Television correspondents stand for their reports and wait for President Barack Obama to enter the news conference in the East Room of the White House, Sept. 10, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

Last Friday, in his first press conference since May, President Obama was concerned primarily with the economy, but also found time to answer a couple of questions about Guantánamo that were put to him by Ann Compton of ABC News Radio. For the most part, the media overlooked this section of the press conference, focusing only on the President’s admission that his administration had “fallen short” on the promised closure of Guantánamo by January this year, but his comments as a whole deserve analysis, because, behind this particular soundbite, he mostly tiptoed around the reasons for this failure. Below I reproduce Ann Compton’s questions, Obama’s answers, and my own commentary on the significance of his remarks.

Ann Compton: Mr. President, what does it say about the status of Americans’ system of justice when so many of those who are thought to be plotters for September 11th or accused of — suspected terrorists — are still awaiting any kind of trial? Why are you still convinced that a civilian trial is correct for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? And why has that stalled? And will Guantánamo remain open for another year?

President Obama: Well, you know, we have succeeded on delivering a lot of campaign promises that we made. One where we’ve fallen short is closing Guantánamo. I wanted to close it sooner. We have missed that deadline. It’s not for lack of trying. It’s because the politics of it are difficult.

My analysis: This is partly an understatement, but it is also somewhat evasive. Certainly, lawmakers — of both parties — must bear the blame for refusing to endorse the President’s plan to close Guantánamo by, essentially, moving it to a new location in Illinois, but this was not without its own problems – primarily, that those regarded as too dangerous to release, but against whom there is insufficient evidence to press charges, would be held alongside those designated for trials, thereby enshrining President Bush’s policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial on the US mainland.

President Obama’s shocking decision to endorse indefinite detention without charge or trial for some prisoners (whether at Guantánamo or on the US mainland) first surfaced last May, when he stated publicly that “preventive detention” was back on the table (along with the reviled Military Commission trial system), and was confirmed in January this year, when his interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force recommended that 35 prisoners should be tried, 48 should be held without charge or trial, and the rest should be released.

In addition, lawmakers must share the blame with the President for legislating to prevent the transfer of any prisoner to the US mainland for any reason other than to face trials. This scuppered any possibility of rehousing cleared prisoners in the US, who cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured in their home countries. As a result, it has made the job of finding new homes for these men in third countries more difficult, because of the correct perception that the US is being hypocritical, asking others to address problems for which the US itself refuses to accept responsibility.

However, it should not be forgotten that Obama allowed the Justice Department to oppose the court-ordered release of 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province) into the US in February 2009, and that three months later he pulled the plug on a plan developed by White House Counsel Greg Craig, which was close to fruition, and involved bringing a few of the Uighurs to live in the US, to pave the way for further releases.

And finally, President Obama must bear the blame for capitulating to hysteria, in the wake of the failed Christmas Day plane bombing last year, by declaring a moratorium on the release of any cleared prisoners to Yemen (whether cleared by the Task Force, by the US courts following their habeas corpus petitions, or both), simply because the would-be bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been recruited in Yemen. This is nothing less than guilt by nationality — and enormously insulting to the Yemeni people as a whole — and the President should have been bold enough to resist it.

President Obama: Now, I am absolutely convinced that the American justice system is strong enough that we should be able to convict people who murdered innocent Americans, who carried out terrorist attacks against us. We should be able to lock them up and make sure that they don’t see the light of day.

We can do that. We’ve done it before. We’ve got people who engaged in terrorist attacks who are in our prisons — maximum-security prisons all across the country. But, you know, this is an issue that has generated a lot of political rhetoric. And people — understandably, you know — are fearful.

But one of the things that I think is worth reflecting on after 9/11 is, you know, this country is so resilient; we are so tough. We can’t be frightened by a handful of people who are trying to do us harm, especially when we’ve captured them and we’ve got the goods on them.

My analysis: The resistance to Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement in November 2009 that the five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) would face a federal court trial in New York was so severe that the administration has put off dealing with it, refusing to confirm or deny whether federal court trials will proceed, whether they will be in New York or elsewhere, or even whether the trials will be scrapped, and the men will face trials by Military Commission instead.

In this passage, the President inadvertently revealed how sensitive the topic of federal court trials is, refusing to refer directly to the courts, and noting how the United States “should be able to convict people who murdered innocent Americans,” and “should be able to lock them up” (my italics), even though the men in question have been held without charge or trial for up to eight and a half years. In addition, his insecurity can be seen in his assurance that “we’ve got the goods on them,” in which, essentially, he pre-judges their guilt (as he and Attorney General Eric Holder did when they were first charged), as an attempt to assure critics that the federal court system will not somehow lead to their release.

President Obama: So, you know, I’ve also said that there are going to be circumstances where a military tribunal may be appropriate. And the reason for that is — and I’ll just give a specific example. There may be situations in which somebody was captured in theater, is now in Guantánamo; it’s very hard to piece together a chain of evidence that would meet some of the evidentiary standards that would be required in an Article III court, but we know that this person is guilty. There’s sufficient evidence to bring about a conviction. So what I’ve said is, you know, the military commission system that we set up, where appropriate, for certain individuals that it would be difficult to try in Article III courts, for a range of reasons, we can reform that system so that it meets the highest standards of due process and prosecute them there.

And so I’m prepared to work with Democrats and Republicans, and we, over the course of the last year, have been in constant conversations with them about setting up a sensible system in which we are prosecuting, where appropriate, those in Article III courts; we are prosecuting others, where appropriate, through a military tribunal. And in either case, let’s put them in prisons, where our track record is, they’ve never escaped.

My analysis: Unwilling to push federal court trials to the top of the agenda, President Obama instead diverted attention to a discussion of trials by Military Commission, ignoring the fact that numerous legal experts have criticized the Commissions for being a poor substitute for federal court trials, and also for enshrining a three-tier judicial system for the Guantánamo prisoners, with federal court trials for some (when the evidence is regarded as being particularly robust), Military Commissions when the evidence is weaker, and indefinite detention without charge or trial when the evidence is too weak or compromised to be used at all Noticeably, the President cannily omitted mentioning this last point, which, understandably, has enraged everyone who opposed President Bush’s assertion that he could hold prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial.

His comment that Military Commissions are appropriate when “we know that this person is guilty” may be another example of reassuring those who fear — unjustifiably — that his administration may be less than rigorous in its appraisal of the remaining prisoners’ significance, but along the way it also dangerously undermines the presumption that suspects are innocent until proven guilty.

It also undermines the work undertaken by judges in the District Court in Washington D.C. Over the last two years, in examining the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions, judges have ruled, in 38 out of 54 cases, that the government has failed to establish that the men in question were involved with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. In doing so, the judges have demonstrated an ability to examine evidence objectively — involving analyzing whether or not statements were derived through torture, unreliable witnesses and intolerable levels of hearsay — that is missing from the President’s bald assertions of guilt.

It is also noticeable that, although the President finally mentioned federal court trials by name, he moved on swiftly to point out that the administration has been working with both Republicans and Democrats to resolve any difficulties, even though lawmakers have actually demonstrated a profound unwillingness to help, and, in significant numbers, support Military Commissions rather than federal court trials. The great irony here is that, in their haste to tar these men as warriors rather than as criminals, lawmakers are forgetting, or ignoring that the federal courts have an impressive track record in dealing with terrorist-related offenses, and in particular, with providing material support to terrorism, whereas the Military Commissions have been something close to an abject failure, with only four convictions throughout their long and troubled history.

Sadly, in his desire to play the Military Commissions card, the President failed to acknowledge these problems, and also failed to acknowledge that providing material support to terrorism is an invented war crime (invented by Congress in the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and maintained in the latest legislation). He also failed to acknowledge that, last summer, senior officials from the Justice Department and the Pentagon told Congress that they believed that any convictions on these charges in the Military Commissions would probably be overturned on appeal.

President Obama: And by the way, just from a purely fiscal point of view, the costs of holding folks in Guantánamo is massively higher than it is holding them in a supermax maximum security prison here in the United States.

My analysis: This is certainly true, as Carol Rosenberg explained in the Miami Herald, when she wrote, “The Pentagon reports the annual cost of running the prison camps, staffed by a variety of US military troops, at $116 million. With a current population of 176 war-on-terror detainees, that’s more than $650,000 each.” By contrast, Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Traci Billingsley told Rosenberg that “it costs nearly $5,575 a year to keep a prisoner in federal detention,” although she added, “A Supermax prisoner’s cost might be a bit higher, because of additional security” (Note: On Monday, Bureau of Prisons spokesman Edmond Ross pointed out that the correct figure is $27,251 a year per federal prisoner).

What is unknown is whether, when dealing with the fears of terrorism that have been persistently stoked for nine years by unscrupulous lawmakers and media outlets, the American people are concerned by Guantánamo’s cost. After all, as reports on Afghanistan have recently demonstrated, with only a maximum of 100 members of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and 1,000 US soldiers for each al-Qaeda member at $1 million per soldier (the cost, on top of a soldier’s salary, of “getting the soldier to Afghanistan, getting his equipment to Afghanistan, and moving the soldier around once in the country”), it actually costs the US $1 billion a year for the pursuit of each al-Qaeda member.

Ann Compton: Is that all for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Will that trial ever happen?

President Obama: Well, I think it needs to happen. And we’re going to work with members of Congress — and this is going to have to be on a bipartisan basis — to move this forward in a way that is consistent with our standards of due process, consistent with our Constitution, consistent also with our image in the world of a country that cares about the rule of law. You can’t underestimate the impact of that.

My analysis: With this answer, the President finally admitted that he believes that the appropriate venue for trying Khalid Shiekh Mohammed and his alleged 9/11 co-conspirators is federal court, although he immediately rushed to point out, yet again, that this would involve working closely, and on a bipartisan basis, with Congress, even though, as outlined above, Congress has shown no appetite whatsoever for working with the President on this issue.

President Obama: You know, al-Qaeda operatives still cite Guantánamo as a justification for attacks against the United States — still, to this day. And you know, there’s no reason for us to give them that kind of talking point when, in fact, we can use the various mechanisms of our justice system to prosecute these folks and to make sure that they never attack us again.

My analysis: This is true, but when analyzed in conjunction with the evasions and omissions outlined above, it fails to provide any reassurance that Guantánamo will close anytime soon, thereby depriving al-Qaeda of a potent tool for recruitment. Setting a new deadline for Guantánamo’s closure would do the trick, but to do that the President would have to make promises that he would be unable to keep — both because of the seemingly implacable opposition he faces from lawmakers, and also because of his own inability to make his own case strongly enough when it really counted, in the first five months of his Presidency. Many of his problems can be traced back to the speech on national security issues that he made in May 2009, when he began distancing himself from the unwavering opposition to Bush’s policies advanced by Greg Craig, and reintroduced Military Commissions and indefinite detention without charge or trial for some of the men still held at Guantánamo.

Had he stuck to just two options — federal court trials or the release of prisoners — much of the “difficult” politics that he mentioned at the start of his press conference on Friday might have been overcome, and the closure of Guantánamo might have remained feasible rather than being, as it appears now, a failed dream whose day has passed.

And sadly, while this sad state of affairs continues to besmirch America’s name abroad, the real losers are the 176 men still held at Guantánamo, who, nine years after the 9/11 attacks, are still waiting for justice, whether they are “guilty” or not.

Originally published on the website of the Future for Freedom Foundation.

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.

A Blow For Consumers

For those not following the FCC as of late, the issue of Net Neutrality has been a hot-button issue. For a few years now, mega internet providers such as Comcast and Verizon have been of the mindset that they can dictate the bandwidth allocated to whatever services they deem acceptable. In 2007, Comcast decided they had the God-given corporate right to slow down and even stop the bandwidth of Bit Torrents among other things Comcast didn’t find appropriate. The FCC actually stood up to them and tried to prohibit their nefarious actions.

Comcast fought the FCC as one can imagine, and on April 6 of this year, the US Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC did not have the authority to stop almighty Comcast from doing as they please; essentially ruling that the FCC can’t impose net neutrality at all. Here is the FCC’s response to the decision:

“The FCC is firmly committed to promoting an open Internet and to policies that will bring the enormous benefits of broadband to all Americans. It will rest these policies — all of which will be designed to foster innovation and investment while protecting and empowering consumers — on a solid legal foundation.”

That’s all warm and fuzzy of the FCC to stand up for us little guys, but considering the courts are siding with the corporations, it will be a tough road to ho for the FCC. But now, the FCC is pushing to regulate the internet through laws designed for phone regulation. This is a novel idea by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, yet it remains to be seen how this proposed regulation will be carried out, especially when the major internet providers are threatening never-ending lawsuits if these regulations are carried out. AT&T has gotten into the act now as well by instituting a multimillion dollar smear campaign of advertisements trying to dupe the public into believing that FCC regulation will actually limit access.

Hope For Consumers?

The absolute key component to the future of net neutrality lies in more competition to the major internet providers. The FCC has announced a National Broadband Plan that proposes such radical ideas as:

“At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second.

The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.

Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose.”

There are a few other ambitious components to the Nation Broadband Plan, but the intent is making sure everyone has access to high bandwidth at affordable prices – sounds like communism to me, don’t tell the tea party! Of course, all the dark and powerful corporate forces of the internet will have their lobbyists out in full force wining and dining and bribing all of our democratically elected representatives to make sure legislation is introduced that will thwart this Un-American plan of the FCC that will give equality and freedom of choice to us consumers.

Despite my cynicism, I have to applaud the FCC for taking such bold steps as they have traditionally done whatever their corporate-media overlords told them — due in part to the monopolies created by Clinton and his Telecommunication Act of 1996 and the pro-corporate Chairmen of the FCC prior to Genachowski. Of course I am always concerned when federal agencies designed to protect consumers actually start protecting consumers. It just doesn’t compute given the history of the FCC.

Google gets involved:

To further hinder the ambitions of the FCC to provide equal access to bandwidth is none other than Google, the 10 Billion dollar corporation that monopolizes the flow of information on the net. Google is approaching the major internet providers – IE: strong-arming – in an attempt to give them the highest bandwidth, a fast lane, for their own content. Since Google’s attempts at further monopolization are being slightly hampered by pesky anti-trust laws (for now), why not make sure that they get to suck up all the bandwidth making it a certainty that when we consumers surf the net and actually want: a page, or video, or mp3, or commerce site to load at reasonable, post dial-up speeds, we will have only Google-controlled content to load.

One would hope that federal laws would prevent Google from furthering its monopoly on information, but if the recent ruling against the FCC in favor of Comcast is any indication, then Google shouldn’t have to worry about petty laws getting in their way. More interesting is the fact that Google has always been a stall-worth of supporting net neutrality – supposedly. Even when Google was preaching the virtues of neutrality, they were paying lobbyists millions and millions of dollars to persuade congress to enact legislation furthering Google’s monopoly. At least the cat’s out of the bag now – Google and their Orwellian mantra Don’t be evil has been exposed for what they are: just another powerful corporation trying to dictate policy and strong-arm competitors to further their dominance in controlling the information we receive through the net.

President Obama has stated — for what that’s worth – that he’ll support and push for net neutrality regulation. Of course Clinton tried selling the public on the idea that his Telecommunications Act would bring about more choice–he was successful as he had little opposition to legislation that ultimately created larger monopolies and inhibited the flow of information. I can say with a modicum of confidence that the GOP–and possibly some DEMS–will inevitably introduce legislation that will give Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner and Google the control they seek. It will probably be called the Internet Consumer Freedom Act, or something similar to that–just as long as freedom or Patriotism is in the wording, an unassuming populace will eat it up. Of course I could be wrong. Perhaps the FCC will actually give us lowly internet users choice and equal access without courts and congress thwarting their efforts.

I know the idea of bandwidth restriction is a bit of a tricky concept to wrap one’s head around, but it is the essence of prohibiting the further monopolization of corporations that can potentially control what information can be readily accessible to the public through the internet. Despite hysterics from those officials in the pockets of the giant telecoms, net neutrality legislation will not hinder nor censor anything on the internet. Quite the opposite as it will guarantee that information WILL NOT be censored through arbitrary bandwidth restrictions and special “high speed channels” for content approved solely by Google. If we fail to stop the telecom industry from squashing net neutrality legislation, we will all be at risk of having only corporate-approved information available to us, much like television – with more ads.

Portions of this report were first published on Mr. Curl’s website, The Todd Blog.

Will Dawn Johnsen, President Obama's nominee to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, become one of the president's recess appointments?

Answer: They get around the pesky will of the majority of the American people.

Here’s a lovely post from the DailyKos praising the president of the AFL-CIO for encouraging the president of the United States to appoint officials during a recess in order to get around the Senate.

We’ve grown used to hearing “progressives” urge Obama to make laws with signing statements and executive orders. The treaty he’s using to occupy Iraq never went to the Senate for ratification. His list of Americans to assassinate was never authorized by Congress. The Fourth Amendment and habeas corpus are not as dearly treasured as people pretended they were when doing so could make a Republican president look bad. But recess appointments is a new one.

When it comes to unconstitutional senate rules like the filibuster, progressives and the president consider them sacrosanct. It’s far more important not to question a rule that lets senators representing 11 percent of Americans block all legislation than it is to pass any of the horrendously bad bills under consideration. One must uphold the rules, be principled, fight fair with “the other side.” The other side is, of course, one of the two parties, even if both parties are opposing the will of the people.

But when it comes to a president, rather than Congress, rules are for pussies. Democratic party loyalists, just like those on “the other side” have a different attitude toward abuses of power when it is a president abusing power rather than congress. That this results in both “sides” year after year shifting more and more power to presidents is not a concern for either “side”. So, when Bush appointed John Bolton during a recess to get around the Senate, that was a horrible thing to do, not because it set a dangerous precedent (it set a good one apparently) and not because Bolton’s policies would mean massive death and suffering (what does that have to do with winning elections?) but because Bush did it. If Obama had done it (and who at this point would dare assert that Obama won’t appoint Bolton to something?) well, then it would have been fine.

Now, the Senate is an institution that almost always opposes the will of the American people. Appointments are blocked by single senators and other maneuvers that are anti-majoritarian even within the hideously corrupt institution of the Senate. Obama could appoint someone to office that Americans would approve of in a referendum, but that at least a few millionaire rednecks in the Senate would never allow. But the president is already LESS accountable to the American people than are senators. The solution here is to improve the Senate, not worsen the presidency.

Anyone failing to fight for the removal of the filibuster rule can shut up immediately about the will of the majority. If we don’t want individual senators blocking appointments or bills, then change the rules and don’t allow that. If we want Senators to follow the will of the people and overcome the corruption of money, media, and party, then we need to establish clean elections, undo corporate personhood, end the doctrine of bribery as “free speech,” create independent media, and at the very least set an example by not ourselves obeying the antidemocratic orders of party leadership.

We can’t do these things, you say? Then what is the point of having given the Democratic Party what they do not admit they have: complete power?

Recess appointments? Really? This will fix soulless, spineless, sell-outs? And nothing worse will come of it?

If looking to the distant future is too difficult, just ask yourself this: Would you want President Sarah Palin making recess appointments? Proceed accordingly.

David Swanson is co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org and author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town by visiting davidswanson.org/book.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Obama expresses no concern with the latest huge bonuses that CEOs Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase ($17 million) and Lloyd Blankenfein of Goldman Sachs ($9 million) paid themselves, saying not only that they are “savvy businessmen” and that “success and wealth” are “part of the American system,” but equating them with professional baseball players who “are making more than that who don’t get to the World Series either.”

Talk about being out of it!

Mr. President, we average Americans aren’t stupid. We know the difference between a banker and a ball player. And we also know the difference between a guy who rewards himself, and a player, who negotiates a salary up front.

These greedy bankers like Dimon and Blankenfein are not “savvy businessmen,” at least if we’re talking about running a business and making a profit “by earning it, the old fashioned way” as the old Smith-Barney ad used to put it before that firm got eaten up. They are savvy con-men who know how to scam the government into bailing them out. And the money they are paying themselves as bonuses for their talent at extortion is taxpayer money, not profits from any “savvy” business decisions.

Professional baseball players, in contrast, negotiate contracts with owners, and are paid based upon what those owners perceive as their ability to win games and attract ticket-buying spectators. They may or may not live up to the expectations of the owners who pay them their huge salaries, but at least they are being paid based upon an expectation that they will deliver the goods.

Furthermore, when these bankers are paid fat bonuses, what is happening is they are being “incentivized” to engage in the most anti-social practices–namely steering their financial institutions into extremely risky investments that, as we have seen, have the ability to crash an entire global economy. They don’t care if they put their enterprises in fatal jeopardy, they don’t care if they put the US or global economy in jeopardy, they don’t care if millions of people lose their jobs as a consequence of their actions. All they care about is that they walk away with these fat, self-determined bonuses.

If baseball players are paid fat salaries, and then don’t deliver the goods, like the Phillies’ big hitter Ryan Howard, who was virtually blanked in the last World Series contest against the New York Yankees, then nobody is hurt except the bitterly disappointed hometown fans. I’ll admit that it was painful watching a guy who’s getting $15 million just fan the ball over and over at critical moments last fall, but nobody lost a job over Ryan’s failure to connect. Okay, maybe some people lost money on bets on the Phillies, but that was their own doing. In fact, I’ll tell you what: I felt sorry for Howard, swinging away over and over at those Yankee pitches on national TV, and then having to walk back to the dugout to Bronx cheers. The fact that he had a fat paycheck didn’t make me any less sympathetic.

Besides, we ordinary folks mostly don’t begrudge our players their big salaries. We know they’re just working stiffs who are making the most of some excellent skills they developed as kids, so we wish them well, and besides, we also know that they are racking up those bucks while they can, because athletes don’t have long work lives. Many end up injured because they’ve pushed their bodies beyond the limit, and they deserve their pay as compensation for the aches and pains they will endure in middle and old age.

It’s a different story entirely for guys like Dimon and Blankenfein. These guys don’t burn out. They just keep raking in the money. When they finally leave their richly appointed CEO offices, they either move to a position as chairman of the board, or they just take all their ill-gotten gains and become behind-the-scenes investors in giant private investment firms. With bankers, it’s all about power, and about figuring out ways to game the system in order to suck as much money as possible out of the rest of our pockets.

Ball players are just ball players. They’re not seeking power, and they’re not trying to rob the rest of us blind.

If the president doesn’t get the difference here, he has truly lost his way.

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

Citizens submitted questions during and after Obama’s the State of the Union. People cast more than 640,000 votes for 11,000 questions from around the world, and YouTube selected a few dozen of the highest rated questions in a various topics – jobs, environment, immigration, etc.

Obama answered 12 questions. The interview went on nearly an hour, starting at 1:47 pm and ending at 2:23 pm.

Newsy items:

Obama addressed the conflict in Sudan, which actually wasn’t in his State of the Union. Obama said the US, UN and other countries are working to broker a series of agreements to stabilize the country and allow refugees back into their homes. “We continue to put pressure on the Sudanese government. If they are not cooperative in these efforts, then it going to be appropriate for us to conclude engagement doesn’t work,” he said.

A Texas questioner asked why the health care debate hasn’t been on C-SPAN like candidate Obama promised. He admitted it’s hard to film all the different health care meetings in and out of Congress. And Obama said he is “making sure that in this last leg, this last five yards before we get to the goal line, that everybody understands exactly what’s going on in the health care bill, that there are no surprises, no secrets.”

The rundown:

The interviewer Steve Grove (grey suit, blue tie with red dots), YouTube’s news and political director and former Boston Globe reporter, and Obama (darker grey suit, blue tie) sat on either side of a flat screen TV.

There were two cameras filming, plus a computer off to the side monitoring the live comments coming over YouTube and Twitter (though the interview didn’t incorporate this live feedback). Grove used a silver MacBook pro.

You pooler seemed to be sitting in the war corner of the room … two framed swords, portraits of Native American chiefs and shelves of books on old battles.

Obama last did a YouTube interview as a presidential candidate. “It went ok the first time,” he joked to Grove, before the cameras rolled.

Grove asked about the budget. Obama said, “I announced the budget and no one threw rotten eggs.” He added, “Budget day is like tax day.”

Question 1: A Silver Spring resident asked if the 40 million uninsured will get insurance this year. Obama said, “We are calling on our Republican colleagues to get behind a serious health reform bill.”

Question 2: Health care debate on C-SPAN. (see above)

Question 3: YouTube showed two videos from small businesses that are having trouble growing in this economy. Obama laid out his most recent plan for a hiring tax credit and how health care reform will greatly unburden small business.

Question 4: A Floridian man asked why banks are slow to modify home loans. Obama agreed that banks need to do more and he’ll put more pressure on them.

Question 5: Obama enters the lightening round. Grove asked, good idea or bad idea?

- The privatization of government agencies like the post office? Bad idea.

- Lowering your insurance premiums if you take health and wellness classes? Good idea, as long as insurance companies don’t discriminate against the old and sick.

- Installing solar panels on all federal and state buildings? Good idea.

Question 6: Does the president believe in a free and open Internet? “I’m a big believer in net neutrality,” he said.

Question 7: A college student told Obama he has 14 credits and 3 part time jobs. “College tuition costs are crushing a lot of folks,” Obama said. He then outlined his recent plan to cut down student debt.

Question 8: A math teacher asked Obama what it means to be an educated person. Obama said “creative teaching” is so important to learning how to learn and think. He said he wants Sasha and Malia to know how to poke holes in arguments and work around problems.

Question 9: A citizen asked how Obama can withdraw troops and effectively combat terrorism at the same time. Obama emphasized that al Qaeda is his main target and that the 30,000 troop surge will be training Afghan forces.

Question 10: Sudan. (see above)

Question 11: Why close Guantanamo? Obama noted that the prison has been a huge recruiting tool for terrorists. Yet he’s had some push back from Congress. “Unfortunately there’s been a lot of political resistance and frankly some of it is politically motivated,” he said.

Question 12: Why does the government continue to invest in dirty coal, drilling and nuclear reactors? Obama said he is pushing for clean alternative energies. “Unfortunately no matter how fast we ramp up those energy sources we’re still going to have enormous energy needs that will be unmet by alternative energy,” he said.

Obama ends by saying, “This was terrific” and “I hope we can do this on a more regular basis.” To the viewers, he said he hoped to answer their questions next time. To Grove, he said he liked the “way the technology is structured.”

Photo/White House photographer Pete Souza

Last Tuesday, in a letter to Illinois governor Pat Quinn, five senior Obama administration officials — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, and Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano — announced that “the President has directed, with our unanimous support, that the Federal Government proceed with the acquisition” of Thomson Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison about 150 miles north-west of Chicago, to house prisoners from Guantánamo.

In off-the-record briefings, officials suggested that between 35 and 90 of the 198 prisoners still held at Guantánamo would be moved to Illinois, and, in a conference call with reporters, to accompany the release of the letter, two government officials explained that “Thomson is not for individuals who will be tried in US criminal courts. It’s for individuals who will be tried in the military commissions.”

On Thursday, in a memo from the White House to members of the Illinois congressional delegation, the administration elaborated, explaining, “If Thomson is selected, we do not anticipate that any detainees currently at Guantánamo Bay who are transferred to Thomson would be prosecuted in civilian courts. Instead, detainees who will be prosecuted in Federal court would be transferred directly to the jurisdiction where they would be prosecuted.”

With reference to the Military Commissions, the memo stated, “Although a final decision has not yet been made on where reformed military commissions will take place, one option under consideration is to hold military commissions at the detention facility selected for detention. If Thomson is that facility, it has existing space that could be used to try military commission cases as well as significant administrative space and other amenities that could provide support to military commissions.” The authors added, “Detainees prosecuted in reformed military commissions would be held at the same location where they are being tried. If the Thomson facility is selected for such detainees, they would be held securely before, during, and after trial within the facility.”

In Tuesday’s conference call, the two government officials also explained what would happen to two other categories of prisoner. The first are those who, the government hopes, will be “transferred to our friends or allies overseas” — 103 of the prisoners, at the last count, who have been cleared for release by the government’s inter-agency Task Force. These men, the officials explained, will remain at Guantánamo, until arrangements for their release have been negotiated.

Those in the second category, who will also be transferred to the prison in Illinois, subject to Congressional approval, are those who, as President Obama described them in a national security speech in May at the National Archives, “cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States.”

Republicans, predictably, sought to capitalize on the fearmongering that has sustained them throughout most of this year, despite the fact that the prison has largely stood empty since its construction in 2001, and that the plan (which also calls for a new influx of federal prisoners to be housed separately from the Guantánamo prisoners) will bring much-needed jobs to the area. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, for example, complained that the administration had “failed to explain how transferring terrorists to Gitmo North will make Americans safer than keeping these terrorists off of our shores in the secure facility in Cuba,” conveniently forgetting to mention that the government does not need to provide an explanation, because, by 307 to 114 votes in the House, and 79 to 19 in the Senate, lawmakers voted in October to allow prisoners to be brought to the mainland to face trials, as part of a $42.8 billion bill for Homeland Security.

If McConnell’s wailing was rather toothless, critics on the left had more to savage in the plans, seizing on the proposals to transfer prisoners “who cannot be prosecuted … but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States” as an example of the Obama administration bringing the worst aspects of Guantánamo to the US mainland. In a statement, Amnesty International explained:

The only thing that President Obama is doing with this announcement is changing the Zip Code of Guantánamo. A fundamental principle of the rule of law is that people cannot be held without charge or trial. The founding fathers knew it, the greatest generation fought for it, candidate Obama campaigned for it and the president needs to remember it.

However, although this criticism is certainly accurate with regard to the government’s intent, it does not address whether the administration will be able to achieve its aim. At present, Congress has only approved the transfer to the US mainland of prisoners facing trials, as the government officials who spoke to reporters on Tuesday acknowledged, when they stated that currently “it would be a violation of the law to transfer prisoners to Thomson for the purpose of anything other than prosecution.” They added that, as a result, the administration acknowledges that it “will need some change of law … Ultimately the facility would allow for the detention of some number of detainees who the President outlined in the Archives speech as not being triable either in federal courts or in military commissions.”

It remains far from clear that lawmakers will approve the “change of law” required by the administration to fulfill its plan, and even if Congressional approval is forthcoming, it is not entirely certain that the government has thought out what its proposal actually means.

Despite being inexplicably proud of its plans to hold some prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial, which has been mentioned with alarming regularity since that speech at the National Archives in May, senior officials have generally been reluctant to acknowledge that the majority of the prisoners that it proposes to transfer to Illinois for the rest of their natural lives — around 55, on the basis of the figures bandied about last week — have habeas corpus petitions pending in US District Courts, and that judges may, if the 78 percent success rate to date is anything to go by, grant the petitions of some of these men and order their release.

In its memo on Thursday, the White House finally acknowledged the role of the courts, but only, it appeared, as a supplement to the administration’s right to detain prisoners indefinitely under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), enacted by Congress in September 2001, which authorized 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 harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States.” The memo also pointed out that, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in June 2004, the Supreme Court had concluded that “Congress has clearly and unmistakably authorized detention” of individuals covered by this legislation.

As a result, the memo stated that the “interagency review panel is in the final stages of determining the number of detainees who will continue to be held, and for whom no prosecution is planned,” under the AUMF, and tagged on, almost as an afterthought, was the following passage: “In addition, the Supreme Court ruled in Boumediene v. Bush [in June 2008] that all detainees currently held at Guantánamo have the right to file petitions for habeas corpus to challenge their detention in federal court. Detainees will continue to have that right when they are transferred to the United States.”

If, as can be expected, some of these men win their habeas corpus petitions, the administration will then be left holding innocent men — or, at least, men whose guilt cannot be established by a court — in a maximum-security prison with no obvious means of release, especially if, as with dozens of the 103 cleared prisoners already at Guantánamo, they cannot be repatriated because they hail from countries with notoriously poor human rights records, where they face the risk of torture.

Admittedly, this is not necessarily any better or worse than remaining in Guantánamo, but it appears to be an outcome that has not been fully thought out by senior officials, including the President, while they have been banging on endlessly about continuing the Bush administration’s disgusting and disgraceful policy of holding men without charge or trial, and I doubt that it will be as easy as it is in Guantánamo to continue to deprive prisoners cleared by the courts of all rights when they are on US territory.

The government should have thought about all of this months ago, of course, but senior officials seem to have regarded the courts with a Bush-like disdain, preferring to conduct their own inter-agency Task Force review of the prisoners’ cases, and doing nothing to prevent Bush-era lawyers in the Justice Department from continuing the same policy of obstruction in the habeas cases that typified the previous administration.

The result is that, of those 55 cases of proposed indefinite detention, only nine — those who have lost their habeas petitions — have any sort of basis in law. Even in these cases, I doubt that the government will be able to maintain forever that it has the right to hold prisoners indefinitely, when their habeas petitions demonstrated only that they had some sort of tangential or minor connection with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but the oddest thing about these nine cases is that they do not seem to have been considered by the government at all.

On Tuesday, in their briefing to reporters, one of the two government officials stated, in response to a question regarding “indefinite detention” from Jake Tapper of ABC News, “The last category which the president suggested may — you called ‘indefinite detention,’ and which the president indicated in his speech at the Archives — we may, in fact, have to address. The fact of the matter is, this review is ongoing. There are no specific cases, to date, that meet that standard that the president has signed off on, and so I don’t want to jump to any conclusions on that.”

This suggests that the administration is not prepared to make a decision about these nine men until the inter-agency Task Force completes its review, indicating that senior officials regard the District Court rulings in these men’s habeas corpus petitions as less significant than the administration’s own, unaccountable Executive review of their cases.

This is actually rather disturbing, because for now these nine men are, at least, detained on a legal basis that has involved the US courts, and are not merely subjected to indefinite detention at the whim of the government, based on eight-year-old legislation passed by Congress in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. From my own point of view, I think we actually need to be having a new conversation, to point out that these men should either be prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, or terrorists who should be put forward for trials, rather than remaining, essentially, the unique class of human being known as “enemy combatants” — whatever the Obama administration now chooses to call them (“alien unprivileged enemy belligerents” being the latest twist).

As it stands, however, the omission of these men from the government’s statements in the past few days suggests that senior officials think so highly of the AUMF that they not only believe that it authorizes them to bring prisoners to the US mainland and imprison them indefinitely, but have also fooled themselves into thinking that this will do anything meaningful to remove the taint of Guantánamo.

The reason why it was so important to close Guantánamo in the first place was to bring to an end the ruinous and unjust policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial, and it amazes me that President Obama has, apparently, fooled himself into thinking that a sleight of hand that perpetuates the same policy as that established by George W. Bush will be any more acceptable when he is its architect, or that a change of scenery — from Guantánamo Bay to Thomson, Illinois — can help to accomplish such a brazen betrayal of the fundamental values on which the United States was founded.

This report was originally published on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

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.

That’s the situation President Obama finds himself in today in the White House. Having surrounded himself with the very Wall Street con men who set up the crooked game that led to the current financial crisis and economic collapse, and finding that the lousy advice they have been giving him since last January has left the country still mired in deepening economic decline, with the banks still not lending and unemployment still mounting, and with growing signs that instead of bottoming out and starting to recover, the economy is threatening to fall a second time, to new lows and higher unemployment, Obama has turned to the same rotten advisors for answers.

A few days ago, in an interview with Fox-TV while he was in China off all places (a country that has made a stupendous stimulus investment to create domestic jobs!) Obama warned, for the first time, that America faces the possibility of a “double-dip” recession. That’s fine as far as it goes. I agree. But what did he say the risk was? Not that the government has been failing to put significant numbers of people back to work, but that the government keeps piling up deficits.

This has to be the lamest economic thinking since Herbert Hoover started tightening the screws on government spending at the onset of the Great Depression in 1930.

Clearly the American government needs to do just the opposite of worrying about deficits. The only growth the US economy has seen to date has been the result of government funding—the cash-for-clunkers program gave a brief restoration of pulse to the auto industry, and the $8000 tax credit for buying a first home kicked up home sales briefly. We know this because when the clunkers program ended, auto sales crashed, and when the deadline approached for the end to the new home tax credit, home building plunged almost 11 percent. The hundreds of billions of dollars poured into so-called “shovel-ready” state and local projects like roads, schools, etc., may have added or saved as much as a million jobs, but the economy lost many times that many jobs over the same period.

The problem with these stimulus programs is that they are inefficient ways to create jobs or preserve jobs. If roughly one million jobs were created through the stimulus spending of say $200 billion (assuming that the February $800-billion stimulus program, to mollify Republicans, consisted of one-half tax cuts and only one-half actual federal spending, and that this federal spending was spread evenly over a two-year period, that’s $200,000 per job!

If, instead, Obama had chucked the dunces at Treasury and in his Council of Economic Advisors, and instead asked your Labor Secretary to initiate a wide-ranging $200-billion-per-year jobs program, hiring the unemployed at perhaps $20-25,000 per person to do everything from teach in overcrowded urban schools to laying high-speed rail trackbeds, from cleaning up parks to putting insulation in homes, he could have given jobs to close 8 million people—people who would have then spent their money on goods and services and helped rally the economy from the bottom up.

Deficits? Who gives a damn about deficits at this point! The country is up to the gills in debt without creating any jobs. (It’s kind of like my mortgage. Why would I worry about using my credit card to buy food for the week if I was low on cash, when my mortgage has me deep in the red for the next ten years? Obama’s financial advisors, on the evidence, would tell me I should let my family go hungry, because I need to worry about my total debt load.)

If you’re worried about deficits, Mr. Obama, end the god-damned wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is costing one million dollars a year to send one lousy grunt to Afghanistan or Iraq. And you want to have at least 100,000 guys over there. That’s $100 billion a year right there—enough to hire four million unemployed Americans back here at home!

This president is well on the way to rescuing President Hoover from history’s crap heap by one-upping him in the realm of economic mismanagement. We already have Obamavilles springing up around the country. We haven’t started calling them that, but Naming Day isn’t far off.

At least Hoover didn’t mire the country in another war while the economy was collapsing around him.

President Obama is on a short leash at this point. His fans, and I was one of those who was willing to give him a shot last November, are mostly giving up on him. Activists are already turning on him. My union friends are disgusted. My African-American friends just shake their heads in dismay. Liberal friends act embarrassed.

A leftist friend, retired, who devoted a month to campaigning for Obama full time in Pennsylvania last fall now writes angry letters almost weekly to Obama’s former campaign manager David Plouffe and others, blasting Obama’s handling of the bank crisis and his Afghan War plans. Clearly Obama cannot continue to appease Republicans and cater to Blue Dogs in Congress and expect to be re-elected in 2012.

Indeed, if he doesn’t toss the crooks and charlatans in the Fed, the Treasury and his Council of Economic Advisers out, and doesn’t stop listening to the self-serving crazies in the military, he won’t even have a Democratic majority in Congress by the end of next year.

President Obama, aren’t you tired of being an embarrassment to your friends and family? Aren’t you tired of being mocked by your foes?

Come on. We’re sick of your speeches! Suck it up, be a leader finally and kick some butt. Do something unconventional and daring. End the wars, bring the troops home, announce a huge jobs program, issue an executive order expanding the Medicare program, raise taxes on the wealthy to back where they were in the 1960s, and let’s get the country moving forward again.

Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository/U.S. Department of Energy

How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate I grant) that hundreds or thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most dangerous waste–the actual uranium from the used fuel rods–and putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned all across the landscape?

And I should note that it’s not just remote places like Iraq and Kuwait and Afghanistan that are being covered in super toxic and radioactive uranium dust–and I’m not just talking about the stuff that gets picked up in the wind and carried around the globe, or the stuff that gets inhaled by our troops and carried home internally, bad enough as that is.

The truth is that depleted uranium weapons are being exploded and burned right here in the USA in training operations. The center of Hawaii’s Big Island, for example, which is a military zone, is heavily contaminated by DU ammunition fired by tanks there. The same is true of Vieques Island, long a favored target for the Navy, which for years has fired DU shells from its ships at the populated island, and also launched DU-tipped missiles and dropped DU-loaded “bunker-buster” bombs at it.

While I don’t have direct knowledge, I’d say it’s a safe bet that there are a number of sites on the Mainland US where DU munitions have also been widely used–maybe White Sands Proving Ground the Marine training area near Joshua Tree National Monument in Southern California, or other such training and testing areas.

The simple truth is that our own government, besides committing an ongoing atrocity in the Middle East, is also poisoning our own country with uranium oxide.

Our Nobel Peace Prize president should take note. President John F. Kennedy reportedly moved to halt open air testing of nuclear weapons after looking at the rain falling outside the window of the Oval Office and asking a science advisor whether it was delivering nuclear fallout to his front lawn (he was told that it was). Maybe President Obama should consider that the rain today is delivering uranium dust to his wife’s and daughters’ garden in the back yard of the White House. At least he should take a look at pictures of the horribly deformed babies being born to mothers in Iraq (and of the lucky babies that are stillborn), thanks to the radioactive warfare that the US military has been employing against both that country and Afghanistan–his “necessary” war.

There is another irony here too. The US is expressing concern about Iran enriching uranium, and possibly creating a nuclear bomb, which in the unlikely event that it were ever used, might spread some radioactivity around parts of the Middle east, yet it is the US which already has spread 2000 or more tons of uranium dust all over Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 18 years–far more than any small Iranian bomb could release.

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