At some point I'll get tired of saying it, but the fact is that the US
government has been taken over by a quiet, not too violent, Military
Coop.
Even as President Eisenhower warned us, as he left office, to beware
of the Military/Industrial Complex, the dye was cast. The problem
really began with our victory in WW II. Overloaded with military
paraphernalia, along with a gaggle of generals needing a good war to
advance their personal ambitions, we unloaded on Korea. Korea posed
no threat to our American Way of Life, but it was sold to us, and off
our young working class boys marched. Despite much posturing and
ranting, no president since FDR has been able to curb the veracious
appetite of our Industrial/Military Complex. This military machine
has united the so-called two political parties, so far as our foreign
policies are concerned. There is only one Party, the Pentagon Party.
.
At home we still believe we have choices, and perhaps we do. We can
choose ..between the hard nosed Donald Trump or the wishy washy
blather of Hillary Clinton. As long as these are the choices, the
Pentagon can rest easy and focus on its need to dominate. Bernie
Sanders or even Jill Stein can not alter our downward spiral on the
home front. All of our resources are being sucked off in order to
feed the ravenous appetite of the Empire's Monster. And sadly, the
few uprisings by the American People, are not focused on the cause of
our decline. But if any improvement is to be had, it must come from
the People, the Working Class.
These are grim but interesting times.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/4/16, Bob Hachey <bhachey@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi all,
Here’s an interesting article. IT partially describes what looks like a
very
good book entitled war Powers by Charlie Savage.
Bob Hachey
How George Bush’s war on terror ensnared Barack Obama
By Eli Lake
Posted: Jan. 01, 2016
Charlie Savage's new history of the Barack Obama administration's war on
terror is the kind of book that should be quoted at outdoor "citizen
tribunals"
and read aloud to throngs waving papier-mâché puppets of Skeletor-Obama.
Such demonstrations are not my kind of thing. I don't think Obama is a war
criminal. Neither does Charlie Savage. But in his new book, "Power Wars,"
the
author makes a meticulous case that, with few exceptions, Obama preserved a
long war on terror that many progressives in the 2000s regarded as
criminal.
This was not necessarily how Obama set out to conduct his presidency, but
as
many generals are fond of saying, the enemy has a vote. As Savage, a
reporter
at the New York Times, wryly observes at the end of the book: "One way of
looking at this is that Obama entrenched the Forever War. Another is that
the
Forever War ensnared him."
This entrenchment and ensnarement is self-evident today. After all, Obama
said the 2001 authorization for war against al- Qaida applied to the
special
operations and air war he launched against the Islamic State in 2014. In
fact, Obama was making his peace with Bush's long war as early as Christmas
Day,
2009, when a troubled young man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab nearly blew
up a plane over Detroit with a bomb in his underwear.
The underwear bombing incident was both a political and policy jolt for
Obama. The tug and pull between security and reform that existed in the
first year
of his presidency effectively ended then, according to Savage, and a kind
of
retrenchment began.
The value that Savage brings to his book is in reporting out how Obama's
lawyers, who were often the toughest critics of Bush when they were out of
power,
wrestled with and ultimately sanctioned this retrenchment.
To understand this process, one must begin with the Bush years. In his
first
term particularly, Bush asserted a limitless wartime authority to disregard
Congress and existing law so as to wage the new war on terror. Over time,
these powers were curtailed by the courts, Congress, political opposition
and
some of his own lawyers. By the time Obama came into office, many of the
most controversial Bush-era programs were either approved by statute, such
as
the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which
Obama voted for as a senator), or revoked altogether, such as the CIA's use
of
waterboarding.
While Obama at times gave the impression that he shared the civil-liberties
concerns of many of his supporters, he was less opposed as president to
many
of these programs than he was to the broader idea that the president's
wartime authorities allowed him to disregard existing statutes. In
practice,
this
meant that Obama pursued a reform of process and not a curtailment of
powers. This rule-of-law critique, as Savage calls it, helps explain how
Obama often
arrived at the same place as his predecessor on many of the activities and
programs that outraged his base when they began under Bush.
There are two exceptions. The first is torture, which Obama banned on his
second day in office. The other is the Guantanamo Bay detention facility,
which
Obama promised to close on his second day in office. Obama tells Savage in
the book that if he could do it all over again, he would have begun moving
the
detainees from Guantanamo in his first year, instead of waiting while
Congress imposed new restrictions on such transfers.
In some cases though, Obama expanded the powers of the executive in the war
on terror. For example, his policies allowed for the raw telephone records
of Americans — collected by the NSA — to be shared with other government
agencies like the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Obama's
Justice
Department prosecuted more leakers of national security information than
any
of his predecessors. (Although these prosecutions stemmed from a Justice
Department
task force on leaks that began under Bush.) He and the CIA took advantage
of
improving technology and bipartisan support to expand the drone wars in
Pakistan
and Somalia.
The Obama approach did at times impose new limits on the long war. Savage
recounts how the State Department's general counsel, Harold Koh, pored over
intelligence
about the Somali Jihadist group al-Shabab to determine which of its members
could be targeted for drone strikes, as opposed to assuming that all
members
of the group could be targeted because of its connections to al-Qaida. But
this was an exception rather than a rule. Today Obama justifies his war on
the
Islamic State (which has split from al-Qaida) with the same authorities Koh
insisted would limit his war on al-Shabab.
While Obama never asserted the Bush era theory of unlimited wartime powers,
he has also ignored the instructions of Congress when it suited him. He
disregarded
a statute, for example, that required his government to give a 30-day
notice
to Congress about the release of detainees from Guantanamo before he
approved
the prisoner swap that freed Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. In 2011, Obama began
an air war in Libya even though the House later voted down an authorization
for this war.
All of this suggests that Obama owes us an explanation. He came into office
promising reform and, as recently as 2014, said it was time to take the
country
off of a war footing. Today, though, Obama recognizes that his successor
will inherit the long war he couldn't end. Savage captures this
disappointment
in the final pages of the book when he describes how Ben Rhodes, Obama's
deputy national security adviser and message guru, approaches this issue in
interviews
a year apart.
In early 2014, Rhodes said Obama would like to leave the next president
"with a counterterrorism approach without necessarily being at war." A year
later,
Rhodes conceded, "We may not be able to solve every legacy issue we
inherited." It would be nice if Obama explained why this long war is
necessary, and
why the law enforcement approach he tried to craft failed. In the meantime,
we at least have Savage's valuable history to illuminate those failures,
even
if Obama is loath to acknowledge them.
Bloomberg View columnist Eli Lake writes about politics and foreign
affairs.
http://www.commercialappeal.com/opinion/national/eli-lake-how-george-bushs-w
ar-on-terror-ensnared-barack-obama-281143e6-f160-04b0-e053-0100007ff7ff-3639
73481.html
