(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: sunilgarg, kzappaster, ~Brenda-Starr~)

During his presidential campaign, then-Senator Obama emphasized negotiations rather than military action. The Republicans ridiculed his focus on diplomacy as naïve,  “Strong countries and strong presidents meet and talk with our adversaries,” Obama said during an August 19 debate. “We shouldn’t be afraid to do so. We’ve tried the other way. It didn’t work.”

Candidate Obama argued that the United States had to put diplomacy at the forefront of American foreign policy. But today a leading civil rights organization is charging that one aspect of diplomacy –the language of ‘dialogue’ and ‘cooperation’ – is little understood, rarely reported on, and is being used by governments throughout the world as a fig leaf to conceal their tacit acceptance of egregious human rights abuses.

“The ritualistic support of ‘dialogue’ and ‘cooperation’ with repressive governments is too often an excuse for doing nothing about human rights,” says Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

His remarks come as the organization released its “World Report 2011,” a 649-page summary of human rights issues and practices in more than 90 countries and territories worldwide.

“Too many governments are accepting the rationalizations and subterfuges of repressive governments, replacing pressure to respect human rights with softer approaches such as private ‘dialogue’ and cooperation’…. Instead of standing up firmly against abusive leaders,” many governments “adopt policies that do not generate pressure for change.”

The report was particularly critical of the United Nations, the European Union and the United States of America.

The famed eloquence of US President Barack Obama “has sometimes eluded him when it comes to defending human rights,” the report says. It cites as examples bilateral contexts with China, India, and Indonesia.

Criticism in the report is not limited to foreign policy. For example, it says that the United States “sets a dubious world record with 2,574 minors serving life sentences at the time the report was written.”

It says Obama has failed to insist that the various agencies of the US government, such as the Defense Department and various embassies, convey strong human rights messages consistently — a problem, for example, in Egypt, Indonesia, and Bahrain.

The report notes that Obama “increased his focus on human rights in his second year in office, but his eloquent statements have not always been followed by concrete actions. Nor has he insisted that the various US government agencies convey strong human rights messages consistently, with the result that the Defense Department and various US embassies – in Egypt, Indonesia, and Bahrain, for example – often deliver divergent messages.”

The report charges that the Obama administration in its first year ”simply ignored the human rights conditions on the transfer of military aid to Mexico, under the Merida Initiative, even though Mexico had done nothing as required toward prosecuting abusive military officials in civilian courts.”

In its second year, the report says, the administration “did withhold a small fraction of funding, it once again certified–despite clear evidence to the contrary–that Mexico was meeting Merida’s human rights requirements.”

“The US also signed a funding compact with Jordan under the Millennium Challenge Corporation even though Jordan had failed to improve its failing grades on the MCC’s benchmarks for political rights and civil liberties,” according to HRW.

A similar dynamic is at play in China, where Western governments seek economic opportunity as well as cooperation on a range of global and regional issues. For example, in its first year in office, the Obama administration seemed determined to downplay any issue, such as human rights, that might raise tensions in the US-China relationship.

President Obama deferred meeting with the Dalai Lama until after his trip to China and refused to meet with Chinese civil society groups during the trip, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that human rights “can’t interfere” with other US interests in China.

The report declares that Obama’s efforts to ingratiate himself with Chinese President Hu Jintao” gained nothing discernible while it reinforced China’s view of the US as a declining power.”

That weakness, the report says, “only heightened tension when, in Obama’s second year in office, he and Secretary Clinton rediscovered their human rights voice on the case of Liu Xiaobo, although it remains to be seen whether they will be outspoken on rights during the January 2011 US-China summit.”

The report concludes, “The Chinese government is naturally reluctant to promote human rights because it maintains such a repressive climate at home and does not want to bolster any international system for the protection of human rights that might come back to haunt it. But even China should not see turning its back on mass atrocities -– a practice that, one would hope, China has moved beyond — as advancing its self-interest.”

US policy toward Egypt shows that pressure can work, the report says.

“In recent years, the US government has maintained a quiet dialogue with Egypt. Beginning in 2010, however, the White House and State Department repeatedly condemned abuses, urged repeal of Egypt’s emergency law, and called for free elections.

“These public calls helped to secure the release of several hundred political detainees held under the emergency law,” the report says.

Egypt also responded with anger–for example, waging a lobbying campaign to stop a US Senate resolution condemning its human rights record. “The reaction was designed to scare US diplomats into resuming a quieter approach, but in fact it showed that Egypt is profoundly affected by public pressure from Washington,” the report charges.

It says that, with respect to Saudi Arabia, the US government in 2005 established a “strategic dialogue” which, because of Saudi objections, “did not mention human rights as a formal subject but relegated the topic to the ‘Partnership, Education, Exchange, and Human Development Working Group’.” But it notes that “even that dialogue then gradually disappeared.

It further notes, “While the US government contributed to keeping Iran off the board of the new UN Women agency in 2010 because of its mistreatment of women, it made no such effort with Saudi Arabia, which has an abysmal record on women but was given a seat by virtue of its financial contribution.”

Western governments also have been reluctant to exert pressure for human rights on governments that they count as counterterrorism allies, the report declares.

For example, it says, the Obama administration and the Friends of Yemen, a group of states and intergovernmental organizations established in January 2010, have not conditioned military or development assistance to Yemen on human rights improvements, “despite a worsening record of abusive conduct by Yemeni security forces and continuing government crackdowns on independent journalists and largely peaceful southern separatists.”

According to HRW, “One common rationalization offered for engagement without pressure is that rubbing shoulders with outsiders will somehow help to convert abusive agents of repressive governments.”

It says the Pentagon makes that argument in the case of Uzbekistan and Sri Lanka, and the US government adopted that line to justify resuming military aid to Indonesia’s elite special forces (Kopassus),”a unit with a long history of severe abuse, including massacres in East Timor and ‘disappearances’ of student leaders in Jakarta.

With respect to Kopassus, HRW says that while the Indonesian government’s human rights record has improved dramatically in recent years, “a serious gap remains its failure to hold senior military officers accountable for human rights violations, even in the most high-profile cases.”

In 2010, the report says, “The US relinquished the strongest lever it had by agreeing to lift a decade-old ban on direct military ties with Kopassus. The Indonesian military made some rhetorical concessions — promising to discharge convicted offenders and to take action against future offenders — but the US did not condition resumption of aid on such changes.”

As a result, the report says, “Convicted offenders today remain in the military, and there is little reason to credit the military’s future pledge given its poor record to date.”

Trivializing the significance of pressure, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates justified resuming direct ties with Kopassus:

“Working with them further produce greater gains in human rights for people than simply standing back and shouting at people.” Yet HRW notes that “even as the US was finalizing terms with Indonesia on resumption of aid to Kopassus, an Indonesian general implicated in abductions of student leaders was promoted to deputy defense minister and a colonel implicated in other serious abuses was named deputy commander of Kopassus.”

A similarly misplaced faith in rubbing shoulders with abusive forces rather than applying pressure on them informed President Obama’s decision to continue military aid to a series of governments that use child soldiers — Chad, Sudan, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of Congo — despite a new US law prohibiting such aid.

In the case of Congo, for example, the military has had children in its ranks since at least 2002, and a 2010 UN report found a “dramatic increase” in the number of such children in the prior years. “Instead of using a cutoff of military assistance to pressure these governments to stop using child soldiers, the Obama administration waived the law to give the US time to ‘work with’ the offending militaries,” HRW says.

Another favorite rationale for a quiet approach, heard often in dealings with China, is that economic liberalization will lead on its own to greater political freedoms–a position maintained even after three decades in which that has not happened.

Indeed, in 2010 the opposite occurred — in its regulation of the internet, China began using its economic clout to try to strengthen restrictions on speech, pressing businesses to become censors on its behalf. In the end, it was a business – Google — that fought back, in part because censorship threatened its business model.

GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest web registrar, also announced that it would no longer register domains in China because onerous government requirements forcing disclosure of customer identities made censorship easier.

Despite these efforts, China still leveraged access to its lucrative market to gain the upper hand because others in the Internet industry, such as Microsoft, did not follow Google’s lead.

Conversely, the one time that China backed off was when it faced concerted pressure — it apparently abandoned its “Green Dam” censoring software when the industry, civil society,
governments, and China’s own Internet users all loudly protested. And even Google’s license to operate a search engine in China was renewed, casting further doubt on the idea that a public critique of China’s human rights practices would inevitably hurt business.

Ironically, some of the governments most opposed to using pressure to promote human rights have no qualms about using pressure to deflect human rights criticism.

China, for example, pulled out all stops in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to suppress a report to the UN Security Council on the discovery of Chinese weaponry in Darfur despite an arms embargo. Sri Lanka did the same in an unsuccessful effort to quash a UN advisory panel on accountability for war crimes committed during its armed conflict with the Tamil Tigers.

China also mounted a major lobbying effort to prevent the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese writer and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, and when that failed, it tried unsuccessfully to discourage governments from attending the award ceremony in Norway. China made a similar effort to block a proposed UN commission of inquiry into war crimes committed in Burma.

But HRW saves its harshest criticism for the United Nations and the European Union. The report excoriates “the failure of the expected champions of human rights to respond” to human rights violations around the world.

HRW says the use of “dialogue and cooperation in lieu of pressure has emerged with a vengeance at the United Nations, from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to many members of the Human Rights Council.”

In addition, the report says, leading democracies of the global South, such as South Africa, India, and Brazil, have promoted quiet demarches as a preferred response to repression.

Recent illustrations include Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) tepid response to Burmese repression, the United Nations’ deferential attitude toward Sri Lankan wartime atrocities, and India’s pliant policy toward Burma and Sri Lanka, Human Rights Watch said.

The UN Human Rights Council has been especially timid, with many countries refusing to vote for resolutions aimed at a particular country. In an extreme example, rather than condemn Sri Lanka for the brutal abuses against civilians in the final months of the conflict with the Tamil Tigers, the council congratulated Sri Lanka, Human Rights Watch said.

Although the EU’s partnership and cooperation agreements with other countries are routinely conditioned on basic respect for human rights, it has concluded a significant trade agreement and pursued a full-fledged partnership and cooperation agreement with Turkmenistan, a severely repressive government, without conditioning either on human rights improvements or engaging in any serious efforts to secure improvements in advance, Human Rights Watch said.

And the EU opened accession discussions with Serbia despite its failure to apprehend and surrender for trial Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb wartime military leader and an internationally indicted war crimes suspect, a key benchmark for beginning the discussions. The EU also lifted sanctions imposed on Uzbekistan after security forces massacred hundreds in 2005 in the city of Andijan, even though the Uzbek government took no steps to fill any of the EU criteria required for lifting the sanctions.

“Dialogue and cooperation have their place, but the burden should be on the abusive government to show a genuine willingness to improve,” Roth said. “In the absence of the demonstrated political will by abusive governments to make change, governments of good will need to apply pressure to end repression.”

If members of the Council want dialogue and cooperation to be effective in upholding human rights, they should limit use of these tools to governments that have demonstrated a political will to improve. But whether out of calculation or cowardice, many Council members promote dialogue and cooperation as a universal prescription without regard to whether a government has the political will to curtail its abusive behavior.

They thus resist tests for determining whether a government’s asserted interest in cooperation is a ploy to avoid pressure or a genuine commitment to improvement–tests that might look to the government’s willingness to acknowledge its human rights failings, welcome UN investigators to examine the nature of the problem, prescribe solutions, and embark upon reforms. The enemies of human rights enforcement oppose critical resolutions even on governments that clearly fail these tests, such as Burma, Iran, North Korea, Sri Lanka, and Sudan.

Similar problems arise at the UN General Assembly, the report says. As the Burmese military reinforced its decades-long rule with sham elections designed to give it a civilian facade, a campaign got under way to intensify pressure by launching an international commission of inquiry to examine the many war crimes committed in the country’s long-running armed conflict.”

A commission of inquiry, the report says, “would be an excellent tool for showing that such atrocities could no longer be committed with impunity. It would also create an incentive for newer members of the military-dominated government to avoid the worst abuses of the past.”

Yet some member states have refused to endorse a commission of inquiry on the “spurious grounds that it would not work without the cooperation of the Burmese junta.”

EU High Representative Ashton, in failing to embrace this tool, said: “Ideally, we should aim at ensuring a measure of cooperation from the national authorities.”

Similarly, a German Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said that, to help advance human rights in the country, it is “crucial to find some co-operation mechanism with the [Burmese] national authorities.”

Yet obtaining such cooperation from the Burmese military in the absence of further pressure is a pipe dream, the report says.

Another favorite form of cooperation is a formal intergovernmental dialogue on human rights, such as those that many governments conduct with China and the EU maintains with a range of repressive countries, including the former-Soviet republics of Central Asia.

“Authoritarian governments understandably welcome these dialogues because they remove the spotlight from human rights discussions,” HRW says.

With such dialogues, the public, including domestic activists, is “left in the dark, as are most government officials outside the foreign ministry.”

But Western governments also often cite the existence of such dialogues as justification for not speaking concretely about human rights violations and remedies in more meaningful settings — as Sweden did, for example, during its EU presidency when asked why human rights had not featured more prominently at the EU-Central Asia ministerial conference.

The UN and EU are accused of “cowardice” for claiming to tackle human rights abuses in places like China or Uzbekistan through quiet dialogue and cooperation, Human Rights Watch said in its annual report Monday.

Highlighting its claim, the HRW report on global human rights violations was issued in Brussels the same day the European Union hosted controversial Uzbek President Islam Karimov amid a flurry of protests from campaigners.

The New York-based non-governmental organization’s executive director Kenneth Roth lambasted “the failure of the expected champions of human rights to respond” to violations in an introduction to the 600-page report covering 100-plus regimes.

In his eyes, the fundamental error made by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other leading voices is to place the accent on quiet diplomacy, which he says is often a euphemism for “other interests at stake.”

Roth cites a “tepid” response from Asian partners to repression in Myanmar, with the report saying the Burmese junta’s release of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi on November 23 was preceded by no significant steps on 2,100 other political prisoners.

The UN meanwhile is criticized for adopting a “deferential” attitude towards Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, alongside Myanmar’s Than Shwe or Sudan leader Omar al-Bashir, with Ban said to have placed “undue faith” in the impact of his corridor diplomacy.

The EU’s top diplomat, the much-criticized English baroness Catherine Ashton, is said to hide behind an “obsequious approach to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan” where large energy interests dominate trade and political links.

Ashton’s “quiet dialogue and cooperation often look like acquiescence” leading rights defenders to “sense indifference rather than solidarity,” Roth wrote in a column for the International Herald Tribune in advance of the Report’s release.

Britain, France and Germany are all cited as appeasing Beijing.

The obsession with dialogue and cooperation is particularly intense at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, where many of the members insist that the Council should practice “cooperation, not condemnation.”

The report says, “A key form of pressure at the Council is the ability to send fact-finders to expose what abuses were committed and to hold governments accountable for not curtailing abuses. One important medium for these tools is a resolution aimed at a particular country or situation. Yet many governments on the Council eschew any country resolution designed to generate pressure (except in the case of the Council’s perennial pariah, Israel).”

HRW’s chief executive, Kenneth Roth, believes the “fundamental error” made by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other leading voices, is to place the accent on quiet diplomacy,
which he says is often a euphemism for “other interests at stake.”

Roth cites a “tepid” response from Asian partners to human rights abuses in Myanmar (Burma). The report charges that the Burmese junta’s release of democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi on November 23 “was preceded by no significant steps on 2,100 other political prisoners.”

Meanwhile, the report is critical of the UN for what it calls the EU’s “deferential” attitude towards Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, alongside Myanmar’s Than Shwe or Sudan leader Omar al-Bashir, with Ban said to have placed “undue faith” in the impact
of his corridor diplomacy.

The EU’s top diplomat, English baroness Catherine Ashton, is criticized for her “obsequious approach to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan,” where Europe has large energy interests.

“Near-universal cowardice,” meanwhile, marks efforts at confronting China’s “deepening crackdown on basic liberties,” with huge Yuan investments — whether in African natural resources or US and eurozone public debt — ensuring silence is the preferred approach.

It says, “In recent years the use of dialogue and cooperation in lieu of public pressure has emerged with a vengeance at the UN, from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to many members of the Human Rights Council.”

In addition, the report says, the EU “seems to have become particularly infatuated with the idea of dialogue and cooperation, with the EU’s first high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Catherine Ashton, repeatedly expressing a preference for ‘quiet diplomacy’ regardless of the circumstances.”

“The credibility of the EU as a force for human rights around the world also rests on its willingness to address human rights abuses by its own member states. With a record of discrimination and rising intolerance against migrants, Muslims, Roma, and others, inadequate access to asylum, and abusive counterterrorism measures, member states and EU institutions need to show greater political commitment to ensure that respect for human rights at home matches the EU’s rhetoric abroad.” The report charges.

The report cites recent examples of failure to exert pressure. These  include the EU’s “obsequious approach” toward Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, the West’s “soft reaction” to certain favored African autocrats such as Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, and the “near-universal cowardice in confronting China’s deepening crackdown on basic liberties.”

It adds that the most effective support for human rights in China in 2010 came from the Norwegian Nobel committee’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

Prior to the recent visit of President Hu of China, there was concerted pressure from Obama’s left wing urging him to launch a full frontal attack on China’s human rights record.

To most of those on the left of the Democratic Party, Obama’s attack was far from “full frontal.”  On the other hand, however, the issue was “on a table,” and not being swept under the rug.

As a New York Times editorial noted, prior to Hu’s arrival, Obama “invited human rights advocates to the White House for a meeting on China.” And Obama raised the issue from the very beginning of the State visit. It is reported that Obama also had a “very serious” discussion on human rights with Hu during a private dinner in the White House.

Many observers believe the president didn’t go far enough, but that he went as far as he could. But far fewer seem to believe Obama’s candor will have any impact on China’s domestic policies, at least not in the short term.

William Fisher, a regular contributor to The Public Record, has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere for the past 25 years and served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He reports on a wide-range of issues for numerous domestic and international newspapers and online journals. He blogs at The World According to Bill Fisher.

Instead, according to some of the nation’s most respected legal authorities, we are about to slither into the quicksand of a regressive judicial “system” designed, not to dispense justice, but to get convictions.

The Administration’s plans can only be characterized as a defeat. They come exactly two years after the President, on his second day in office, vowed to the American people that he would close the iconic prison at Guantanamo.

Since then, that objective has been immobilized by a perfect storm. The President’s Task Force assigned to review each detainee’s case found itself hog-tied by the Bush Administration’s sloppy housekeeping: case files were a shambles, incomplete and scattered throughout the government; before they could be read and assessed they had to be found and assembled. That took time not anticipated.

Then, a Federal judge ruled in the matter of the Uighers – Muslims from China – held at GITMO for years without charge or trial. These men had already been cleared for release – but where were they to go? They couldn’t be sent home to China, where they surely would face China’s merciless justice system. So the DOJ and the State Department worked overtime, trotting out all the blandishments and incentives only a superpower has to dispense in an effort to cajole countries to become Uighur hosts.

Amidst this genuine – and exhausting — effort, a Federal Judge took up the Uighurs’ case. Designated innocent, scheduled for release, and yet still imprisoned for years. The judge stopped just short of a heart attack when he ruled that the Uighurs should be brought to the United States for resettlement with families here that were awaiting them.

Predictably, the government appealed that decision, and the appeals court ruled that courts could not made immigration regulations; that was the job of the Department of Homeland Security.

But while the lower court decision was overturned, the tiger was out of the bag. Congress had picked up on the possibility that exonerated GITMO detainees would soon be running up and down the main streets of America, bumping into you at the Mall.

It didn’t take much for our courageous lawmakers – on both sides of the aisle – to show how much they appreciated Obama’s respect for the rule of law. In record time, they passed a bill stipulating that no Guantanamo detainee would be released inside the U.S. and mandating Obama to give Congress advance notice before moving a detainee to the U.S. for trial.

Trial. Oh yes, that was back in the days when civilian Federal trials for GITMO detainees were still on the table. Most legal experts, legal and human rights organizations, the entire Administration and at least a few in Congress, insisted that trials in Article Three courts were most likely to result in real justice.

The self-described mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), was to be the first to be tried and his trial would take place in Federal Court in New York City (home of dozens of other terrorist trials). Mayor Bloomberg of New York was enthusiastic about all the attention and tourist dollars this trial would bring to his city. And he said so. But then he went quiet. For days nothing was heard from him. And the next time he surfaced, he was embraced by the New York City Congressional delegation, and he and they had taken a 180-degree turn. Federal trials in New York: Bad Idea.

This despite the fact that dozens of accused terrorists – including Zacarias Moussaoui, dubbed the “20th hijacker,” have been tried and convicted in downtown Manhattan. Moussaoui is now serving a life sentence at the supermax prison in Colorado.

But Obama was not to be easily deterred. While Congress and the administration’s critics were becoming increasing apoplectic about the prospect of meeting a terrorist in the men’s room of the U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan, the Obama team readied itself for its first trial of a GITMO detainee to be held in the Continental U.S.

It was not KSM, however. It was a man who would perhaps provide a dress rehearsal for a KSM trial later. His name was Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, accused of participating in the 1998 bombings of American Embassies in East Africa.

After 41/2 days of deliberation, the jury cleared Ghailani of more than 280 counts, including the top charges of murder and murder conspiracy, and convicted him on one count: conspiracy.

He faces a mandatory 20-year-to-life sentence for the conviction.

Supporters of Federal trials for GITMO detainees noted that virtually no one noticed a terrorist trial in progress, and said the verdict vindicated the U.S. justice system; opponents pointed to the one-out-of-281-count conviction, and fanaticized about Ghailani on parole, enjoying breakfast at McDonalds.

New York Republican Rep. Pete King, who has bitterly opposed Federal trials, called the mixed verdict “a disgraceful miscarriage of justice.”

Congress sided with King and the trial’s many other opponents. It cut off funding for the transport of any GITMO detainee to the U.S. for any purpose whatever.

Ergo, the Administration is left with only bad options, and not many of those. It can forget about trials altogether. These prisoners will just make up part of the group that, regardless of any other factors, the Administration intends to hold indefinitely. It can continue to try to find countries to host those inmates cleared for release (the largest single group of these is from Yemen; and there is currently a ban on repatriating anyone to Yemen because of the recent reported Al Qaeda activity there). Or it can revert to the quaint system of justice fashioned by the George W. Bush Administration: the Military Commission.

That’s the road it is reportedly taking. And that news has furnished critics with a large, loud microphone.

Lawyers who are intimately familiar with the Military Commission system say it is not designed to produce justice; it is designed to produce convictions. They call it a second-class justice system.

Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, and now executive director of the Crimes of War Project, told The Public Record, “In more than nine years since President Bush authorized military commissions, we’ve conducted a total of five trials and generated nothing but universal condemnation. We’re long past the question of whether we could do them to one of whether we should. Putting lipstick on this pig is not going to convince anyone that she’s been transformed into lady justice.”

Another GITMO veteran, Darrell J. Vandeveld, who resigned his appointment as a prosecutor before a Guantanamo military commission because of a serious ethical issue, told us, “Right after the President issued the order to close the prison, [it was clear that] nothing good will come out of Guantanamo for years. Nothing has been accomplished during this hiatus except to demonstrate that military commissions are inferior, deeply-flawed ‘courts,’ that have delivered, in the few cases tried, inferior justice and utterly inferior results. Ghailani will likely receive a life sentence; Omar Khadr will likely be a free man in less than two years. The prior administration’s politicization of the military is unprecedented, and, as we see, ruinous. The current administration is only rejoining this fin de siecle circus.”

David Frakt also has equally serious doubts about the legitimacy of the Military Commissions.

It was Frakt who, in 2008, challenged the role of chief prosecutor Brigadier General Thomas W. Hartmann in choosing his client, Mohammed Jawad, for trial.

Frakt argued that Hartmann had “…exercised unlawful command influence. Frakt also argued, during his challenge of Hartmann’s unlawful influence, that the Prosecution had failed to release important records to the Defense, and that this showed that the process through which Jawad was charged was rushed and without proper preparation.

Frakt argued that Jawad had been subjected to: “…pointless and sadistic treatment [in a] bleak underworld of barbarism and cruelty, of anything goes, of torture.”

Frakt told The Public Record, “The Administration’s plan to restart the flawed military commissions in Guantanamo demonstrates that they have caved in to the bullies in Congress who have used fearmongering and disinformation to preempt the best and most appropriate option for prosecution of the few real terrorists at Guantanamo — federal criminal trials.”

He continued: “The apparent willingness of the Administration to allow a detainee who was admittedly tortured to be prosecuted for crimes committed well before 9/11, under a theory that the U.S. was in a state of armed conflict (i.e. war) with al Qaeda since 1996, reveals how little has really changed in the current Administration’s approach from the predecessor administration.”

Frakt is now a professor at the Barry University law school.

He added, “Given that President Obama abandoned his campaign pledge to abolish the military commissions and opted to reform them, it is not surprising that the military commissions are resuming. However, President Obama’s stated view that federal courts are the preferred option and that military commissions should only be used for violations of the law of war has clearly changed. Now that military commissions are perceived as the only viable option, the President seems to be willing to allow prosecutions for terrorism offenses regardless of whether they are traditional war crimes.”

Human and civil rights groups are no less vociferous in their condemnation of Military Commissions.

For example, Hina Shamsi, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Security Project, told The Public Record, “Trying Guantánamo detainees in the military commissions – which are designed to ensure convictions, not fair trials – would be a major step backward for attempts to restore the rule of law.”

She added, ”It is disappointing that the administration seems determined to proceed with the discredited commissions, but has made little progress on prosecuting suspects in the more reliable federal courts. If credible evidence exists against Guantanamo detainees, they should be prosecuted in federal criminal courts, which are fully capable of handling complex terrorism trials and delivering outcomes we can trust.”

Similar sentiments come from Bill Quigley, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a public interest law firm that has mobilized dozens of pro-bono private sector lawyers to defend Guantanamo detainees.

Quigley, also a professor at the Loyola University law school, told The Public Record, “We think President Obama has made a major mistake in getting behind military commissions. This is a second class system of justice for the Arab and Muslim men in Guantanamo. This second class system will likely be struck down by the courts and certainly will subject the US to more international condemnation for these violations of human rights.”

He added, “Federal courts have worked since our country was founded. They can work now.”

Most of the attorneys contacted by The Public Record could find few redeeming qualities in the Military Commissions.

Prof. Peter Shane of the Ohio State University law school reminded us that, “In November, 2009, Attorney General Holder told Congress, ‘The venue in which we are most likely to obtain justice for the American people is in federal court.’ He’s right,” said Prof. Shane.

He continued: “Although the Commission system has been significantly improved through the Military Commissions Act of 2009, it will always be seen as offering a kind of second-class justice, and it is by no means obvious that anyone will be convicted through the Commission system who could not otherwise be prosecuted in federal court.”

He concluded: “The best thing that can be said about the resumption of trials is that formally adjudicating the culpability of the remaining detainees pursuant to reasonably decent procedures is better than indefinite detention without adjudication. Of course, had we not subjected any of the detainees to abusive interrogation – the value of which has been doubted even by the CIA Inspector General – all detainees accused of war crimes could probably have been brought to justice consistent with the rule of law.”

Finally, veteran human rights defender Chip Pitts poses the ultimate question:

He says, “The administration mishandled Congressional relations in ways that undoubtedly made it harder for President Obama to keep his campaign promises to close Gitmo and move away from military commissions, but its continued failure to deploy serious political capital on the entire cluster of domestic rule-of-law and human rights issues remains short-sighted.”

He continues: “Fears of trying these suspects in regular American courts are unfounded and unworthy of the “land of the free and home of the brave,” and make terror a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Then Pitts asks, “Might America really execute an individual the US government tortured, on hearsay evidence, in illegal tribunals designed to convict, without a full and fair trial? “

He concludes: “True leadership demands the courage to fight for important issues of principle, but instead this administration, like the last, continues to take the easy way out, simultaneously shredding core American values and genuine American security.”

“One can only hope against hope – likely in vain – that this is not a full capitulation to dictatorial methods of the sort our nation has so often condemned, and that some as-yet undisclosed strategy (e.g. using Justice Department rather than Defense Department funds) remains to transfer at least some of the prisoners to face true justice in civilian courts.”

Chip Pitts is the former head of Amnesty USA and currently a Board member of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.

William Fisher, a regular contributor to The Public Record, has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere for the past 25 years and served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He reports on a wide-range of issues for numerous domestic and international newspapers and online journals. He blogs at The World According to Bill Fisher.

The Obama administration has shown a blatant disregard for international treaties and basic human rights in its second forcible deportation from Guantánamo of an Algerian national in the last six months. On January 6, the administration secretly and forcibly repatriated 48-year-old Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed to Algeria, which he reportedly fled in the 1990s, trying to escape threats from Islamic extremists. In a press release from Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which condemned “in the strongest possible terms” the deportation, CCR noted that “Mr. Mohammed has long been cleared of any connection with terrorism.”

Farhi had been ordered released from Guantánamo , when District Court Judge Gladys Kessler granted his habeas petition. He had spent nearly nine years at the U.S. prison facility, most of the time in maximum security solitary confinement. While the former itinerant laborer said he had traveled to Afghanistan to find a wife for himself, the Pentagon presented “evidence” from unreliable informers to frame Mr. Mohammed as a supporter of Al Qaeda. Presumably, Judge Kessler was unimpressed by this evidence. What is undisputed is that after 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Farhi fled to Pakistan where he was captured and subsequently transferred to Guantanamo in 2002.

Once cleared by the District Court, Mr. Mohammed fought the government not to be sent back to his native Algeria, fearing persecution by either Islamic militants or by the government. Indeed, every Algerian Guantanamo prisoner sent back to that country thus far has been initially arrested and put on trial, though none have been convicted. U.S. authorities have said they conducted a “comprehensive review” of Farhi’s case prior to his release. The U.S. government maintains that “the Algerian government has provided so-called ‘diplomatic assurances’ – promises to treat returned detainees humanely.” But Human Rights Watch watch replied that “research has shown that diplomatic assurances provided by receiving countries, which are legally unenforceable, do not provide an effective safeguard against torture and ill-treatment. Algerian human rights groups report that torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment are at times used on those suspected of terror links.”

Torture and Persecution in Algeria

Indeed, the last U.S. State Department Human Rights Report on Algeria, released February 25, 2009, indicated numerous problems with conditions in that country. While torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment is illegal, human rights activists “local human rights activists reported that government officials employed such practices to obtain confessions,” and “impunity remained a problem.” The report singled out a February 2008 incident when an inmate protest on prayer conditions resulted in prison guards handcuffing, stripping and beating “approximately 80 prisoners with iron bars and sticks.”

The State Department report also indicated noted that, except for the International Red Cross, all other human rights groups are forbidden to inspect conditions at Algerian military and high-security prisons and detention centers. Detainees are often held in jail without charges for months on end, and receive little or no medical care. The report also said, “in practice authorities did not completely respect legal provisions regarding defendants’ rights and denied due process. Military courts try all “cases involving state security, espionage, and other security-related offenses involving military personnel and civilians,” but only rarely is any information given about these proceedings. The government monitors “the communications of political opponents, journalists, human rights groups, and suspected terrorists,” as well as political meetings. The country remains under rule of an emergency degree. Meanwhile, radical Islamic extremists belonging to al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) have “issued public threats against all ‘infidels’ and ‘apostates’ in the country, both foreigners and citizens, killing approximately 160 people in the country in 2008.

A prisoner or refugee cannot by international law be returned to a country where they fear persecution or death. This principle is enshrined in the UN Convention Against Torture treaty to which the U.S. is signatory: “No State Party shall expel, return (“refouler“) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

Furthermore, Article 33 of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (July 28, 1951), to which the U.S. is also signatory, states: “No Contracting State shall expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” (A 1967 Protocol expanded the Convention’s coverage from European to all refugees.) There is no question that Farhi meets the Convention’s definition of a refugee, and has since leaving Algeria in the 1990s, until wrongly apprehended by the U.S. in 2002.

The Role of Congress and the Courts

It is notable that Congress has played a role in this administration’s flaunting of international law and decency. As Andy Worthington and others have pointed out, Congress has prevented the Obama from “bringing any Guantánamo prisoner to the US mainland for any reason”. In addition, as I pointed out in an article on the forcible deportation of Algerian Guantánamo prisoner Abdul Aziz Naji in July 2010, Congress has an oversight role over the release of any Guantánamo prisoner.

According to the 2010 Homeland Security Appropriations, Interior Appropriations, Consolidated Appropriations, and Defense Appropriations Acts, all of which contain similar language on the subject, no funds are to be appropriated for the transfer of a Guantanamo prisoner to another state unless 15 days prior to release the President submit to Congress, “in classified form,” a statement regarding any risks to national security or U.S. citizens, the name of the prisoner and country of release, and “the terms of any agreement with the country or freely associated state that has agreed to accept the detainee.” (See PDF link.)

At that time, Senator Carl Levin and Senator Dianne Feinstein’s offices confirmed they had been informed at least 15 days in advance of Naji’s deportation. There’s no reason to doubt they had the same notice in the case of Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, and essentially signed off on the forcible deportation, demonstrating Congressional complicity in this flagrant violation of the laws of the land.

Mr. Mohammed’s case had been high-profile. After the granting of his habeas petition, he fought a repatriation to Algeria, for the reasons stated earlier, and Judge Kessler granted that request. But, as Larkin Reynolds explains at Lawfare, “the D.C. Circuit later reversed that injunction in July, however, in an expedited summary proceeding.” Farhi’s attorneys then asked the Supreme Court for a stay of the Circuit court’s decision. While their petition was denied last July, another petition regarding the transfer issue was sent to the Supreme Court last November. According to Reynolds, “The government’s response to the petition is due on February 4, 2011.” But the forced deportation of Farhi apparently makes that decision moot.

David Remes, Farhi’s counsel in the Supreme Court case told Lawfare, the Obama administration’s actions amounted to a “stealth transfer”:

The government shipped Mr. Mohammed back to Algeria against his will –- the second involuntary transfer of an Algerian in the past six months -– giving us no advance notice and therefore no chance to resist. The government may also intend Mohammed’s transfer to moot his petition for review in the Supreme Court, in which he challenged the government’s right to make exactly this kind of involuntary transfer, that is, a transfer where the detainee fears he will be tortured or abused if he is returned. The government has used this tactic to avoid judicial review of its actions in other cases involving military detention of war-on-terror captives -– Padilla, Al-Mar’i, and Abu Ali are examples. From Mr. Mohammed’s case, it’s apparent the government wants to avoid public scrutiny too.

The Role of the Democratic Party

The government’s actions in the case of should be sharply condemned, but outside of some human rights groups, almost nothing is being said or reported on this crime by our own government. (The Washington Post did report the story.) The fact that a Democratic administration, and practically up to the time he was secretly deported, a Democratic Congress, were the primary actors in this decision is something that appears to fly over the heads of most Democratic Party and Obama supporters, for whom nothing, not even plans to issue an executive order allowing indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo, seems to move to principled action.

The U.S. currently holds 173 detainee-prisoners at Guantánamo. Three other Algerians remain at the Naval prison facility, also fearing forced deportation for reasons similar to that of Farhi Faheed bin Mohammed, and Abdul Aziz Naji. The three other cleared Algerians are Motai Saib, Djamel Ameziane and Nabil Hadjarab, and Andy Worthington covered their stories in an article in July 2009.

This latest move by the Obama administration must have thrown fear into these prisoners, assuming they have heard of it. But it should throw fear into Americans as well, as their government has shown that it has little patience for such things as the rule of law. Consider these unlawful deportations along with the story of the torture of 19-year old American citizen Gulet Mohamed last month by U.S. ally Kuwait, after he was placed on a no-fly list by the Americans. The U.S. reportedly collaborated in Mohamed’s detention, and should be held partly responsible for Mohamed’s torture.

Originally published at Firedoglake.

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: sunilgarg, kzappaster, ~Brenda-Starr~)

This story was written by Jason Leopold and originally published on Truthout.org.

This week, in a burst of stunning hypocrisy, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that imposes sanctions on Iran for human rights abuses and targets eight Iranian government and military officials who are blamed for the torture, abuse and murder of citizens who protested Iran’s 2009 presidential election.

“The United States is strongly committed to the promotion of human rights around the world, including in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the White House said in an accompanying news release. “As the President noted in his recent address to the United Nations General Assembly, human rights are a matter of moral and pragmatic necessity for the United States.”

A State Department fact sheet added, “protesters [in Iran] were detained without formal charges brought against them and during this detention detainees were subjected to beatings, solitary confinement, and a denial of due process rights at the hands of intelligence officers under the direction of [Iran’s then-Minister of Military Intelligence Qolam] Mohseni-Ejei.

“In addition, political figures were coerced into making false confessions under unbearable interrogations, which included torture, abuse, blackmail, and the threatening of family members,” the State Department said.

Yet, President Obama has taken no action against US officials who under the direction of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld imprisoned without charge “war on terror” detainees at secret black sites and at Guantanamo Bay.

These prisoners also were subjected to beatings, solitary confinement and a denial of due process. They, too, were coerced into making false confessions under unbearable interrogations, which included torture, abuse, blackmail, and the threatening of family members.

President Obama has excused his failure to exact any accountability on complicit US officials by saying that he preferred “to look forward, not backwards.” It is apparently easier to look backwards in Iran and demand accountability than it is in Washington.

Even as the Obama administration insists on punishing alleged Iranian abusers, it continues to use the state secret privilege and other legal maneuvers to derail civil lawsuits that seek some justice against US officials responsible for the abuse and deaths of detainees in American custody.

As Obama appointees were congratulating themselves for going after those eight Iranians, a US District Court Judge in Washington, DC, was dismissing a lawsuit filed against Rumsfeld and two dozen other US officials by the families of two Guantanamo detainees who, along with another prisoner, committed suicide at the detention center in 2006, , according to the government’s official account.

Judge Ellen Huevelle noted in her opinion that there was compelling evidence the detainees were murdered. But last year the Obama administration said in a legal brief that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 stripped the courts of jurisdiction to hear lawsuits that challenged the “detention, transfer, treatment or conditions of confinement” of “enemy combatants.”

Moreover, in court papers filed in June 2009, the Obama administration said, “Judicial intrusion into this politically sensitive area by creating a damages remedy for detainees could subvert these military and diplomatic efforts and lead to ‘embarrassment of our government abroad.’”

Besides, the Obama administration said, just as torture memo author John Yoo is entitled to absolute immunity, Defense Department officials like Rumsfeld are entitled to “qualified immunity” because the “Fifth and Eighth Amendments do not extend to Guantánamo Bay detainees.” Judge Huevelle ultimately agreed to dismiss the case.

Three weeks ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Obama administration and blocked another lawsuit, this one filed against Jeppesen DataPlan, a subsidiary of Boeing, that was accused of knowingly flying people kidnapped by the CIA to secret overseas prisons where they were tortured.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, argued that state secrets would be at risk if the case were allowed to move forward.

In a 6-5 decision, the appeals court judges said the lawsuit presented “a painful conflict between human rights and national security” and agreed with Obama’s Justice Department attorneys that the latter trumped the former.
Essentially, the decision means that victims of the Bush administration’s torture program are not entitled to have their day in court if the government believes sensitive national security information would be disclosed.

Ben Wizner, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who argued the case on behalf of the five plaintiffs, said, if the “decision is allowed to stand, the United States will have closed its courtroom doors to torture victims while providing complete immunity to their torturers.”

Obama’s aggressive efforts to protect his predecessor’s crimes are not limited to the United States.

Last year, the Obama administration told British officials that intelligence sharing between the US and the UK could be halted if seven redacted paragraphs contained in secret US documents relating to the torture of Binyam Mohamed, one of the victims named in Jeppesen lawsuit, were made public by a British High Court.

According to legal papers filed by the ACLU, Mohamed was beaten so severely on numerous occasions that he routinely lost consciousness and during one gruesome torture session “a scalpel was used to make incisions all over his body, including his penis, after which a hot stinging liquid was poured into his open wounds.”

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Obama said that while he has been unable to close Guantanamo as promised, he “has been able to ban torture” since being sworn into office.

But Obama’s use of the word “torture” to describe what had taken place during George W. Bush’s tenure obligates him under the Convention Against Torture to conduct a full investigation and to prosecute the offenders.

The Convention declares that: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Moreover, the Convention says individuals who resort to torture cannot defend their actions by saying they were acting on orders from superiors and it mandates that torturers be prosecuted wherever they are found.

According to that provision, “each state party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

However, while Obama and his team give the Bush administration a pass on torture, different standards are applied to officials from “enemy” states.

During a news conference last Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the eight Iranian officials, saying that under their “watch or under their command, Iranian citizens have been arbitrarily arrested, beaten, tortured, raped, blackmailed, and killed.

“Yet the Iranian Government has ignored repeated calls from the international community to end these abuses, to hold to account those responsible and respect the rights and fundamental freedoms of its citizens.”

The hypocrisy has passed virtually unnoticed in the mainstream US news media. Yet, it’s hard to take the Obama administration’s moralizing seriously when they have taken pass on evidence of American abuses, such as this:

Dilawar was chained by his wrists to the ceiling of his cell for four days and brutally beaten by Army interrogators on his legs for hours on end to the point where he could no longer bend them. He died on Dec. 10, 2002.

Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, an Air Force medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Dilawar, said Dilawar’s leg was pummeled so badly that the ”tissue was falling apart and had basically been pulpified.”

“Had Dilawar lived,” Rouse told Army investigators in sworn testimony, “I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation. I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus.’”

According to a report published by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Dilawar and another detainee whose death was also listed as a homicide, were killed within one week of Rumsfeld issuing a memo to military authorizing the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques against prisoners in Afghanistan.

Published reports claim Obama continues to operate secret prisons in Afghanistan where detainees have said they were tortured and where the International Committee for the Red Cross has been denied access to the prisoners.

The Armed Services Committee report said those “aggressive interrogation techniques conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in US military custody.”

As the New York Times reported, when Dilawar had died, “most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.”

Obama also has not taken steps to investigate the explosive claims leveled in a sworn declaration by Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top Bush administration official, that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld knew the “vast majority” of the 700 or so prisoners sent to Guantanamo were innocent.

Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell during George W. Bush’s first term in office, said the administration refused to set them free after those facts were established because of the political repercussions that would have ensued.

President Obama apparently has made a similar political calculation regarding the partisan recriminations that would follow if he allowed the prosecutions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and other officials implicated in “war on terror” torture cases.

It appears to be much safer politically for Obama to turn a blind eye to crimes by his predecessor while pointing the finger at Iranians.

Photo/White House photographer Pete Souza

The Obama administration is a welcome change from the Bush–Cheney years. Against severe Republican opposition, President Obama has kept campaign promises to reform health care, curb Wall Street excesses, create a federally-funded stimulus program to help bring the nation out of the recession, and to remove American troops from the needless Iraq war, which has already cost Americans more than $740 billion and 4,400 lives. He has also pledged to eliminate the Bush–Cheney tax cuts for the rich, while not raising taxes on the middle- and lower-classes.

However, much of what the President is doing appears to be little more than an extension of Bush–Cheney values. And that is not what the Americans voted for when they elected him to office.

Candidate Obama ran, and won office as an anti-war politician. President Obama has increased American presence in Afghanistan. In July, 66 American soldiers were killed, the highest number for any month during the war.

Candidate Obama pledged to end the PATRIOT Act, which has done little to protect American safety and much to destroy American Constitutional rights, including freedom of expression, due process, and protection against unreasonable governmental invasion of privacy. However President Obama signed legislation to extend the Act for yet another year.

During the 2008 campaign, both candidates Barack Obama and John McCain promised to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. However, President Obama, apparently scared by the right wing paranoids, hasn’t transferred any prisoners to maximum federal security prisons in the U.S., any one of which would should have little difficulty dealing with suspected enemy combatants among the general population of killers and rapists.

President Obama had failed to clean up the corrupt Minerals Management Service of the Department of Interior, which under the Bush–Cheney administration had become little more than feckless advocates for Big Oil. About a year into the Obama administration, the MMS exempted BP from filing a full environmental impact statement. Against the advice of environmentalists, and his own statements while a candidate, President Obama allowed continued deep water drilling in the Gulf, claiming that safety concerns were met. About a month later, the BP oil rig ruptured, killing 11 workers and leading to the worst oil spill in U.S. history. It took five weeks before President Obama finally placed a six month moratorium on deep well drilling, only to have that moratorium overturned by a Louisiana judge with financial ties to the oil industry. The Obama administration appealed that order and issued a broader moratorium. By then, more about 200 million gallons of oil had spilled into the gulf, killing wildlife, the fishing industries, and tourism.

Although Candidate Obama promised better transparency in government—and to a certain extent has succeeded—as President he allowed BP and his own government to place severe restrictions upon the media that were trying to give full coverage to the spill.

The transparency credibility issue surfaced again this month when the Defense Department rejected the application for Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings to accompany troops in Afghanistan. Hastings had accurately reported the political statements by Gen. Stanley McChrystal that led the President to fire him for the nature of his comments that “undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of the democratic system.”

Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama had said he believed in gay marriages. However, President Obama, although extending the rights of gay couples, has yielded to the fears of irrational conservatives and says he opposes same-sex marriages, but believes in civil unions. Unlike President Obama, supporters of same-sex marriage include Bill Clinton, Laura Bush, and Cindy McCain.

The Republican leadership tried to block extending unemployment benefits during the Recession; it was weeks until President Obama spoke forcefully against the Republicans, which has earned its label as the “Party of ‘No.’” Hopefully, President Obama will be quicker to denounce the prattle of Republican leaders who are mounting a campaign to reduce Social Security benefits.

Solely for political reasons, the Bush–Cheney administration took gray wolves off the endangered species list one week before Barack Obama became president. Slightly more than a year after taking office, President Obama officially continued the Bush–Cheney policy. The action by both administrations allowed the killing large numbers of the 1,600 wolves in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho and Montana, often by state officials from helicopters and often into the dens that housed pups. No matter what the federal government said about wolves not being endangered, there were two realities.

First, the Cattle Industry lobby wanted wolves removed, although federal subsidies reimburse ranchers for any livestock killed by wolves. The second issue is that wolves are competition for hunters, a majority of whom tend to be conservatives or supporters of Republican philosophies. While wolves kill for food or to protect their pack, human hunters may claim they hunt for food, but go to extraordinary lengths and expense to stuff and display their “trophy kills,” and often will kill animals, such as bears, prairie dogs, and coyotes that have no food value. Unlike their human competitors, wolves usually don’t use guns with telescopic sights, buy all kinds of whistles and electronic calls that mimic the cries of other animals, use elevated shooting stands, send out decoys, or even create elaborate steel-jaw traps. They never take their prey back to a cabin, consume 6-packs, and tell stories with other wolves. A federal court this week ruled that gray wolves in the Rockies were not only an endangered species, but stopped state-supported wolf hunts in Idaho and Montana.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, against severe opposition, pushed through some of the most critical social legislation in the nation’s history. Harry Truman stood up for his principles and for the benefit of the people when he lashed out at a “do-nothing Congress.” Candidate Obama was elected on a forceful campaign mantra of “Change you can believe in,” and not “A slight variation of present policies that you can maybe live with.”

President Obama is known as “No Drama Obama” because of his quiet intellectualism. He needs to be more forceful, both in fully supporting social legislation he and his base believe in as well as attacking the vicious smears, lies, and distortions from the extreme Right Wing. If President Obama continues to pandering to the conservatives, and continues a slide into compromise that dilutes necessary social justice legislation instead of trusting the millions who voted for that change he promised, especially when he has both the power of the presidency and the votes in Congress, he will be a one-term president, hated by both the right and the left.

Walter Brasch is a professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. His most recent book is Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush. He can be reached at brasch@bloomu.edu.

The President speaks at the American University School of International Service, White House Photo, Pete Souza

As the Justice Department remains on a collision course with the State of Arizona‘s  tough new anti-immigrant law, and myriad additional legal problems develop for Arizona’s Republican governor, President Barack Obama has launched a new robust rhetorical initiative to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

The president was unclear, however, as to the timing of Congressional action. It was generally believed that Obama would talk about immigration reform between now and the election of the next Congress in 2010. It was thought unlikely he would do anything significant on this contentious issue that could present Congressional Democrats with difficult votes.

Nonetheless, President Obama told a Washington audience Thursday that he remains committed to comprehensive immigration legislation that will include a strong focus on border security but also will preserve America’s legacy as “a nation of immigrants . . . who believed that there was a place that they could be, at long last, free to work and worship and live their lives in peace.”

The President appears to be saying that while the politics of the thorny issue may demand that legislation waits a bit, it is too important to be kicked down the road. He pledged to push for immigration reform relentlessly from now on.

Observers believe he wants to make good on a major campaign promise and that he decidedly has his eye on the ways history will remember him.

In a speech at American University today, Obama emphasized the need for federal immigration reform that respects the civil rights of those in this country.

Among the organizations pressing for quick action on the issue is the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which strongly supports reforms to U.S. immigration policy and calls on political leaders to ensure that any legislation protects the civil rights, civil liberties and human rights of everyone in the United States, regardless of his or her immigration status.

Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU, said, “We commend President Obama for recognizing the need to reform our immigration system on the federal level rather than allow a patchwork of state and local laws that lead to the violation of civil rights and alienation of communities from law enforcement.”

He added,” The recently enacted Arizona law, which the ACLU and others are challenging in court, is a prime example of misguided laws that inevitably lead to egregious racial profiling and discrimination. We urge the Obama administration to bring a federal challenge to the Arizona law through litigation as soon as possible and to take all actions in its power to prevent the law’s implementation.

“President Obama is also correct that heavy border security is not a singular answer to addressing immigration issues. Expanded border enforcement could cause more civil liberties abuses in U.S. communities on the southwest border. Any border enforcement must be conducted in a constitutional manner with strict accountability and oversight to avoid abuse.

“Expanding E-Verify, an electronic employment verification program promoted by the president today, is not an answer but would lead to discrimination, burden American workers and deny employment to authorized workers.

“We encourage President Obama to work with Congress to implement immigration policies that respect the Constitution and the civil liberties of all within our borders.”

As Obama calls for bipartisan reform, Human Rights First stresses importance of safeguards in detention and protecting refugees’ access to fair asylum proceedings.

Responding to President Ocala’s speech at American University, Human Rights First today emphasized that any immigration reform package must reflect U.S. values and commitment to refugee protection.

“As the President works with lawmakers to address the many complex issues that will arise during a debate over comprehensive immigration reform, he must ensure that America upholds its longstanding commitment to refugee protection – which he emphasized strongly just two weeks ago on the occasion of World Refugee Day,” said Human Rights First’s Annie Sock.

“The Obama Administration and Congress should ensure safeguards to prevent arbitrary detention and protect refugees’ access to fair asylum procedures.”

Several bills pending in Congress already include key improvements to the asylum and refugee systems that should be incorporated into any immigration reform legislation. Human Rights First continues to urge President Obama and Congress to put into law measures including the following:

Eliminate the one-year asylum-filing deadline that bars refugees with well-founded fears of persecution from asylum; remove barriers that prevent some asylum seekers from receiving prompt review by the immigration courts of detention decisions so that these asylum seekers are not subject to prolonged and arbitrary detention; clarify the “particular social group” basis and “nexus” requirements for asylum so that the asylum requests of vulnerable individuals are adjudicated fairly and consistently; and

Protect refugees from inappropriate exclusion by refining the definitions of “terrorist activity” and “terrorist organization” so that U.S. immigration laws target actual terrorists, as opposed to hurting thousands of legitimate refugees who are not guilty of any wrongdoing and pose no threat to American security.

In a related development reported by the Miami Herald newspaper, Federal immigration officials now have the ability to identify potentially deportable foreign nationals booked into Florida county jails on suspicion of crimes.

Michael W. Meade, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office director in Miami, announced Tuesday that booking centers in all 67 Florida counties are now linked to ICE’s biometric databases for quicker identification of immigration records.

Meade’s disclosure marks an expansion in Florida of ICE’s Secure Communities initiative, a controversial program the agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security deems vital to its efforts to quickly identify foreign nationals who have been convicted or charged.

“This capability means local law enforcement and ICE are automatically alerted when potentially deportable criminal aliens come into state and local custody,” Meade told a news conference at ICE’s office in Doral.

“If this program were really targeting hardened criminals and making us safer, as ICE claims, I imagine most everyone would support it,” said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, long a critic of Secure Communities.

“People arrested for any reason, including traffic violations and loitering, are caught in ICE’s net — including U.S. citizens.”

Under President Barack Obama, ICE has reconfigured its stated immigration enforcement priority, ostensibly targeting foreign nationals convicted of crimes committed in the United States.

Previously, immigration authorities detained and deported criminal and noncriminal immigrants without distinction.

Ali Noorani, Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum and Chair of the Reform Immigration FOR America campaign, praised the Obama speech but said, “Republicans must offer more than tough talk and tired “border first” talking points.”

He added, “Border security is a necessary but insufficient part of getting immigration reform right.  It does nothing to stop the jobs magnet or bring the 11 million unauthorized immigrants into the system legally.  And it does nothing to reform our legal immigration system so that it can respond flexibly to future labor market needs. We don’t need window dressing, more tough talk, or more empty gestures. We need leadership on comprehensive reform.”

The American Bar Association has also filed a “friend of the court” brief seeking an injunction against Arizona’s law authorizing police to stop and detain individuals unless they can produce proof of citizenship or legal immigration status.

William Fisher, a regular contributor to The Public Record, has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere for the past 25 years and served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He reports on a wide-range of issues for numerous domestic and international newspapers and online journals. He blogs at The World According to Bill Fisher.

A U.S. Army soldier with Echo Company, 629th Military Intelligence Battalion, keeps watch from a guard tower at the Joint Task Force Guantanamo detention center on Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Nov. 13, 2006. U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Jon Soucy

President Obama’s hopes of closing Guantánamo, which were already gravely wounded by his inability to meet his self-imposed deadline of a year for the prison’s closure, now appear to have been killed off by lawmakers in Congress.

Although the House Armed Services Committee was happy to authorize, by 59 votes to 0, a budget of over $700 billion for war ($567 billion for “defense spending” and $159 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) for the fiscal year beginning in October, lawmakers unanimously saw through — and turned down — a fraction of this budget for what the administration had labeled a “transfer fund” — money intended to close Guantánamo and buy a new prison in Illinois for prisoners designated for trials or for indefinite detention without charge or trial.

The administration had attempted to hide its intentions behind this vague wording, because senior officials were acutely aware of ferocious opposition in Congress to the closure of Guantánamo. Fueled by opportunistic Republicans and backed by cowardly Democrats, Congress had only been prevented at the last minute from passing an insane law last year, which would have prevented the administration from bringing any prisoner to the US mainland for any reason (even to face a trial) and had only relented in October, allowing prisoners to be brought to the US mainland for trials, but not for any other purpose.

Despite this, the House Armed Services Committee is now trying to withdraw from even this concession to the administration’s aims, including, in a summary of the bill, a prohibition on using even the tiniest fraction of the war budget (around $350 million) to buy a new detention facility. As Spencer Ackerman explained in the Washington Independent:

According to the bill summary, the bill now requires Defense Secretary Robert Gates to give Congress a report that “adequately justifies any proposal to build or modify such a facility” if it wants to move forward with any post-Guantánamo detention plan. “The Committee firmly believes that the construction or modification of any facility in the US to detain or imprison individuals currently being held at Guantánamo must be accompanied by a thorough and comprehensive plan that outlines the merits, costs, and risks associated with utilizing such a facility,” the summary text read. “No such plan has been presented to date. The bill prohibits the use of any funds for this purpose.”

This is a depressing example of how even a morally and ethically flawed attempt to close Guantánamo is unacceptable to both Republican and Democrat lawmakers, who have retreated to a position that the Bush administration, at its most extreme, would have been proud of.

For those of us who don’t mind prisoners being brought to the US mainland to face trials (35 in total, according to Obama’s Guantánamo Task Force), but who are implacably opposed to the administration’s contention that it can hold some prisoners indefinitely (48 of the remaining 181 prisoners), it is by no means a tragedy that the plan to replicate some of Guantánamo’s most unpalatable innovations on American soil has been prevented.

In my more optimistic moments, it strikes me that, with the option of transferring prisoners to the US mainland denied, the administration will — if it remains committed to the closure of Guantánamo — have to rethink its plans, and that one way of doing this would be to give up on its intention to hold 48 men indefinitely, which, to put it bluntly, is unconstitutional.

In truth, the claim that 48 men should be held indefinitely has always been something of a deception, because these men have outstanding habeas corpus petitions in the District Court in Washington D.C., where judges, rather than an unaccountable Task Force, are making their own decisions about whether they are, as President Obama explained in a major national security speech last May, a special category of prisoner who “cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people.”

So far, the judges have ruled that just 14 men can continue to be held indefinitely, although it’s noticeable that, in denying their habeas petitions, they have generally not concluded that they “pose a clear danger to the American people,” but have, instead, found that they were minor players in the Taliban, or in al-Qaeda forces supporting the Taliban. However, according to the detention policies they are required to follow, the judges are not allowed to distinguish between the terrorists of al-Qaeda and the foot soldiers of the Taliban when it comes to consigning men, on an apparently sound legal basis, to endless incarceration.

This problem relates to the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, which authorizes the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001” (or those who harbored them). Combined with a Supreme Court ruling (in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in 2004) that “Congress has clearly and unmistakably authorized detention” of individuals covered by the AUMF, this is the rationale used by the administration to justify the prisoners’ detention, and, although different judges have expressed different opinions about who these individuals are, they have broadly agreed that, to qualify as an “enemy combatant” — or, in Obama’s new world, an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent” — the government is required to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that these individuals supported al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban.

This lack of distinction between al-Qaeda and the Taliban is clearly ridiculous, as was noted last year by two judges, Judge James Robertson and Judge Thomas Hogan, who made a point of stating, when refusing to grant the habeas petitions of two Yemenis, Adham Mohammed Ali Awad and Musa’ab al-Madhwani, that they did not regard either man as an ongoing threat. Regarding Ali Awad, Judge Robertson noted, “It seems ludicrous to believe that he poses a security threat now,” and in al-Madhwani’s case, Judge Hogan stated that he “did not think Madhwani was dangerous,” noted that he has been a “model prisoner” since his arrival at Guantánamo in October 2002, and added, “There is nothing in the record now that he poses any greater threat than those detainees who have already been released.”

Moreover, this inability to make a distinction between al-Qaeda and the Taliban — or al-Qaeda forces supporting the Taliban in military operations in Afghanistan, rather than in activities related to terrorism — is one that I have been railing against for some time now, for the simple reason that the former should be put forward for trials, whereas the latter — if they should continue to be held at all — should be held as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions.

I don’t see this happening anytime soon, of course, because no one even wants to talk about it, but when the House Armed Services Committee moves so decisively to prevent the closure of Guantánamo — and every sign is that the House will approve their amendment this week, and the Senate Armed Services Committee will follow suit at the end of the month — the closure of Guantánamo now requires a new kind of thinking.

To my mind, this should involve, first of all, more respect for the District Court’s habeas rulings than has been shown to date. Over the last 20 months, judges have granted the habeas petitions of 35 prisoners, and along the way have done more to demolish claims that Guantánamo holds “the worst of the worst” than any other forum, exposing how much of the government’s supposed evidence consists of unreliable statements made by the prisoners themselves or by their fellow prisoners, and also exposing how torture, coercion and the bribery of prisoners with better living conditions have played a major role in making these statements unreliable. Despite this, the administration has failed to take advantage of these rulings in its dealings with Congress, and has preferred to either appeal them, or to release those who have won their petitions with extreme reluctance.

In addition, rethinking the closure of Guantánamo should involve highlighting the fact that 96 of the 181 men still held have been cleared for release, reviving plans for returning dozens of cleared men to Yemen (which were shelved in the most cowardly manner after it was revealed that the would-be Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had trained in Yemen), and — although I expect hell to freeze over before this comes to pass — renewing calls for cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture to be allowed to settle in the US, as was planned last year by White House Counsel Greg Craig, supported by Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton, until Obama got cold feet.

This could best be achieved by allowing US citizens access to the stories of cleared prisoners released in other countries who are living peaceful lives, and, if it’s of any use, I’m happy to help on this front, as I’ve spent much of the last three months traveling around the UK with a former prisoner, Omar Deghayes, showing “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (a film I co-directed, in which Omar plays a major part), and can guarantee that giving people the opportunity to meet Omar (after they have seen his pained and eloquent testimony about his ordeal) is a perfect way to demonstrate that colossal mistakes were made — and continue to be made — at Guantánamo, that many innocent men were seized, and that many of these innocent men are still held.

And finally, to return to the confusion between al-Qaeda and the Taliban that is at the heart of Guantánamo’s detention problem, rethinking the closure of Guantánamo should involve a recognition that the failure to distinguish between al-Qaeda terrorists and Taliban foot soldiers is unfairly consigning men to indefinite detention as terrorists when they should be held as prisoners of war. In addition, it should also provide an opportunity to reflect on the more fundamental question of whether, over eight years after most of the men who are still held at Guantánamo were first seized, the Authorization for Use of Military Force is a valid reason for detention at all, when the Geneva Conventions and the criminal justice system should suffice.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

You know, the one that blew up and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, leaving a tangled spaghetti pile of 22-inch steel pipe one mile long all balled up on the sea floor a mile below the surface, leaking oil at over 200,000 gallons per day–equivalent to a whole supertanker breaking up in the Gulf every month and a half.

The thing is, the fail-safe system, about the size of a McMansion sitting at the wellhead on the ocean floor, um, failed. It didn’t collapse and shut off the flow of oil as intended, and it could take months now to shut the well down–during which time the leak rate is likely to increase to up to 300,000 gallons per day, or over two million gallons a week.

President Obama claimed last month that off-shore drilling technology had become so advanced that oil spills and blowouts were a thing of the past. Of course, as he said this, Australia and Indonesia were still assessing the damage from a similar offshore oil platform, the Montana, in the Timor Sea, which blew out and poured millions of gallons of oil into the ocean off Western Australia for more than three months before it could be sealed off.

Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Given that this is true, particular of complex technological enterprises, the question that needs to be asked is not, what is the probability of a catastrophic failure of an offshore well, but what is the potential damage in the event of even one such catastrophe for the local environment?

In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, the potential damage if this well really blows is staggering. Just 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, it poses a near fatal risk to the region’s wetlands and bayous, with their shrimp and oyster fisheries, not to mention the breeding grounds they provide for endangered birds, fish and other animals.

But the real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon is what it means for expanded drilling in the Arctic waters north of Alaska.

Oil companies, including BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell and others, like Goldman traders looking at a tranch of subprime mortgages, are casting covetous eyes on the Arctic Ocean and the oil and gas that studies suggest lie under the virgin sea floor. Their plan is to drill for these hydrocarbons once the summer sea ice vanishes as a result of rising global temperatures (more about this in a future article).

Obama, as part of his opening of more coastal areas to drilling, is including areas of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, which are already ice free during summer.

But let’s think about this for a moment. Suppose there were a blowout like the one in the Gulf of Mexico at a rig drilling in the Arctic? Suppose it happened towards the end of the short summer, when the ice was about to return to cover the ocean surface? If it was a blowout that couldn’t be plugged, like the Montana blowout in the Timor Sea, or if the fail-safe system at the wellhead failed, as with the Deepwater Horizon, and if the only solution was, as with the Montana well, to drill new wells to ease the pressure on the blown well, how would this be done, once the ice moved in?

Answer? It couldn’t be done. Murphy’s Law again. And so millions of gallons of crude oil would rise up out of the burst wellhead to spread out underneath the ice, whence it would eventually move on to destroy hundreds of miles of fragile coastline, probably killing untold numbers of species that live in the affected waters. The damage from such a completely predictable disaster wouldn’t just be staggering, like the Montana or the Deepwater Horizon blowouts, but incomprehensible!

So why are we even talking about this?

The argument, made ad nauseum by Republicans and Democrats alike, is that the US needs more energy, and that we don’t want to be dependent for our oil on “countries that hate us.”

And yet, there is a much simpler answer than hanging a hydrocarbon Sword of Damocles over our nation’s critical coastal areas. Just copy Europe and impose a 100% tax on gas and oil, to make people turn away from 15 or 20 or 25-mile-per-gallon vehicles and start driving fuel-efficient cars, car-pooling or forgoing cars altogether.

Even better, tax the crap out of cars that don’t get at least 35 or even 40 mpg.

Oh, I know. People will say, “but poor people in rural areas or in the suburbs can’t pay those rates for gas to get to work, and they have to buy used cars that don’t get such high mileage rates.”

I understand the problem, but it is solvable, by establishing refundable tax credits for low-income people who can document long commuting distances, for example.

The main point is that the country doesn’t need to drill in risky settings. It needs only to cut oil consumption.

What’s clear is that drilling in the open ocean is simply disaster after disaster waiting to happen.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Photo/White House photographer Pete Souza

The Democratic Party’s embarrassing electoral disaster in Massachusetts, losing a seat held for 46 years by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, provided a clear warning that the party, and President Obama’s presidency, are headed for an epic trouncing this November, when all members of the House and a third of the Senate face reelection.

But all the frantic strategizing within the sclerotic Democratic Party leadership ignores the bigger crisis yet to come for this party that once brought the nation Social Security, unemployment compensation, public jobs programs and Medicare. That crisis is the economy, which is now showing signs of falling off a second cliff instead of beginning to recover.

Thanks to the abject failure of President Obama to boldly order up a massive jobs program and a full-blown economic stimulus program of public investment at the beginning of his term last spring, and his failure to attack the entrenched banking interests by smashing apart the mega-investment banks that had turned banking into a casino game, the economy has been left to stagnate for a year.

Unemployment has continued to rise, with the latest reports showing that layoffs have begun to re-accelerate. Unemployment rose in 43 states, including some of the biggest, in December and fell in only four. And we are only seeing the beginning of this new drive into the ditch. The most ominous, and totally predictable, trend is layoffs by the public sector–by towns, counties, states, and public bodies such as public universities, school districts, public hospitals and transit companies.

These layoffs which could ultimately number in the millions and which will have a knock-on effect on all kinds of other jobs, were deferred because of aid provided last year by the federal government, but no more federal aid is likely to be forthcoming and the money already provided runs out this summer. Look for official unemployment this year to move past the 11 percent record set in 1982. Meanwhile, real unemployment, which includes people who have given up looking for work, and those who have managed to get part-time work, is approaching 20 percent, and could eventually top 25 percent–a rate reminiscent of the Great Depression.

At the same time, the foreclosure crisis, and the related decline in home values which has put one-fourth of all homes “underwater,” meaning they’re worth less than the mortgage balance, continues unabated. Time magazine, in its first issue of the new year, predicts that at least as many homes will go into foreclosure in 2010 as in the record year just ended–over 3 million houses. Equally bad, the magazine says that many housing experts are predicting that property values, which have lost an average of 30 percent since 2006, will continue to decline until into 2013! Already, American homeowners have lost over $7 trillion in wealth because of property value declines, and they will continue to lose more.

In an economy where 72 percent of all financial activity involves consumers buying stuff, it is impossible to imagine where any growth or recovery in the economy could come from when the American people are being so battered financially.

For almost a year, the government has hidden this disaster behind a rising stock market, which rose in seeming contradiction to all the bad news, as companies slashed costs to eke out profits from drastically reduced revenues. Many analysts say that this bizarre behavior of the equities markets was the likely result of behind-the-scenes government intervention in markets. Consider this: for the whole period between March 9, 2009, when the market began its rebound, and the present, a period during which the equities markets recovered roughly 60 percent of the ground they’d lost in the last crash, corporations were net sellers of their stock, and retail investors were basically out of the market.

Foreign investors entered the market, but not in any huge way. Hedge funds, too, normally big players, were experiencing outflows of investor cash during most of the period, making it unlikely that they were investing either. Even pension funds, which were badly burned in the crash, were cautious investors over the past year. So who’s left? Suspicion falls on the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. This might explain why stocks have continued to rise on very low trading volume, and also why most of the upside has come, especially since last September, in after-hours trading in S&P futures, not in direct buying of shares during regular trading hours. If true, what this means is that the federal government has been doing what it fines hedge funds and investment banks for doing: manipulating the markets.

While the Fed and Treasury can theoretically manipulate the stock market, they cannot do this forever, and this past week, we have seen indications that the bull run in the market, whatever caused it, may have run out of steam.

If the economy does take a second plunge similar to what happened in late 2008 and 2009, Obama and the Democrats will have to accept the full blame. They had the opportunity last year to strike hard at the root causes of economic decline and at the sinister, greedy and corrupt activities of Wall Streets banks and investment banks. Because they chose instead to try and paper over the problem and accomodate those banks–even helping them to become bigger and more powerful– they will deserve the electoral drubbing that is coming.

It would be a huge and historic mistake for Democrats to listen to the advice of people like White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who are claiming that the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat to a Republican means it is necessary for the party to hew even further to the right. Yes, Massachusetts voters were voting for a guy who said he would kill the health bill in Congress, but polls suggest that his winning margin came from 7 percent of self-described liberal Democrats who told exit pollsters that the health bill was terrible and they wanted it killed.

That seven percent is a huge number, when you consider how hard it would be for most Democrats to vote for a hard-line conservative candidate–someone who openly advocates waterboarding of terrorist suspects, and who is adamantly anti-abortion rights.

What really turned the trick for the GOP candidate, Scott Brown, though, was the economy. The rank-and-file working person (Republican or Democrat), both in Massachusetts and in the US at large, has seen enough over the past year to conclude that the Democrats in Congress and the Man-o-Change in the White House do not have their interests at heart. They clearly see that this government’s actions in support of the banks, the insurance companies, and the other giant industries in the US, from autos to utilities, are not being taken in the cause of bringing benefits to the people, but are simply being done for the benefit of those industries and their leaders and key investors. It’s not even “trickle down” anymore. It’s just catering to the rich and powerful–the people who make all those fat campaign contributions.

This is why Obama’s sudden “pivot” (people who have real values don’t “pivot”) to a tacky “populist” rhetoric about “fat-cat bankers” is falling on deaf ears. It’s why Democratic leadership calls for Congress to just pass the wretched Senate version of the health bill are being viewed with disgust by the public.

Everyone realizes it’s all just image-mongering. Nobody in power in Washington, Democrat or Republican, is there to help the little folks.

It’s all about making the rich richer.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Photo: isafmedia / Flickr

This report was originally published on Truthout.org.

Two reports coming out of Afghanistan illustrate the depth of hypocrisy and subterfuge characterizing the US/NATO intervention in that country. One could cite a myriad of such examples, so immoral and wrong as the US war there.

In the first report, a 2009 human rights assessment prepared by Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department, obtained by The Canadian Press and reported at CBC News, revealed a skyrocketing suicide rate among Afghan women:

“Self-immolation is being used by increasing numbers of Afghan women to escape their dire circumstances and women constitute the majority of Afghan suicides,” said the report, completed in November 2009….

The director of a burn unit at a hospital in the relatively peaceful province of Herat reported that in 2008 more than 80 women attempted suicide by setting themselves on fire, many of them in the early 20s.

It’s not as if the plight of Afghan women under the US-backed Karzai government hasn’t gotten some attention. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) recorded 184 cases of self-immolation by Afghani women in 2007, versus 106 in 2006. In Herat alone, in the first six months of 2008, 47 women, desperate from an escape from a life of domestic servitude, violence, rape, injustice, and other crimes, set themselves on fire and ended up in the emergency room of the local hospital. Ninety percent died from their serious burns.

The police and judiciary do not launch any formal investigations to determine the causes and motivations of suicide and self-burning by women, according to the AIHRC.

As a result, men who force and provoke women to self-immolation and other forms of suicide remain immune from all legal and penal repercussions.

To delve into the statistics only reveals a more doleful picture: almost 90 percent (!) of Afghan women have been victims of violence, 60 percent of all marriages are forced. The US-backed regime has made some token moves to assist women, such as creating police task forces staffed by women officers. But the female officers aren’t allowed to do any outreach. Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai infamously supported a law that allows for spousal rape. (Afghanistan is not alone in this, however, as Bahrain, too, “offers women no protection from spousal rape.”)

US/NATO-Backed Afghan Regime Practices Torture

As the US plans to transfer administrative control of its Bagram detention facility to the Afghanistan government, a separate scandal links the Afghan government to the torture and murder of a prisoner in its custody. According to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), Afghan citizen Abdul Basir was tortured while in custody of Afghani security forces last December, and killed when he was pushed or thrown out a window. His family was told he committed suicide. But HRW has posted pictures of the tortured marks on Basir’s body.

It wasn’t easy to try and get an investigation of Basir’s death in Afghanistan – from this brave new government (“elected” by massive fraud) that has guaranteed justice and due process to the Bagram prisoners, once they get their hands on them. According to HRW’s report on Basir’s death:

An NDS official told family members that Basir’s father, Zalmai, signed a statement confirming that Basir had committed suicide and that an autopsy was not required. The family told Human Rights Watch that NDS officials told them that if they buried the body, Basir’s brothers and father would be released.

However, concerned that the marks on Basir’s body may have been signs of torture, the family took the body to the Forensic Department of the Health Ministry where an autopsy was carried out. The findings have not been made public. The family reported that security agency officials later came to the house where the body was held and gave them a message to bury the body. When the family tried to take the body to parliament, they said, agency vehicles blocked their way.

While the Afghan defense ministry assures the world press that “all international conventions on prisoners’ rights would be implemented” once it gets control of Bagram, the many reports of arbitrary arrest, torture, and other ill-treatment by Afghan security forces suggest otherwise. In fact, there is nothing very trustworthy about either the Afghan government or its US/NATO backers, who have averted their eyes from anything that would besmirch the credentials of their war purposes in Afghanistan.

This leads the leaders of the Western alliance to some pretty strange places. Take Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Talking to interviewers for the French-language television network TVA about the many reports that prisoners captured by Canadian forces and turned over to Afghani authorities were tortured, even killed, Harper said:

“We are speaking here of a problem among Afghans. It’s not a problem between Canadians and Afghans. We’re speaking of problems between the government of Afghanistan and the situation in Afghanistan. We are trying to do what’s possible to improve that situation, but it’s not in our control.”

For Harper, the system of transferring prisoners to the Afghans “works very well,” though he admits there are “problems from time to time.” As an example of some of these problems, read the over 40 redacted emails (PDF) sent from former Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin to then-Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay alleging the torture of detainees transferred by Canadians to Afghan prisons.

While trumpeted as a blow against the idea of turning Bagram into a second Guantanamo, the likelihood is that things will not get any better for the 700 plus prisoners at the US facility there. Nor does it speak to the ongoing management by Special Operations forces of a black site prison, also on the Bagram Air Base. US Special Operations forces are granted special privileges to hold prisoners in indefinite detention. Evidence of torture at the SO black site prison, published in both The New York Times and The Washington Post last November, has not produced any follow-up in terms of Congressional hearings or further investigations. Instead, the handover of the Department of Defense’s primary Bagram detention site appears likely to even further reduce oversight and investigation into the plight of prisoners there, once under Afghan jurisdiction, as the promises of the Afghanistan government are not to be trusted.

Meanwhile, the propaganda from Washington continues unabated. “Surge turning tide against Taliban, says McChrystal,” blared ABC news on Monday. But no amount of propaganda is going to fill up the moral bog that is the US war in Afghanistan. Whether its targeted assassinations, leading to rounds and never-ending rounds of assassination and bombings, as at Khost, or the counterinsurgency attacks that target school-age children, as at Ghazi Khan, the campaign in Afghanistan has nowhere to go but down.

Even its vaunted aim of improving the lives of Afghan women is proven to be a lie. As a statement by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) reported recently:

The US “War on terrorism” removed the Taliban regime in October 2001, but it has not removed religious fundamentalism which is the main cause of all our miseries. In fact, by reinstalling the warlords in power in Afghanistan, the US administration is replacing one fundamentalist regime with another. The US government and Mr. Karzai mostly rely on Northern Alliance criminal leaders who are as brutal and misogynist as the Taliban….

Last month, Malalai Joya, a former member of the Afghan parliament, told Michelle Goldberg of the Daily Beast that the situation for Afghan women is every bit as bad under Karzai as it was under the Taliban. Joya is also concerned that civilian casualties are fueling popular support for the Taliban.

Thus far, no significant antiwar movement has emerged to seriously challenge the Obama administration’s prosecution of the Afghanistan war. Meanwhile, the administration has clearly expanded its military operations to Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. But support by the US electorate of this war policy appears shaky at best, as the population suffers under an unemployment rate approaching 20 percent, and an array of service cutbacks in many US states.

Whether protests against the economy will be linked to the bellicose policies of the Obama administration in its own version of Bush’s “war on terror” remains to be seen. But one doesn’t have to look very far to see that the premises of prosecuting a democratic, human rights war is no more tenable under Obama than it was under Bush.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor The Public Record, has been blogging at Daily Kos since May 2005, and maintains a personal blog, Invictus. E-mail Mr. Kaye at sfpsych at gmail dot com.