Tag Archives: Newshoggers

Bush Taught, Obama Learned

20 Monday Jun 2011

Posted by in Congress, Constitution, George W. Bush, Justice Department, Libya, Obama, Politics

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From an editorial in the St. Petersburg Times, May 21, 2006, via Newshoggers:

“[T]he changes that George W. Bush has made to our nation’s constitutional firmament may not depart with the first family’s bags. His disregard for the separation of powers has so dramatically distorted the office of the president that he may have engineered a turning point in American history.

…Bush has taught tomorrow’s leaders that, if there are no consequences for ignoring legal constraints on power and if no one stops you from conducting the nation’s business in secret, you don’t have to be accountable. He is ruling through the tautological doctrine of Richard Nixon, who told interviewer David Frost that as long as the president’s doing it “that means it is not illegal.”

…Holding the executive branch to account for its actions, demanding that it respect the law and insisting that it fully report to Congress on its activities – these are nonnegotiable duties of Congress, because they are key part of our inheritance.

Being answerable to another is humbling. It makes you more careful in your actions. It requires that you consider how you will defend your decisions. George Bush has freed himself of this constitutional imperative and is showing the next president, and the next, how it is done.”

Bush taught, Obama learned, as evidenced by recent events. Like the expansion of the FBI’s investigative powers:

“The Obama administration has long been bumbling along in the footsteps of its predecessor when it comes to sacrificing Americans’ basic rights and liberties under the false flag of fighting terrorism. Now the Obama team seems ready to lurch even farther down that dismal road than George W. Bush did.

Instead of tightening the relaxed rules for F.B.I. investigations — not just of terrorism suspects but of pretty much anyone — that were put in place in the Bush years, President Obama’s Justice Department is getting ready to push the proper bounds of privacy even further.”

Like ignoring the advice of the Attorney General, the Pentagon general counsel, and the head of the Office of Legal Counsel on the president’s convoluted definition of “hostilities”:

“President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

…Other high-level Justice lawyers were also involved in the deliberations, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. supported Ms. Krass’s view, officials said.”

But the Executive’s ability to expand power and ignore existing law becomes easier with idiots like Lindsey Graham ready, willing, and able to lend a helping hand with statements such as this:

“Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Sunday that Congress should not interfere with U.S. operations in Libya. “Congress should sort of shut up and not empower Qadhafi,” Graham said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Pull out that copy of the Constitution that I’m sure is in your coat pocket, Sen. Graham. See what it says about Congress’ responsibilities and duties relating to the declaration and funding of war. I don’t think “shut up” is among them.

Vietnam Redux

22 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by in Afghanistan, Iraq, war on terror

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The ever-increasing toll that an endless number of deployments necessitated by our state of perpetual war is taking on our soldiers. In Iraq:

“When Lt. Col. Dave Wilson took command of a battalion of the 4th Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, the unit had just returned to Texas from 14 months traveling some of Iraq’s most dangerous roads as part of a logistics mission.

What he found, he said, was a unit far more damaged than the single death it had suffered in its two deployments to Iraq.

Nearly 70 soldiers in his 1,163-member battalion had tested positive for drugs: methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana. Others were abusing prescription drugs. Troops were passing around a tape of a female lieutenant having sex with five soldiers from the unit. Seven soldiers in the brigade died from drug overdoses and traffic accidents when they returned to Fort Bliss, near El Paso, after their first deployment.”

In Afghanistan:

“The U.S. soldiers hatched a plan as simple as it was savage: to randomly target and kill an Afghan civilian, and to get away with it…For weeks, according to Army charging documents, rogue members of a platoon from the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, floated the idea. Then, one day last winter, a solitary Afghan man approached them in the village of La Mohammed Kalay. The “kill team” activated the plan.

One soldier created a ruse that they were under attack, tossing a fragmentary grenade on the ground. Then others opened fire…According to charging documents, the unprovoked, fatal attack on Jan. 15 was the start of a months-long shooting spree against Afghan civilians that resulted in some of the grisliest allegations against American soldiers since the U.S. invasion in 2001. Members of the platoon have been charged with dismembering and photographing corpses, as well as hoarding a skull and other human bones.”

Steve Hynd at Newshoggers (my emphasis):

“Drug abuse and suicide rates are at record highs, misdemeanours committed while in uniform have almost doubled in the last five years, sexual assaults by those in uniform have trippled since 2001.

Over a million US servicemen and women have passed through Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. Estimates on how many suffer from some form of PTSD-related illness range from 40-60%. If current psychological data on how mental illness spreads its hurt like ripples in a pool are any guide, each of them will adversly affect between five and twelve friends and close family, who will see negative behavioural changes themselves ranging from mild PTSD-like symptoms to full shell-shock caused by a mentally ill but still abusive partner or parent.

And this is why you should care. The American victims of Bush’s adventures, continued by Obama, are your brothers, sisters, parents, spouses and friends. Their troubles will affect your sister, your brother…you get the idea. This is one area where both Iraq and Afghanistan are like Vietnam.

Bring them ALL home.“

America’s Longest War Drags On, and On, and On, and….

11 Friday Jun 2010

Posted by in Afghanistan, Obama administration, Politics, war on terror

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As America’s longest war drags on, and on, and on…. the two operative phrases seem to be “ still a long way to go” and “taking longer than expected.” In Marjah (McChrystal’s “bleeding ulcer”):

“Residents of this onetime Taliban sanctuary see signs that the insurgents have regained momentum in recent weeks, despite early claims of success by U.S. Marines. The longer-than-expected effort to secure Marja is prompting alarm among top American commanders that they will not be able to change the course of the war in the time President Obama has given them.”

In the time President Obama has given them or ever, it appears.

“We’ve come a long way,” said Lt. Col. Cal Worth, the commander of one of the two Marine infantry battalions in Marja. “But there’s still a long way to go.”

In Kandahar:

“On Thursday, during a visit to NATO headquarters here, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal admitted that preparations for perhaps the most critical operation of the war — the campaign to take control of Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace — weren’t going as planned. He said winning support from local leaders, some of whom see the Taliban fighters not as oppressors but as their Muslim brothers, was proving tougher than expected. The military side of the campaign, originally scheduled to surge in June and finish by August, is now likely to extend into the fall.”

There’s also some backpedaling on the importance of Kandahar:

“In March, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, described Kandahar as Afghanistan’s “center of gravity” and the key to reversing the Taliban’s momentum this year, Obama’s goal when he ordered the troop surge in December.

But Gates on Wednesday made clear he believed Kandahar was one part of the equation.

“Kandahar and Helmand are important but they are not the only provinces in Afghanistan that matter in terms of the outcome of this struggle,” he said.”

“Only one part of the equation?” Derrick Crowe at Newshoggers has this chart from the Pentagon’s most recent Afghanistan report to Congress:


So which is it? Meanwhile the casualties mount, 23 Americans killed so far this month. And suicide and attempted suicide rates in every branch of the military are at all-time highs.

How much longer? How much more blood and treasure are we going to pour into this Graveyard of Empires? How long before we realize that this country that’s not really a country but just an area on the map with lines drawn around it is an unwinnable, unfixable quagmire? How long before we stop repeating history and learn from it?

Nobody seems to know.

Proud of War Crimes?

14 Sunday Mar 2010

Posted by in Politics, terrorism, torture, war on terror

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Proud to be war criminals—the sad, and sadly enduring, legacy of the Bush administration, which the so-called “brain” of that dark period in our history continued to attempt to rationalize and justify in a recent interview with the BBC:

“A senior adviser to former US President George W Bush has defended tough interrogation techniques, saying their use helped prevent terrorist attacks…In a BBC interview, Karl Rove, who was known as “Bush’s brain”, said he “was proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists”…He said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, should not be considered torture.”

…Mr Rove said US soldiers were subjected to waterboarding as a regular part of their training…A less severe form of the technique was used on the three suspects interrogated at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, he added.”

“Simulates drowning” and a “less severe from of the technique?” Not so says someone who has been there, Malcolm Nance (emphasis added) :

“As a former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, I know the waterboard personally and intimately. Our staff was required to undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception.

Having been subjected to this technique, I can say: It is risky but not entirely dangerous when applied in training for a very short period. However, when performed on an unsuspecting prisoner, waterboarding is a torture technique – without a doubt. There is no way to sugarcoat it.

In the media, waterboarding is called “simulated drowning,” but that’s a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning.”

I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school’s interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques employed by the Army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What is less frequently reported is that our training was designed to show how an evil totalitarian enemy would use torture at the slightest whim.

Rove reiterated his pride later in the interview:

“Yes, I’m proud that we kept the world safer than it was, by the use of these techniques. They’re appropriate, they’re in conformity with our international requirements and with US law.”

No they aren’t. Our “international requirements” [the Convention Against Torture] and U.S. law [U.S. Code, Title 18, Chapter 113 C]  both forbid and prescribe punishment for torture.

“Mr Rove has just written a memoir, Courage and Consequence, in which he defends the two terms of the Bush administration as “impressive, durable and significant.”

BJ Bjornson at Newshoggers:

“Well, I’ll go with significant, at least. Significant in that Bush’s two terms took the US from the acknowledged leader of the Free World, respected if not loved, to just another world hegemony that most people won’t mind seeing pass into history at this point. While Obama has repaired a bit of the damage Bush has done, the lack of any prosecutions over the war crimes that people like Rove and Cheney now flaunt to the world has left most of us rather less than impressed.”