaints. The discrepancy between that behavior and their conduct towards the Bush White House's press attacks also demonstrates, as usual, that reality is the exact opposite of the Right's incessant and petulant complaints about "The Liberal Media."

The unconstitutionality of the congressional GOP's ACORN obsession

Glenn Greenwald — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:24:00 PDT

Yesterday, GOP Rep. Paul Broun had a five-minute dialogue with Rep. Alan Grayson about the unconstitutionality of the Congressional GOP's numerous amendments directed exclusively at ACORN, all of which bar ACORN from receiving any government contracts due to alleged wrongdoing (not adjudicated by any court). While being questioned by Grayson about whether these measures are unconstitutional "bills of attainder" -- acts of Congress that punish specific individuals for alleged, unadjudicated wrongdoing -- Broun was handed a piece of paper, which he dutifully read, claiming that these amendments do not impose "punishment" on ACORN. Instead, he claimed, Congress is merely barring ACORN from receiving government contracts, and since nobody has the "right" to receive government contracts, there is no "punishment" here. It's simply a case of the government exercising its prerogative as to who it will and will not hire.

As always happens, numerous people who never gave a moment's thought to what a "bill of attainder" is rushed forward to declare that Broun was correct, because they want to believe that. But it's false, and clearly so.

Under the law as pronounced by the Supreme Court -- i.e., the authoritative source on this question -- it is "punishment" when the Congress targets specific individuals and denies them even discretionary benefits otherwise available based on allegations of guilty behavior. Just read for yourself what the Court has said. Or -- for those of you who want to argue otherwise -- think about what you're endorsing.

In 1946, the Court decided the interesting case of U.S. v. Lovett. That suit was brought by three government employees who, despite uniformly positive performance evaluations, were specifically named by an amendment passed by Congress as possessing "subversive beliefs" and "subversive associations," and were therefore barred from receiving future pay for any work for the Federal Government. The Court observed that the bill (Section 304) "was designed to force the employing agencies to discharge respondents and to bar their being hired by any other governmental agency." As the Court put it: "what is involved here is a congressional proscription of Lovett, Watson, and Dodd, prohibiting their ever holding a government job."

Obviously, there is no "right" to receive a job from the Federal Government, and Congress has the Constitutional power to make appropriations decisions. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court held that the law imposed "punishment" on these specific individuals and was thus an unconstitutional bill of attainder. Here's what the Court said; its applicability to these anti-ACORN amendments is too self-evident to require much explanation (emphasis added):

In Cummins v. Missouri, 4 Wall. 277, 323, this Court said, "A bill of attainder is a legislative act which inflicts punishment without a judicial trial." Section 304 was designed to apply to particular individuals. [n4] Just as the statute in the two cases mentioned, it "operates as a legislative decree of perpetual exclusion" from a chosen vocation. Ex parte Garland, supra, at 377. This permanent proscription from any opportunity to serve the Government is punishment, and of a most severe type. Section 304, thus, clearly accomplishes the punishment of named individuals without a judicial trial. The fact that the punishment is inflicted through the instrumentality of an Act specifically cutting off the pay of certain named individuals found guilty of disloyalty makes it no less galling or effective than if it had been done by an Act which designated the conduct as criminal. [n5] No one would think that Congress could have passed a valid law stating that, after investigation, it had found Lovett, Dodd, and Watson "guilty" of the crime of engaging in "subversive activities," defined that term for the first time, and sentenced them to perpetual exclusion from any government employment. Section 304, while it does not use that language, accomplishes that result. The effect was to inflict punishment without the safeguards of a judicial trial and [p317] "determined by no previous law or fixed rule." [n6] The Constitution declares that that cannot be done either by a State or by the United States. . . . When our Constitution and Bill of Rights were written, our ancestors had ample reason to know that legislative trials and punishments were too dangerous to liberty to exist in the nation of free men they envisioned. And so they proscribed bills of attainder. Section 304 is one. Much as we regret to declare that an Act of Congress violates the Constitution, we have no alternative here. Section 304 therefore does not stand as an obstacle to payment of compensation to Lovett, Watson, and Dodd.

Barring specific parties from working with the Government based on allegations of wrongdoing -- exactly what the GOP's anti-ACORN bills do -- constitutes "punishment" under Supreme Court law and is thus an unconstitutional bill of attainder. Period. As clearly as could be, the Court rejected the two arguments made by Broun-defenders: that (a) it's not "punishment" if Congress denies something to which one does not have a "right," and (b) denying government contracts cannot be a "bill of attainder." The Supreme Court, as recently as 1976 in Paul v. Davis, explained the meaning of Lovett as follows:

In United States v. Lovett, 328 U.S. 303 (1946), the Court held that an Act of Congress which specifically forbade payment of any salary or compensation to three named Government agency employees was an unconstitutional bill of attainder. The three employees had been proscribed because a House of Representatives subcommittee found them guilty of "subversive activity," and therefore unfit for Government service.

Could that be any clearer? These anti-ACORN bills -- beginning with the very first one passed by Congress -- single out ACORN and deny them government contracts based on alleged (though unadjudicated) allegations of wrongdoing. They're exactly the Congressional adjudications of guilt, followed by punishment, which the Constitution forbids. The prohibition on bills of attainder isn't some hyper-technical or obsolete right. Acts of that sort are toxic and pernicious, because they permit the Congress to punish parties without any of the safeguards that judicial proceedings provide. That's exactly what Congress is doing to ACORN.

For those who want to ignore the actual law and insist that it's not "punishment" for Congress to prohibit specific people from receiving discretionary government benefits (such as government contracts), it should be the case that you'd have no Constitutional objection to bills which provide for the following:

* Only registered Democrats, but not registered Republicans, shall be eligible for unemployment benefits. * Any individual belonging or contributing to the NRA shall be permanently barred from government employment. * Anyone who has been employed by Blackwater at any time during the past decade -- including those who performed contracting services for said corporation -- shall not be permitted to participate in the Medicare or Medicaid program. * Any organization which helps more Republicans than Democrats register to vote shall be barred from holding tax-exempt status. * Any person or company providing services, or entering into contracts with, Fox News shall be barred from receiving government contracts.

By the reasoning of Rep. Broun and his defenders, such measures cannot be unconstitutional because Congress is not "punishing" anyone here. Nobody has the "right" to receive unemployment benefits, or be employed by the government, or to have government-provided health care benefits or to receive special tax-exemptions. Those are purely discretionary benefits which the Congress is free to dole out, or not dole out, as it wishes. Nobody who is singled out by the Congress can possibly complain that they are being unconstitutionally "punished" merely because Congress has decided to deny them these discretionary benefits. Is that what anti-ACORN crusaders are prepared to defend?

Whatever else is true, it is settled law that denial of government employment aimed at specific parties is "punishment" and therefore an unconstitutional "bill of attainder." There may be other reasonable grounds for claiming that the anti-ACORN laws do not constitute bills of attainder, but the claim that mere denial of discretionary benefits does not constitute "punishment" is not such a ground.

The Congress today had five minutes of worthwhile dialogue

Glenn Greenwald — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:23:00 PDT

Earlier today, GOP Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia introduced yet another amendment to deny all funding to ACORN. Rep. Alan Grayson took the five minutes allotted to him to question Rep. Broun about this thing called "the Constitution" and, specifically, "bills of attainder," which happen to be prohibited by the "Constitution." What ensued is both hilarious and very worthwhile. Every member of Congress should be subjected to questioning like this on a daily basis:

For those interested, my interview with Grayson several weeks ago about ACORN and bills of attainder is here.