Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 118

Newly leaked documents show the ongoing travesty of Guantanamo

Numerous media outlets -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and NPR, among others – last night published classified files on more than 700 past and present Guantanamo detainees. The leak was originally provided to WikiLeaks, which then gave them to the Post, NPR and others; the NYT and The Guardian claim to have received them from "another source" (WikiLeaks suggested the "other source" was Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former WikiLeaks associate who WikiLeaks claims took, without authorization, many WikiLeaks files when he left).

The documents reveal vast new information about these detainees and, in particular, the shoddy and unreliable nature of the "evidence" used (both before and now) to justify their due-process-free detentions. There are several points worth noting about all this:

(1) Given that multiple media outlets have just published huge amounts of classified information, it is more difficult than ever to distinguish between WikiLeaks and, say, the NYT or the Post under the law. How could anyone possibly justify prosecuting WikiLeaks for disseminating classified information while not prosecuting these newspapers who have done exactly the same thing? If Dianne Feinstein, the DOJ and Newt Gingrich are eager to prosecute WikiLeaks for "espionage" – and they are – how can that not also sweep up these media outlets?

(2) Once again we find how much we now rely on whistleblowers in general – and WikiLeaks and (if he did what's accused) Bradley Manning in particular – to learn the truth and see the evidence about what the world's most powerful factions are actually doing. WikiLeaks is responsible for more newsworthy scoops over the last year than all media outlets combined: it's not even a close call. And if Bradley Manning is the leaker, he has done more than any other human being in our lifetime to bring about transparency and shine a light on what military and government power is doing.

(3) The difference among the various newspapers in how these leaks are being presented is stark, predictable and revealing. The Guardian emphasizes exactly what is most important about these documents: how oppressive is this American detention system, how unreliable the evidence is on which the accusations are based, and how so many people were put in cages for years without any justification:

On its front page, the Telegraph trumpets the "more than 150 innocent people held at the U.S. prison."

The NYT, by stark contrast, emphasizes how Dangerous and Menacing these Evil Terrorists are shown to be (while at least noting underneath that many were held without cause):

Unsurprisingly, the Washington Post is the most absurd of all; here's what they found most newsworthy:

In sum, foreign newspapers highlight how these documents show U.S. actions to be so oppressive and unjust, while American newspapers downplayed that fact. That reflects Jack Goldsmith's praise of American media outlets as comprising a "patriotic media".

(4) These documents shed new light on the persecution of Sami al-Haj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who was encaged at the camp for more than 6 years and then abruptly released without ever being charged. As I've written many times, this was one of the most discussed cases in the Muslim world – that the U.S. would imprison an Al Jazeera journalist without charges for years – yet (outside of Nicholas Kristof) it was almost entirely suppressed in establishment media outlets (even as American journalists obsessed on the imprisonment of American journalists by Iran and North Korea for far shorter periods of time).

Al-Haj has long claimed that he was interrogated almost exclusively about his work for Al Jazeera, and virtually nothing about the accusations against him (being an "Al Qaeda courier"). The files released about him corroborate that claim, as The Guardian notes : "An al-Jazeera journalist was held at Guantánamo for six years partly in order to be interrogated about the Arabic news network." In particular:

His file makes clear that one of the reasons he was sent to Guantánamo was "to provide information on ... the al-Jazeera news network's training programme, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan, including the network's acquisition of a video of UBL [Osama bin Laden] and a subsequent interview with UBL".

Al-Haj was far from the only journalist the U.S. imprisoned for years without charges during the War on Terror, but his case represents one of the most egregious – and under-reported – American acts during the last decade, given that he was detained to learn more about Al Jazeera. These newly released files dispel any doubt about the accuracy of al-Haj's claims regarding his detention experience.

(5) Perhaps most important of all, these documents conclusively underscore the evils of the Obama administration's indefinite detention regime. Just last month, President Obama signed an Executive Order directing that dozens of detainees held for years at Guantanamo continue to be imprisoned indefinitely without any charges: either in a real court or even before a military commission. Although indefinite detention was one of the primary hallmarks of Bush/Cheney radicalism, this order was justified by the White House and its followers on the ground that the President knows of secret evidence that shows that these detainees are Too Dangerous to Release, yet cannot be prosecuted because the evidence against them is tainted (see this post for why that line of reasoning is so logically and morally twisted).

The idea of trusting the government to imprison people for life based on secret, untested evidence never reviewed by a court should repel any decent or minimally rational person, but these newly released files demonstrate how warped is this indefinite detention policy specifically.  The New Yorker's Amy Davidson highlights some of the most extreme inanities in how "evidence" was assembled, while McClatchy's Carol Rosenberg describes just some of the reasons to find this "evidence" so unreliable: beyond the fact that so much of it was extracted using torture:

The U.S. military set up a human intelligence laboratory at Guantanamo that used interrogation and detention practices that they largely made up as they went along. . . .

The documents, more than 750 individual assessments of former and current Guantanamo detainees, show an intelligence operation that was tremendously dependent on informants — both prison camp snitches repeating what they'd heard from fellow captives and self-described, at times self-aggrandizing, alleged al Qaida insiders turned government witnesses who Pentagon records show have since been released.

Intelligence analysts are at odds with each other over which informants to trust, at times drawing inferences from prisoners' exercise habits. They order DNA tests, tether Taliban suspects to polygraphs, string together tidbits in ways that seemed to defy common sense.

In one sense this is not new, as federal courts which have reviewed these detentions during the Obama administration have overwhelmingly found them lacking any credible evidence. Still, these files provide important new specifics. The NYT describes the case of Omar Hamzayavich Abdulayev – placed in Guantanamo in 2002 when he was 23 (he's now 32) and one of the detainees just ordered indefinitely detained by Obama. The newly released files reveal what the NYT calls "the haunting conclusion of his 2008 assessment: 'Detainee's identity remains uncertain'." In other words, the person who has been in Guantanamo for 9 years – most of his adult life – and whom Obama just ordered detained indefinitely with no charges, very well may not even be the person we think he is.

(6) Those condemning these disclosures – consisting of the now-familiar union of Bush neocons and the hardest-core Obama followers – are saying, in essence, that it would be far better if we had remained ignorant about the extreme unreliability of the "evidence" justifying these detentions, and that it would be preferable if the evidence showing the extreme injustice of continuing to imprison people there without so much as charging them with any crimes continued to be concealed.

* * * * *

Over the weekend, The Washington Post published a detailed account of why Obama has not closed Guantanamo, debunking the apologists' claim that he did everything he could but was thwarted by an independent Congress. Marcy Wheeler highlights just some of the key points from that article.

For those in New York and the Baltimore/D.C. area, I'll be speaking this week at these events.

President Obama speaks on Manning and the rule of law

(updated below)

Protesters yesterday interrupted President's Obama speech at a $5,000/ticket San Francisco fundraiser to demand improved treatment for Bradley Manning. After the speech, one of the protesters, Logan Price, approached Obama and questioned him. Obama's responses are revealing on multiple levels. First, Obama said this when justifying Manning's treatment (video and transcript are here):

We're a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.

The impropriety of Obama's public pre-trial declaration of Manning's guilt ("He broke the law") is both gross and manifest. How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt? Numerous commentators have noted how egregiously wrong was Obama's condemnation. Michael Whitney wrote: "the President of the United States of America and a self-described Constitutional scholar does not care that Manning has yet to be tried or convicted for any crime." BoingBoing's Rob Beschizza interpreted Obama's declaration of guilt this way: "Just so you know, jurors subordinate judging officers!" And Politico quoted legal experts explaining why Obama's remarks are so obviously inappropriate.

It may be that Obama spoke extemporaneously and without sufficient forethought, but it is -- at best -- reckless in the extreme for him to go around decreeing people guilty who have not been tried: especially members of the military who are under his command and who will be adjudged by other members of the military under his command. Moreover, as a self-proclaimed Constitutional Law professor, he ought to have an instinctive aversion when speaking as a public official to assuming someone's guilt who has been convicted of nothing. It's little wonder that he's so comfortable with Manning's punitive detention since he already perceives Manning as a convicted criminal. "Sentence first - verdict afterward," said the Red Queen to Alice in Wonderland.

But even more fascinating is Obama's invocation of America's status as a "nation of laws" to justify why Manning must be punished. That would be a very moving homage to the sanctity of the rule of law -- if not for the fact that the person invoking it is the same one who has repeatedly engaged in the most extraordinary efforts to shield Bush officials from judicial scrutiny, investigation, and prosecution of every kind for their war crimes and surveillance felonies. Indeed, the Orwellian platitude used by Obama to justify that immunity -- Look Forward, Not Backward -- is one of the greatest expressions of presidential lawlessness since Richard Nixon told David Frost that "it's not illegal if the President does it."

But it's long been clear that this is Obama's understanding of "a nation of laws": the most powerful political and financial elites who commit the most egregious crimes are to be shielded from the consequences of their lawbreaking -- see his vote in favor of retroactive telecom immunity, his protection of Bush war criminals, and the way in which Wall Street executives were permitted to plunder with impunity -- while the most powerless figures (such as a 23-year-old Army Private and a slew of other low-level whistleblowers) who expose the corruption and criminality of those elites are to be mercilessly punished. And, of course, our nation's lowest persona non grata group -- accused Muslim Terrorists -- are simply to be encaged for life without any charges. Merciless, due-process-free punishment is for the powerless; full-scale immunity is for the powerful. "Nation of laws" indeed.

One final irony to Obama's embrace of this lofty justifying term: Manning's punitive detention conditions are themselves illegal, as the Uniform Code of Military Justice expressly bars the use of pre-trial detention as a means of imposing punishment. Given how inhumane Manning's detention conditions have been -- and the fact that much of it was ordered in contradiction to the assessments of the brig's psychiatric staff -- there is little question that this is exactly what has happened. The President lecturing us yesterday about how Manning must be punished because we're a "nation of laws" is the same one presiding over and justifying Manning's unlawful detention conditions.

Then, in response to Price's raising the case of Daniel Ellsberg, we have this from Obama:

No it wasn't the same thing. Ellsberg's material wasn't classified in the same way.

What Obama said there is technically true, but not the way he intended. Indeed, the truth of the matter makes exactly the opposite point as the one the President attempted to make. The 42 volumes of the Pentagon Papers leaked by Ellsberg to The New York Times were designated "TOP SECRET": the highest secrecy designation under the law. By stark contrast, not a single page of the materials allegedly leaked by Manning to Wikileaks was marked "top secret"; to the contrary, it was all marked "secret" or "classified": among the lowest level secrecy classifications.  Using the Government's own standards, then, the leak by Ellsberg was vastly more dangerous than the alleged leak by Manning.  

(And the notion that Ellsberg's leak was limited and highly selective is absurd; he passed on thousands of pages to the New York Times in the form of 42 full volumes worth.  Among the documents leaked by Ellsberg were some of the nation's most sensitive cryptography and eavesdropping methods: documents The New York Times withheld from publication upon the NSA's insistence that their publication would gravely harm American national security [see p. 388 and fn 170].  By contrast, none of the documents allegedly leaked by Manning comes close to anything as potentially damaging or sensitive as that.)

But it has long been vital for Obama officials and the President's loyalists to distinguish Ellsberg from Manning. Why? Because it is more or less an article of faith among progressives that what Ellsberg did was noble and heroic. How, then, can Nixon's persecution of Ellsberg continue to be loathed while Obama's persecution of Manning be cheered? After all, even the hardest-core partisan loyalists can't maintain contradictions that glaring in their heads; they need to be given a way to distinguish them.

Hence the importance of differentiating Ellsberg's actions from those in which Manning is accused of engaging. That Ellsberg himself has repeatedly said that Manning's alleged acts are identical to his own both in content and motive -- and that he considers Manning a hero -- is obviously problematic for that cause, but the justifying show must go on. Thus do we have Obama's backward claim that "Ellsberg's material wasn't classified in the same way," when the reality is that The Pentagon Papers were deemed far, far more sensitive by the U.S. Government than the documents published by WikiLeaks. Indeed, from every objective metric, Ellberg's leak was a far graver compromise of national security secrets than Manning's alleged leak; if they're to be distinguished, it would be in favor of defending Manning, not defending Ellsberg (and while it's true that Obama didn't order the break-in of Manning's psychiatrist's office, it's also true Nixon never ordered Ellsberg confined to 23-hour-a-day pre-trial solitary confinement and forced nudity).

That Obama has to resort to the most brazen hypocrisy and factually confused claims to defend Manning's treatment should hardly be surprising (and as Politico's quoted experts noted, Obama was also deeply confused when he claimed yesterday that he, too, would be breaking the law if he released unauthorized classified information, since the President has the unfettered right to declassify what he wants). Those engaged in purely unjustifiable conduct can, by definition, find only incoherent and nonsensical rationale to justify what they're doing. The President's remarks yesterday provide a classic case of how true that is.

 

UPDATE: In response to the controversy created by Obama's declaration of Manning's guilt, the White House now says that the President merely was "making a general statement that did not go specifically to the charges against Manning: 'The president was emphasizing that, in general, the unauthorized release of classified information is not a lawful act,' [a White House spokesman said] Friday night. 'He was not expressing a view as to the guilt or innocence of Pfc. Manning specifically'." What Obama actually said was: "He broke the law." I'll leave it to readers to determine whether the White House's denial is reasonable, or whether it's the actions of a President constitutionally incapable of admitting error (h/t auerfeld).

Amazingly, this incident -- as this truly excellent post documents -- is highly redolent of the time Richard Nixon publicly declared Charles Manson's guilt before the accused mass murderer had been convicted.  Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, was at Nixon's side when he did it and immediately recognized the impropriety of Nixon's remarks, and the White House quickly issued a statement claiming that Nixon misspoke and meant merely to suggest Manson had been "charged" with these crimes, not that he was guilty of them.  Obama's decree was worse, of course, since (a) Obama has direct command authority over those who will judge Manning (unlike Nixon vis-a-vis Manson's jurors); (b) Manson's jurors were sequestered at the time and thus not exposed to Nixon's proclamation; and (c) Obama is directly responsible for the severe punishment to which Manning has already been subjected (h/t lysias).

It is notable indeed that an act immediately recognized as grossly improper by John Mitchell -- "easily American history's crookedest Attorney General ever" -- is engaged in by our nation's top political-leader/Constitutional-scholar, and no attempt is made to rectify it until it becomes clear that the controversy could harm both Manning's prosecution and the President's political standing.

Nobel peace drones

A U.S. drone attack in Pakistan killed 23 people this morning, and this is how The New York Times described that event in its headline and first paragraph:

When I saw that, I was going to ask how the NYT could possibly know that the people whose lives the U.S. just ended were "militants," but then I read further in the article and it said this:  "A government official in North Waziristan told Pakistani reporters that five children and four women were among the 23 who were killed."  So at least 9 of the 23 people we killed -- at least -- were presumably not "militants" at all, but rather innocent civilians (contrast how the NYT characterizes Libya's attacks in its headlines: "Qaddafi Troops Fire Cluster Bombs Into Civilian Areas").

Can someone who defends these drone attacks please identify the purpose?  Is the idea that we're going to keep dropping them until we kill all the "militants" in that area?  We've been killing people in that area at a rapid clip for many, many years now, and we don't seem to be much closer to extinguishing them.  How many more do we have to kill before the eradication is complete?  

Beyond that, isn't it painfully obvious that however many "militants" we're killing, we're creating more and more all the time?  How many family members, friends, neighbors and villagers of the "five children and four women" we just killed are now consumed with new levels of anti-American hatred?  How many Pakistani adolescents who hear about these latest killings are now filled with an eagerness to become "militants"?

The NYT article dryly noted: "Friday's attack could further fuel antidrone sentiment among the Pakistani public"; really, it could?  It's likely to fuel far more than mere "antidrone sentiment"; it's certain to fuel more anti-American hatred: the primary driver of anti-American Terrorism. Isn't that how you would react if a foreign country were sending flying robots over your town and continuously wiping out the lives of innocent women, children and men who are your fellow citizens? What conceivable rational purpose does this endless slaughter serve? Isn't it obvious that the stated goal of all of this – to reduce the threat of Terrorism – is subverted rather than promoted by these actions?

Regarding the announcement yesterday that the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner was now deploying these same flying death robots to Libya, both The Washington Post's David Ignatius and The Atlantic's James Fallows make the case against that decision. In particular, Ignatius writes that "surely it's likely that the goal was to kill Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi or other members of his inner circle."

I don't know if that is actually the purpose, though if Ignatius is good at anything , it's faithfully conveying what military and intelligence officials tell him. If that is the goal, doesn't that rather directly contradict Obama's vow when explaining the reasons for our involvement in the war (after it started): "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake." It already seemed clear from the -- in which they pledged to continue "operations" until Gadaffi was gone -- that this vow had been abandoned. But if we're sending drones to target Libyan regime leaders for death, doesn't it make it indisputably clear that the assurances Obama gave when involving the U.S. in this war have now been violated. And does that matter?

Finally, when the OLC released its rationale for why the President was permitted to involve the U.S in Libya without Congressional approval, its central claim was that -- due the very limited nature of our involvement and the short duration -- this does not "constitute[] a 'war' within the meaning of the Declaration of War Clause" (Adam Serwer ). Now that our involvement has broadened to include drone attacks weeks into this conflict, with no end in sight, can we agree that the U.S. is now fighting a "war" and that this therefore requires Congressional approval?

* * * * *

A new NYT/CBS poll today finds that only 39% approve of Obama's handling of Libya, while 45% disapprove (see p. 17). That's what happens when a President starts a new war without any pretense of democratic debate, let alone citizenry consent through the Congress.

Beltway austerity values

(updated below - Update II)

The Washington Post Editorial Page for years has been the Beltway media leader in crusading for cuts to entitlements programs for ordinary Americans in the name of battling deficit spending and the debt.  That this same Editorial Page has been the leading cheerleader for every debt-fueled American war over the last decade reveals how inauthentic are their purported fiscal concerns, but any doubt about that should be forever dispelled by its Editorial today, opposing meaningful cuts to America's bloated, debt-financed military budget:

Even with significant trims in those areas, however, reaching Mr. Obama's goal would probably require cuts in the size of the Army and Marines beyond the reduction of more than 40,000 troops already proposed by Mr. Gates. Defense analyst Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution thinks it could require the elimination of more command structures and another round of base closures. What will then happen if the United States is forced into more conflicts like those of the past decade — if it must intervene to prevent Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon or respond to aggression by North Korea, for example?

Mr. Gates, who is expected to leave office this year, said that big defense cuts "would be disastrous in the world environment we see today." While some reductions in defense are inevitable, that is a warning that the administration and Congress cannot afford to disregard.

In other words:  it's vital that we continue to splurge for military spending that is almost equal to what the entire rest of the world spends combined, and that we continue to spend 6 times more than the second-largest military spender (China).  Why is that?  Because we may need to fight our fourth, fifth and sixth wars (not counting the covert ones) and must remain ready to start those wars at a moment's notice.  There are many things one can say about someone plagued by that warmongering mentality; that they are serious opponents of borrowed spending and debt financing is most assuredly not one of them.  There are undoubtedly many motives driving the Post Editors to demand that ordinary Americans -- already under severe economic stress -- "sacrifice" the remaining aspects of their safety net, but concern over the debt is manifestly not among them.

To see what the Post Editors are really all about -- and they are worth examining because they are the ultimate establishment mouthpiece -- consider which military cuts they are affirmatively advocating (beyond the elimination of weapons systems which the Pentagon says it does not want):

Defense savings beyond those already achieved by Mr. Gates are certainly possible and even needed -- though by and large they lie in areas that Congress has been unwilling to touch. As we pointed out in a recent editorial, military health care now costs as much as the war in Iraq, in part because military families — including working-age retirees — pay one-tenth as much for their health plans as do civilian federal workers. 

Think about how rancid that is.  The Post Editors and their corporate bosses are people who have used their influence as much as possible not only to start multiple wars but to vehemently argue against their end.  Those wars have not, of course, been fought by Post Editors; that's why they've so blithely cheered them on and demanded their continuation:  because it isn't their lives endangered by them.  Their pro-war advocacy has instead imposed extreme burdens on a tiny portion of the population -- members of the military and their families -- and yet when it comes time to cut the military budget, they refuse to consider limiting the number of new wars they might want to start.  Instead, they demand that the people they send off to fight their wars and their families be forced to pay more for their health care.

That's a perfect microcosm of the deficit and austerity debate taking place in Washington.  It consists of privileged elites demanding that ordinary, financially strapped Americans sacrifice what little is left of their First World living standard, while the policies that benefit those elites and which they love (especially the ones that explode the deficit and debt in whose name the "sacrifice" is justified) continue indefinitely (though even the much maligned Simpson-Bowles report called for relatively significant reductions in military spending).  Shielding the military budget from meaningful cuts on the ground that America must fight still more wars -- while calling for reductions in the health care benefits of those who fight them -- is about as warped a value system as one can find. 

That's well into Marie Antoinette territory, but so is most of our economic policy.  This is the rotted mindset -- abolition of all societal opportunity and mass prosperity accompanied by endless militarization and a gorging oligarchical class -- that lies at the heart of most instances of imperial collapse.  The Post Editors are worth scrutinizing not because they're aberrations, but because they're so representative of our political and media class.

 

UPDATE:  Speaking of Beltway austerity values:  supremely sleazy D.C. lobbyist Lanny Davis -- who has made millions of dollars engaged in legalized influence peddling on behalf of dictators and other assorted figures -- today demands bipartisan cuts in Social Security, in the name of political courage.  That may be even a better expression of this dynamic than Post Editors demanding reductions in health care benefits for the people they keep sending into wars.

UPDATE II:  And now we have this:

 

As the war in Libya escalates on a seemingly weekly basis, I think it's time for another urgent speech about how imperative it is that we all tighten our belts. It's probably also time for another Nobel Peace Prize (and yes, I know: these drone attacks are designed to bring about peace -- because War, as we know, Is Peace).

Lessons from Manning's transfer out of Quantico

A Pentagon official yesterday leaked word to the Associated Press that accused WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning was being transferred out of the Quantico Marine brig where he has been held under inhumane conditions for 10 months, and moved to the Army's prison facility in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. The Pentagon did not even bother to notify Manning's lawyer of the transfer; he had to learn of it through the media leak. As most media reports on this transfer note, the move takes place "in the wake of international criticism about his treatment." In particular, the AP story explains:

Manning's move to a new detention center comes about a week after a U.N. torture investigator complained that he was denied a request to make an unmonitored visit to Manning. . . . Two days later, a committee of Germany's parliament protested about Manning's treatment to the White House. And Amnesty International has said Manning's treatment may violate his human rights [ed.: actually, the Amnesty condemnation was far more emphatic than that].

Additionally, the British government formally raised concerns with the U.S. over the treatment of Manning (whose mother is a British citizen). State Department reporters had begun aggressively questioning officials about their refusal to allow unmonitored U.N. access to Manning (after all, even the Bush administration allowed unmonitored visits by human rights organizations to accused top Al Qaeda Terrorists held at Guantanamo).

Combine all that with the compelled "resignation" of State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley for his public denunciation of Manning's treatment -- and the forced defense by President Obama of this treatment when he was asked about it in a Press Conference by ABC News' Jake Tapper -- and it's obvious that this has exploded into a serious political and international scandal for the Obama administration. Add on to all that the fact that Manning's counsel was preparing to file a habeas corpus petition after brig officials just ruled that they would indefinitely continue Manning's oppressive treatment against the advice of the brig's psychiatric experts, and it's not difficult to see why this transfer was politically necessary.

How Manning will be treated in Ft. Leavenworth remains to be seen, and it's impossible to know the psychological injuries that have already been inflicted on him by 10 months of inhumane detention. NBC News' Jim Miklaszewski claims that "he'll be placed in a new medium-security facility," and will "have some freedom of movement in an open day room, have contact and take meals with fellow prisoners, shower when he wants and have access to books and TV" and "have three hours a day of recreation time." If that happens, that will be a positive development, but what's particularly interesting about Miklaszewski's report is how extensively some military and government officials acknowledge wrongdoing (anonymously, of course, lest they meet Crowley's fate):

Manning was held in maximum security at the Marine Corps brig Quantico, Va., for more than eight months where he spent 23 hours a day and ate all his meals in an isolated cell, was permitted no contact with other prisoners, and was forced to wear chains and leg irons any time he was moved. He also was often forced to strip naked at night and stand nude in his cell for early morning inspection.

The Marines claim they took his clothes to prevent him from injuring himself. Military and Pentagon officials insist the action was punishment for what the Marines considered disrespect from Manning. Such tactics for disciplinary reasons are against military regulations. . . . U.S. military officials, who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity, deny Manning was tortured, but one said "the Marines blew it" in terms of how they treated him.

For multiple reasons, the treatment of Manning has been a profound stain on the Obama administration. It isn't merely that the treatment is inherently inhumane, although that's true. It isn't merely that oppressive detention conditions are such a glaring betrayal of Obama's repeated signature vow to end detainee abuse, though that's also true. And it isn't merely that Manning has never been convicted of anything, rendering this obvious punishment (masquerading as protective detention) offensive on multiple Constitutional and ethical levels (not to mention a violation of the UCMJ), though that, too, is true. What makes it most odious are the purposes that likely drove it: a desire to break Manning in order to extract incriminating statements to be used against WikiLeaks and, worst of all, a thuggishly threatening message to future would-be whistleblowers about the unconstrained punishment they'd face if they, too, exposed government deceit, wrongdoing and illegality.

But there is one positive aspect of all of this worth highlighting: namely, the mechanisms used to catapult this story into such prominence. Had this been 10 or even 5 years ago, I'm convinced that Bradley Manning's oppressive detention conditions would never have received any substantial attention and he'd wither away indefinitely in Quantico. Major media outlets would evince little interest in the conditions of an accused Army leaker. Republicans have long made clear their support for detainee abuse, and given that it's being carried out by a Democratic President, very few officials in the President's party would care either. It's long been the case that the only stories capable of generating any real media interest are ones raised by the leadership of one of the two parties, and Bradley Manning's detention conditions is of interest to neither.

But that landscape has changed, one could say fundamentally. The story of Manning's inhumane detention conditions was first reported here in this space on December 15, when I wrote the following in the first paragraph:

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months -- and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait -- under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning's detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

From there, blogs that barely existed even five years ago -- such as FDL -- coordinated a highly effective activism campaign to publicize and protest these conditions. Blog readers complained en masse to the U.N. and Amnesty International, which led to a formal investigation by the former and a formal condemnation and protest campaign from the latter. A few isolated media figures and politicians -- who regularly read blogs -- picked up the cause, with MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan providing ample coverage and Dennis Kucinich demanding official access to Manning and loudly complaining when it was denied (along with constant coverage from The Guardian). Rather than rely on the mediation of establishment journalists and editors, Manning's counsel largely confined his public commentary to his own newly-created blog, where he was able to control the content, avoid distorting editing practices, and be heard in full.

Substantial Internet-organized protests took place outside of the brig and elsewhere around the country -- aided by the vocal support of the classic heroic whistle-blower, Daniel Ellsberg, who was arrested protesting Manning's conditions -- bringing further attention to Manning's plight. Blog-reading and blog-writing law professors organized an eloquent but harsh condemnation of Manning's detention supported by 250 of the nation's preeminent scholars.  And the ultimate tipping point for the story -- Crowley's condemnation -- came not when he was asked about Manning at the daily State Department briefing he gave for establishment reporters, but rather at a small group of Internet activists and social media writers when he was confronted with an aggressive question about "Manning's torture" from a Ph.D student at MIT.

But perhaps most significant is how the scandal finally seeped into full-scale establishment media focus. Even five years ago, most establishment journalists took their cues exclusively from a small handful of homogenized outlets (), but now many of them (the smartest and most resourceful ones) use a much more extensive and diversified roster of sources, such as blogs, Twitter, and independent political commentators. That caused one of the leading media practitioners of this new method (Jake Tapper) to ask President Obama about Crowley's denunciation of Manning at a nationally televised Press Conference, elevating the story to the presidential level, leading to Crowley's resignation (and commendable ongoing condemnation of Manning's treatment), and ultimately to the forced transfer of Manning out of Quantico.

The point here is not to take any victory lap; none is warranted given Manning's ongoing detention under still-unknown conditions as well as the injuries he's unquestionably suffered already (his counsel says that, despite the transfer, he "nonetheless intends to pursue redress at the appropriate time for the flagrant violations of [Manning's] constitutional rights by the Quantico confinement facility"). But this episode should be a potent antidote to defeatism, as it provides a template for how issues that would be otherwise ignored can be amplified by independent voices creatively using the democratizing and organizing power of the Internet, and meaningful activism achieved.

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I'll be on MSNBC this morning, at 11:40 a.m., discussing the opressive impact of the Defense of Marriage Act on binational same-sex couples, as highlighted by the Out Magazine profile I noted yesterday.

Priorities in the Land of the Free

Millions of Americans are without jobs and are having their homes foreclosed.  The U.S. is currently fighting three out-in-the-open wars (or, if you prefer, one war, one occupation, and one kinetic humanitarian intervention) and several other covert ones.  Financial and political elites are preparing to tell Americans (quite unpersuasively) that they have to sacrifice Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements because the U.S. debt is so large and unmanageable that it threatens to subvert America's superior creditworthiness.  And we're constantly told that civil liberties erosions are necessary to combat the Great Menace of Domestic Terrorism.  So what is our political class focused on, and to what are law enforcement resources being devoted?  First, there's this, from a couple weeks ago:

Nearly half of the members of the U.S. Senate are urging Attorney General Eric Holder to step up federal prosecutions of adult pornography.

In a letter sent to Holder earlier this week, 42 senators encouraged Holder instruct prosecutors and FBI agents to counter what the lawmakers called "the growing scourge of obscenity in America" . . . . The signatures on the letter from socially-conservative Republicans like Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and Jim Demint of South Carolina are unsurprising. However, some fairly liberal Democrats also joined in: Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California, Tom Carper of Delaware and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

And now there's this:

In the wake of a dramatic bust by the Justice Department, the poker industry is in turmoil. Three of the major sites -- PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker -- are inoperable in the U.S. Millions of Americans accustomed to playing cards at home on the top poker websites will need to find some other way to get their poker fix.

Whether the game has a digital future in America is anyone's bet. . . The Justice Department and FBI on Friday announced charges against 11 people, including founders of three top online poker operations, alleging bank fraud, money laundering and illegal gambling offenses. The allegations relate to the poker sites' methods of accepting payments from gamblers, flouting a 2006 federal law that expressly prohibited it. . .

The legality of playing online poker for money is a murky issue. In fact, authorities are going after online poker operators, not individual players. But many regular players have found their accounts frozen by the feds, unable to access their money. "Some players have literally millions of dollars in their online poker accounts," [poker professional Brandon] Adams said. . .

The 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act made it a federal crime to knowingly accept most forms of payment for Internet gambling. That shut off access to U.S. banks, and thus, the ability to accept wagers from U.S. gamblers.

After that law passed, leading online poker companies took operations out of the United States and continued to operate. They reassured players that it was OK to continue playing because account funding was an international transaction, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law.

As a result, if you attempt to visit what had, until days ago, been the world's largest online poker sites, this is the creepy, authoritarian image which greets you -- effectuated, of course, without the need to convict anyone of anything in a court of law:

There are several points worth noting about all this.  First, imagine how the brain functions in a person who spends years and years flattering people and trolling for money in order to get to the Senate, then arrives and, after surveying all of America's problems, decides they're going to focus on stopping adults from viewing pornography and playing poker online.  What does it say about the character and judgment of someone who has those priorities and wants the U.S. Government to adopt them?

Second, Americans in general -- and the Right in particular -- love to boast about what a freedom-loving, liberty-demanding people we are.  Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.  The Rugged Individualists.  Yet one finds not a peep of protest from virtually anyone -- and especially not our small-government, restrained-federal-power "conservatives" -- over this attempt by the Orrin Hatches and Dianne Feinsteins of the world to get together and use the coercive force of law to dictate to adult citizens what they can read online and how they can spend their money for entertainment or profit.  If you're someone willing to let Orrin Hatch and Dianne Feinstein make decisions like this for you -- ones that are about as personal, private and consensual as it gets -- then on what basis do you claim to oppose invasive federal government power and rail against "politicians who think they know what's best for us"?  Tellingly, it's a liberal Democrat, Barney Frank, who has been the most outspoken opponent of online gambling bans on the ground that it's none of the government's business how adults choose to spend their money on entertainment.

Third, how can any politicians be taken seriously when they claim that Terrorism is some sort of grave threat meriting multiple wars and civil liberties abridgments -- homegrown Terrorism and sleeper cells and all that -- while they simultaneously demand that scarce FBI and DOJ resources be devoted to adult porn and online poker?

Fourth, I once believed that the greatest myth in American political discourse was "The Liberal Media."  I've realized I was wrong.  "The Liberal Media" is indeed an absurd, self-evident myth, but the greatest myth is that there is too little bipartisanship in Washington.  There is very little but that.

Fifth, one of the most reliable rules in Washington is this:  whenever there is some liberty-abridging, pernicious, authoritarian action taken in the nation's capital, one finds the pro-war, ossified establishment oligarch Dianne Feinstein lurking behind it.  And that, of course, highlights the truth of the fourth point quite vividly.  That Donald Trump is a leading presidential candidate is an excellent symbol of America's political culture in this era, but the image of Dianne Feinstein and Orrin Hatch gathering together to decide which websites adults should be allowed to visit and how they can entertain themselves is an equally appropriate one.

* * * * *

Out Magazine has a newly published, lengthy profile of me that is much more personal than I'm accustomed to and typically comfortable with, but that's the nature of profiles like this.  Those interested can read it here.

Obama v. Obama on signing statements

The issue of signing statements is more complex than the political controversy over them suggests. When condemning Bush/Cheney lawlessness, I rarely focused on their use of signing statements. That was true for several reasons.

There's nothing inherently illegitimate about a President's expressing his view on various laws. It's vastly preferable for a President to openly declare his intent to violate the law than to do so secretly. Signing statements themselves are just instruments for conveying constitutional views of the law; whether they're truly odious depends upon the view that is being expressed (what made Bush so radical were the theories of executive omnipotence he embraced, not his use of signing statements to express those views).

And a reasonable argument can be made (though it's not one I share) that a President's duty to uphold the Constitution can sometimes be advanced more by refusing to execute an unconstitutional than by enforcing it; that view, at least for some, is a critical part of the formal definition of the "unitary theory of the executive" and is something right-wing theorists (and now Obama supporters) have long maintained (I ultimately reject that view because the constitutionally legitimate means for a President to object to an unconstitutional law is to veto it, not violate it; moreover, the power to declare laws unconstitutional lies with courts, not the President). But all of those issues introduce nuance into the question of signing statements that is often lacking in the political discussions they've triggered.

But there was no such nuance present when Barack Obama, during a 2008 campaign rally, made his position known on signing statements.  After being asked by an audience member whether he would "promise" not to use signing statements to override Congressional statutes, he stated simply "yes," and then elaborated as follows:

There is no ambiguity in that vow: none at all. He explicitly promised not to use signing statements to nullify Congressional statutes he thought were invalid. Citing his credentials as a Constitutional Law professor, Obama explained that "Congress' job is to pass legislation," and when that happens, a President has only two options: "the President can veto it or sign it." In contrast to Bush -- who, Obama said, "has been saying 'I can change what Congress passed by attaching a statement saying I don't agree with this part, I'm going to choose to interpret it this way or that way'" -- Obama said he, by contrast, believes "that's not part of [the President's] power." He punctuated his answer as follows: "we're not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress." It just doesn't get any clearer than that.

But on Friday, Obama did exactly that which he vowed in that answer he would never do. When signing the budget bill into law, he attached a signing statement objecting to some provisions as an encroachment on executive power but still vowing to obey them (such as restrictions on transferring Guantanamo detainees), but then explicitly stated that he would ignore the provision of this new law that de-funds his so-called "czars" (which are really little more than glorified presidential advisers). Declaring that the Executive has the unfettered "authority to supervise and oversee the executive branch" -- i.e., asserting another critical aspect of the "unitary theory of the Executive" -- Obama declared that "the executive branch will construe [the de-funding provision] not to abrogate these Presidential prerogatives." In other words, we're going to ignore that mandate because we believe it's unconstitutional.

It is true that there's a reasonable argument to make about the unconstitutionality of that de-funding provision. It's a close call, as Article II does vest the executive power in the President, which presumably includes the power to decide how to structure his team of advisers.  But even the most ardent defenders of executive power have always maintained that Congress' most potent Constitutional power is to de-fund what it dislikes without restriction (even John Yoo -- the ultimate defender of Executive authority -- acknowledged during the Bush years that the Democratic Congress had the power to de-fund the Iraq War and any other Bush policies it disliked: "The fact is, Congress has every power to end the war -- if it really wanted to. It has the power of the purse," Yoo wrote).

It's also true that Obama has, in other instances, provided more nuanced answers about his views of signing statements than the one he gave in the clip above; when answering the executive power questionnaire from The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage, for example, Obama vaguely asserted hat "no one doubts that it is appropriate to use signing statements to protect a president's constitutional prerogatives", but then added: "it is a clear abuse of power to use such statements as a license to evade laws that the president does not like or as an end-run around provisions designed to foster accountability" and explicitly vowed: "I will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law." That, too, seems clear -- he will not use signing statements to ignore laws -- but at least there was a bit of rhetorical nuance there.

But the vow he made in that campaign speech was unambiguous: he said the only two options a President has when faced with a bill is to sign or veto it, and that "we're not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress." Regardless of one's views on signing statements or the "czar" de-funding law, then, there is simply no question that Obama is now asserting exactly the power that, when demagoguing this issue during the campaign, he insisted was illegitimate and he would not exercise. What kind of person would justify that?

It's exactly the same issue as his decision to order U.S. involvement in the attack on Libya without Congressional approval. I firmly believe that a President lacks the authority to order the U.S. to participate in a war without Congressional approval, but many people differ on that. There's a reasonable debate (barely) to be had on that question. But what is 100% clear and indisputable is that Obama, when trying to convince Americans to elect him as President, took the exact opposite position as the one he now maintains. He said in that Boston Globe questionnaire, as clearly as possible, that "the President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation"; he added that only "in instances of self-defense" would "the President [] be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent."

No minimally honest or rational person can reconcile the President's Friday signing statement with the vow he gave during that campaign event, nor can any such person reconcile his claimed war powers with the view he emphatically expressed during the campaign. And, of course, the list of similar departures from his own claimed views during the campaign is depressingly long: from railing against the evils of habeas corpus denial to fighting to deny habeas review to Bagram detainees; from vowing to protect whistleblowers to waging the most aggressive war in American history against them; from condemning the evils of writing bills via secret meetings with industry lobbyists to writing his health care bill using exactly that process; from insisting that Presidents have no power to detain or even eavesdrop on Americans without due process to asserting the power to assassinate Americans without due process, etc. etc. etc.

It would be one thing if these full-scale reversals were on ancillary issues. But these are fundamental. They're about the powers of that office and the nature of our government. And Obama made these issues the centerpiece of his campaign.  These campaign statements are nothing less than vows made to voters about how he would exercise the power he was seeking if they voted for him.  To insist during the campaign that Presidents have no power to start wars without Congress or to ignore laws the President believes are unconstitutional -- and then do exactly that once he's been vested with that power -- is a form of fraud. Whatever one thinks about the policies in question on the merits, it should be impossible to defend or justify the radical inconsistency between what he pretended to believe and what he's doing.

Mission transformation in Libya

(updated below)

Barack Obama, March 28, 2011, explaining America's involvement in the war in Libya:

Of course, there is no question that Libya -– and the world –- would be better off with Qaddafi out of power. I, along with many other world leaders, have embraced that goal, and will actively pursue it through non-military means. But broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.

Barack Obama, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy, joint Op-Ed, yesterday:

The bombing continues until Gaddafi goes

Our duty and our mandate under UN Security Council Resolution 1973 is to protect civilians, and we are doing that. It is not to remove Gaddafi by force. . . . However, so long as Gaddafi is in power, Nato and its coalition partners must maintain their operations so that civilians remain protected and the pressure on the regime builds. Then a genuine transition from dictatorship to an inclusive constitutional process can really begin, led by a new generation of leaders. For that transition to succeed, Colonel Gaddafi must go, and go for good.

Whatever one thinks about this war limited humanitarian intervention on the merits, this is not the mission that Obama cited when justifying America's involvement. It's the opposite:  "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake" v. "so long as Gaddafi is in power, Nato and its coalition partners must maintain their operations." To claim that "regime change" is subsumbed under the goal of "protecting civilians" is to define that objective so broadly as to render it meaningless and, independently, is to violate Obama's explicit decree at the start that regime change would not be the military goal.  Finally, note the blithe dismissal of the very limited U.N. Resolution that initially justified all this: it does not provide for regime change in Libya by force, acknowledged the three leaders, but that, in essence, is what we're going to do anyway (continue "operations" until he's gone).

* * * * *

Two other points: (1) Juan Cole had posed questions to me the week before last regarding the U.S. mission in Libya; I was unable to answer them due to extensive travels that week, but most of his commenters thoroughly supplied the answers I would have:  in particular, the notion that NATO's actions exist prior to and separate from the U.S.'s will is a fiction. "NATO" could and would fight a war like this only if the U.S. wanted that to happen.

(2) I was scheduled to speak next week at Berkeley, Stanford, Claremont McKenna and a couple of other California events, but due to circumstances beyond my control, I'm now unable to travel that week and was forced to cancel those events.  My apologies to the event sponsors and anyone else inconvenienced by my cancellation.

 

UPDATE:  Writing yesterday in The Boston Globe, University of Texas Professor Alan Kuperman makes a compelling case "that President Barack Obama grossly exaggerated the humanitarian threat to justify military action in Libya."  He also argues that "US interference has prolonged Libya's civil war and the resultant suffering of innocents."  I'm not adopting all of his arguments, but they are well-argued and definitely worth reading.

The two-tiered justice system: an illustration

Of all the topics on which I've focused, I've likely written most about America's two-tiered justice system -- the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world's largest prison state and most merciless justice system. That full-scale destruction of the rule of law is also the topic of my forthcoming book. But The New York Times this morning has a long article so perfectly illustrating what I mean by "two-tiered justice system" -- and the way in which it obliterates the core covenant of the American Founding: equality before the law -- that it's impossible for me not to highlight it.

The article's headline tells most of the story: "In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures." It asks: "why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?" And it recounts that not only have no high-level culprits been indicted (or even subjected to meaningful criminal investigations), but few have suffered any financial repercussions in the form of civil enforcements or other lawsuits. The evidence of rampant criminality that led to the 2008 financial crisis is overwhelming, but perhaps the clearest and most compelling such evidence comes from long-time Wall-Street-servant Alan Greenspan; even he was forced to acknowledge that much of the precipitating conduct was "certainly illegal and clearly criminal" and that "a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud."

Despite that clarity and abundance of the evidence proving pervasive criminality, it's entirely unsurprising that there have been no real criminal investigations or prosecutions. That's because the overarching "principle" of our justice system is that criminal prosecutions are only for ordinary rabble, not for those who are most politically and financially empowered. We have thus created precisely the two-tiered justice system against which the Founders most stridently warned and which contemporary legal scholars all agree is the hallmark of a lawless political culture. Lest there be any doubt about that claim, just consider the following facts and events:

When Bush officials were revealed to have established a worldwide torture regime (including tactics which Obama's Attorney General flatly stated were illegal) and spied on Americans without the warrants required by law (which Obama himself insisted was criminal), what happened? This, from The New York Times, January 11, 2009:

And when Spanish prosecutors decided, in light of Obama's refusal, that it would criminally investigate the torture by American officials to which its citizens were subjected by the U.S., what happened? This, from Mother Jones, December 1, 2010:

When telecoms get caught participating in Bush's illegal eavesdropping program in violation of multiple federal statutes, what happened? This, from TPM, February 12, 2008:

And that, in turn, led to this, from The New York Times, June 3, 2009:

And when the CIA got caught destroying videotapes of its "interrogation" sessions with accused Terrorists even in the face of multiple court orders directing that they preserve such evidence -- acts which even the establishment-serving, rhetorically restrained co-Chairmen of the 9/11 Commission strongly suggested constituted "obstruction" of justice -- what happened? This, from Politico, November 9, 2010:

And when it came time to decide what to do with one of the most brazen and egregious lawbreakers in the financial world -- former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, whose fraud was so glaring that he was one of the very few to suffer any consequences (forced to pay a paltry $40 million out of his $500 million fortune) -- what happened? This, from AP, February 10, 2011:

All of that stands in the starkest possible contrast to how ordinary Americans -- especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities -- are treated by this same "justice system": with incomparably harsh and merciless punishment. From The New York Times, April 23, 2008:

The virtually full-scale immunity now vested in political and financial elites stands in just as stark contrast to the treatment received by those who reveal wrongdoing, corruption and illegality by those elites -- from The New York Times, June 11, 2010:

And, from CBS News, March 11, 2011:

And this overflowing forgiveness and generosity toward elites stands in starkest contrast to foreign nationals accused of Terrorism, who are literally rendered non-persons and denied all rights - from The Washington Post, March 11, 2011:

And, from the ACLU, September 15, 2009:

In a 1795 letter, George Washington vowed that "the executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity." Thomas Jefferson -- in an April 16, 1784, letter to Washington -- argued that the foundation on which American justice must rest is "the denial of every preeminence." It's literally difficult to imagine how we could be further away from those core principles. That the culprits who caused one of the worst financial crises in modern history have been fully shielded from the consequences of their acts -- set along side the torturers and illegal eavesdroppers who have been similarly protected -- illustrates that quite compellingly.

Obama's "bad negotiating" is actually shrewd negotiating

In December, President Obama signed legislation to extend hundreds of billions of dollars in Bush tax cuts, benefiting the wealthiest Americans. Last week, Obama agreed to billions of dollars in cuts that will impose the greatest burden on the poorest Americans. And now, virtually everyone in Washington believes, the President is about to embark on a path that will ultimately lead to some type of reductions in Social Security, Medicare and/or Medicaid benefits under the banner of "reform." Tax cuts for the rich -- budget cuts for the poor -- "reform" of the Democratic Party's signature safety net programs -- a continuation of Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies and a new Middle East war launched without Congressional approval. That's quite a legacy combination for a Democratic President.

All of that has led to a spate of negotiation advice from the liberal punditocracy advising the President how he can better defend progressive policy aims -- as though the Obama White House deeply wishes for different results but just can't figure out how to achieve them. Jon Chait, Josh Marshall, and Matt Yglesias all insist that the President is "losing" on these battles because of bad negotiating strategy, and will continue to lose unless it improves. Ezra Klein says "it makes absolutely no sense" that Democrats didn't just raise the debt ceiling in December, when they had the majority and could have done it with no budget cuts. Once it became clear that the White House was not following their recommended action of demanding a "clean" vote on raising the debt ceiling -- thus ensuring there will be another, probably larger round of budget cuts -- Yglesias lamented that the White House had "flunked bargaining 101." Their assumption is that Obama loathes these outcomes but is the victim of his own weak negotiating strategy.

I don't understand that assumption at all. Does anyone believe that Obama and his army of veteran Washington advisers are incapable of discovering these tactics on their own or devising better strategies for trying to avoid these outcomes if that's what they really wanted to do? What evidence is there that Obama has some inner, intense desire for more progressive outcomes? These are the results they're getting because these are the results they want -- for reasons that make perfectly rational political sense.

Conventional D.C. wisdom -- that which Obama vowed to subvert but has done as much as any President to bolster -- has held for decades that Democratic Presidents succeed politically by being as "centrist" or even as conservative as possible. That attracts independents, diffuses GOP enthusiasm, casts the President as a triangulating conciliator, and generates raves from the DC press corps -- all while keeping more than enough Democrats and progressives in line through a combination of anti-GOP fear-mongering and partisan loyalty.

Isn't that exactly the winning combination that will maximize the President's re-election chances? Just consider the polling data on last week's budget cuts, which most liberal commentators scorned. Americans support the "compromise" by a margin of 58-38%; that support includes a majority of independents, substantial GOP factions, and 2/3 of Democrats. Why would Democrats overwhelmingly support domestic budget cuts that burden the poor? Because, as Yglesias correctly observed, "just about anything Barack Obama does will be met with approval by most Democrats." In other words, once Obama lends his support to a policy -- no matter how much of a departure it is from ostensible Democratic beliefs -- then most self-identified Democrats will support it because Obama supports it, because it then becomes the "Democratic policy," by definition. Adopting "centrist" or even right-wing policies will always produce the same combination -- approval of independents, dilution of GOP anger, media raves, and continued Democratic voter loyalty -- that is ideal for the President's re-election prospects.

That tactic in the context of economic policy has the added benefit of keeping corporate and banking money on Obama's side (where it overwhelmingly was in 2008), or at least preventing a massive influx to GOP coffers. And just look at the team of economic advisers surrounding Obama from the start: does anyone think that Bill Daley, Tim Geithner and his army of Rubin acolytes and former Goldman Sachs executives are sitting around in rooms desperately trying to prevent budget cuts and entitlement "reforms"?

Why would Obama possibly want to do anything different? Why would he possibly want a major political war over the debt ceiling where he looks like a divisive figure and looks to be opposing budget cuts? Why would he possibly want to draw a line in the sand defending Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security from any "reforms"? There would be only two reasons to do any of that: (1) fear that he would lose too much of his base if he compromised with the GOP in these areas, or (2) a genuine conviction that such compromises are morally or economically intolerable. Since he so plainly lacks both -- a fear of losing the base or genuine convictions about this or anything else -- there's simply nothing to drive him to fight for those outcomes.

Like most first-term Presidents after two years, Obama is preoccupied with his re-election, and perceives -- not unreasonably -- that that goal is best accomplished by adopting GOP policies. The only factor that could subvert that political calculation -- fear that he could go too far and cause Democratic voters not to support him -- is a fear that he simply does not have: probably for good reason. In fact, not only does Obama not fear alienating progressive supporters, the White House seems to view that alienation as a positive, as it only serves to bolster Obama's above-it-all, centrist credentials. Here's what CNN's White House Correspondent Ed Henry and Gloria Borger said last night about the upcoming fight over entitlements and the debt ceiling:

Henry: I was talking to a senior Democrat who advises the White House, outside the White House today who was saying look, every time this president sits down with Speaker Boehner, to Gloria's point about negotiating skills, the president seems to give up another 5 billion dollars, 10 billion dollars, 20 billions dollars. It' s like the spending cuts keep going up. If you think about where the congressional Democrats started a couple of months ago they were talking about no spending cuts on the table. It keeps going up.

But this president has a much different reality than congressional Democrats.

Borger (sagely): Right.

Henry: He's going for re-election, him going to the middle and having liberal Democrats mad at him is not a bad thing.

Borger: Exactly.

That's why I experience such cognitive dissonance when I read all of these laments from liberal pundits that Obama isn't pursuing the right negotiating tactics, that he's not being as shrewd as he should be. He's pursuing exactly the right negotiating tactics and is being extremely shrewd -- he just doesn't want the same results that these liberal pundits want and which they like to imagine the President wants, too. He's not trying to prevent budget cuts or entitlement reforms; he wants exactly those things because of how politically beneficial they are to him -- to say nothing of whether he agrees with them on the merits.

When I first began blogging five years ago, I used to write posts like that all the time. I'd lament that Democrats weren't more effectively opposing Bush/Cheney National Security State policies or defending civil liberties. I'd attribute those failures to poor strategizing or a lack of political courage and write post after post urging them to adopt better tactics to enable better outcomes or be more politically "strong." But then I realized that they weren't poor tacticians getting stuck with results they hated. They simply weren't interested in generating the same outcomes as the ones I wanted.

It wasn't that they eagerly wished to defeat these Bush policies but just couldn't figure out how to do it. The opposite was true: they were content to acquiesce to those policies, if not outright supportive of them, because they perceived no political advantage in doing anything else. Many of them supported those policies on the merits while many others were perfectly content with their continuation. So I stopped trying to give them tactical advice on how to achieve outcomes they didn't really want to achieve, and stopped attributing their failures to oppose these policies to bad strategizing or political cowardice. Instead, I simply accepted that these were the outcomes they most wanted, that Democratic Party officials on the whole -- obviously with some exceptions -- weren't working toward the outcomes I had originally assumed (and which they often claimed). Once you accept that reality, events in Washington make far more sense.

That Obama's agenda includes an affirmative desire for serious budget cuts and entitlement "reforms" has been glaringly obvious from the start; it's not some unintended, recent by-product of Tea Party ascendancy. Since before Obama was even inaugurated, Digby has been repeatedly warning of his support for a so-called "Grand Bargain" that would include cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And Jane Hamsher and had a fairly acrimonious exchange very early on in the Obama presidency over the former's observation that Obama officials were expressly advocating cuts in Social Security while Klein insisted that this would never happen (yesterday, Klein reported that Obama would be supportive of Bowles-Simpson, which proposes deep cuts to Social Security, and boasted of his anticipation weeks ago that this would happen). Before Obama's inauguration, I wrote that the most baffling thing to me about the enthusiasm of his hardest-core supporters was the belief that he was pioneering a "new form of politics" when, it seemed obvious, it was just a re-branded re-tread of Clintonian triangulation and the same "centrist", scorn-the-base playbook Democratic politicians had used for decades.

What amazes me most is the brazen claims of presidential impotence necessary to excuse all of this. Atrios has written for weeks about the "can't do" spirit that has overtaken the country generally, but that mindset pervades how the President's supporters depict both him and the powers of his office: no bad outcomes are ever his fault because he's just powerless in the face of circumstance. That claim is being made now by pointing to a GOP Congress, but the same claim was made when there was a Democratic Congress as well: recall the disagreements I had with his most loyal supporters in 2009 and 2010 over their claims that he was basically powerless even to influence his own party's policy-making in Congress.

Such excuse-making stands in very sharp contrast to what we heard in 2008 and what we will hear again in 2012: that the only thing that matters is that Obama win the Presidency because of how powerful and influential an office it is, how disaster will befall us all if this vast power falls into Republican hands. It also contradicts the central promise of the Obama candidacy: that he would change, rather than bolster, the standard power dynamic in Washington. And it is especially inconsistent with Obama's claimed desire to be a "transformational" President in much the way that Ronald Reagan was (but, Obama said to such controversy, Bill Clinton was not). Gaudy claims of Fundamental Change and Transformation and Yes, We Can! have given way to an endless parade of excuse-making that he's powerless, weak and there's nothing he can do.

Obama's most loyal supporters often mock the notion that a President's greatest power is his "bully pulpit," but there's no question that this is true. Reagan was able to transform how Americans perceived numerous political issues because he relentlessly argued for his ideological and especially economic world-view: a rising tide lifts all boats, government is not the solution but is the problem, etc. -- a whole slew of platitudes and slogans that convinced Americans that conservative economic policy was optimal despite how much it undermined their own economic interests. Reagan was "transformational" because he changed conventional wisdom and those premises continue to pervade our political discourse.

When has Obama ever done any of that? When does he offer stirring, impassioned defenses of the Democrats' vision on anything, or attempt to transform (rather than dutifully follow) how Americans think about anything? It's not that he lacks the ability to do that. Americans responded to him as an inspirational figure and his skills of oratory are as effective as any politician in our lifetime. It's that he evinces no interest in it. He doesn't try because those aren't his goals. It's not that he or the office of the Presidency are powerless to engender other outcomes; it's that he doesn't use the power he has to achieve them because, quite obviously, achieving them is not his priority or even desire.

Whether in economic policy, national security, civil liberties, or the permanent consortium of corporate power that runs Washington, Obama, above all else, is content to be (one could even say eager to be) guardian of the status quo. And the forces of the status quo want tax cuts for the rich, serious cuts in government spending that don't benefit them (social programs and progressive regulatory schemes), and entitlement "reform" -- so that's what Obama will do. He won't advocate, and will actually oppose, steps as extreme as the ones Paul Ryan is proposing: that's how he will retain his "centrist" political identity and keep the fear levels high among his voting base. He'll pay lip service to some Democratic economic dogma and defend some financially inconsequential culture war positions: that's how he will signal to the base that he's still on their side. But the direction will be the same as the GOP desires and, most importantly, how the most powerful economic factions demand: not because he can't figure out how to change that dynamic, but because that's what benefits him and thus what he wants.

Ironically, Obama is turning out to be "transformational" in his own way -- by taking what was once the defining GOP approach to numerous policy areas and converting them into Democratic ones, and thus ensconcing them in the invulnerable protective shield of "bipartisan consensus." As Digby put it: "Reagan was a hard-core ideologue who didn't just tweak some processes but radically changed the prevailing conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, Obama is actually extending the Reagan consensus, even as he pursues his own agenda of creating a Grand Bargain that will bring peace among the dueling parties (a dubious goal in itself.)" That has been one of the most consequential outcomes of the first two years of his presidency in terms of Terrorism and civil liberties, and is now being consecrated in the realm of economic policy as well.