Tag Archives: Obama administration

Politcal quote of the day 2

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For civil libertarians, the legacy of bin Laden is most troubling because it shows how the greatest injuries from terror are often self-inflicted. Bin Laden’s twisted notion of success was not the bringing down of two buildings in New York or the partial destruction of the Pentagon. It was how the response to those attacks by the United States resulted in our abandonment of core principles and values in the “war on terror.” Many of the most lasting impacts of this ill-defined war were felt domestically, not internationally.

Starting with George W. Bush, the 9/11 attacks were used to justify the creation of a massive counterterrorism system with growing personnel and budgets designed to find terrorists in the heartland. Laws were rewritten to prevent citizens from challenging searches and expanding surveillance of citizens. Leaders from both parties acquiesced as the Bush administration launched programs of warrantless surveillance, sweeping arrests of Muslim citizens and the creation of a torture program.

What has been most chilling is that the elimination of Saddam and now bin Laden has little impact on this system, which seems to continue like a perpetual motion machine of surveillance and searches. While President Dwight D. Eisenhower once warned Americans of the power of the military-industrial complex, we now have a counterterrorism system that employs tens of thousands, spends tens of billions of dollars each year and is increasingly unchecked in its operations.

– Jonathan Turley, George Washington University law professor, from his column today in USA Today. You must read the entire piece.

Miss USA and the TSA

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One again our protectors at the TSA will go to any length to insure than heinous criminals, like former Miss USA winners, are not allow to pass onto a plane without a vigorous and thorough groping. Way to go people.

(via The Official Website of Susie Castillo by way of No Agenda)

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Who cares what S&P says?

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S&P yesterday announced a negative outlook for the United States’ credit rating. So what? This is the same organization that was unable to notice that billions of dollars in collateralized mortgage securities were not AAA securities. Or, as Clive Crook said:

S&P adduces no new information that I can see. Competent ratings of opaque instruments such as, oh, mortgage-backed securities would be very useful to investors (not that ratings agencies troubled to provide competent ratings in that case, obviously). But why should anybody need that kind of help in judging the soundness of US government bonds? S&P knows nothing about them that you or I don’t know.

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Look who got bail-out money

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Matt Taibbi is back and has reviewed some of the recipients of Fed bail-out funding, now that Congress has ordered a release of the information. I am sure you will be surprised to note the many of the recipients were neither in financial distress or even located in the United States.

Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the “other” budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. “Our jaws are literally dropping as we’re reading this,” says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “Every one of these transactions is outrageous.”

And there is more available from Michael Lewis here.

Political quote of the day

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So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

– Bob Herbert, today, in his last op-ed column for the New York Times

 

Obama (again) reduces civil liberties (updated x2)

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The Obama administration has now issued new rules that allow domestic terror suspects to be held and questioned longer before being given Miranda warnings. Yet again, the Constitution (and Supreme Court precedent) takes a back seat to fear.

Update: More from the New York Times.

The existence of the memorandum was reported by The New York Times in December, but the Justice Department refused to make it public. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal published an article containing excerpts from the document, and The Times later obtained access to a full copy.

Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said that the memo could not alter a constitutional right. He portrayed it as clarifying existing flexibility in the rule — especially when investigators are willing to risk sacrificing the ability to use a suspect’s statements in trial.

Update 2: More from Jonathan Turley:

President Obama has continued his attack on basic constitutional and legal principles with an astonishing new order that allows investigators to not only hold domestic terror suspects for longer periods but to deny them Miranda rights under a strained interpretation of the public safety exception. Obama had attempted to get this change from Congress but was rebuffed. He has now again adopted a tactic of his predecessor and acted unilaterally to trump recognized constitutional rights.

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Political quote of the day

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WASHINGTON - JANUARY 20: President George W. B...

Birds of a Feather

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.

– Barack Obama

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Where is Congress? (updated x3)

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Do we really need to be engaged in another war in Libya? The answer is no.

I agree with Andrew Sullivan:

At least Bush argued that Saddam posed a threat to the US. No one can seriously argue that Qaddafi poses such a threat. To launch a war on these grounds is to set a precedent that would require a kind of global power and reach that not even the most righteous neocons have pushed for. And I look forward to the actual Arab contributions to the military action. Presumably Egypt and Saudi Arabia will be involved. Or will it be what we now have – Qatar and, er, that’s it? The Arab League has no real skin in this game. And one suspects, in the end, the narrative will be America bombing the Arabs again. How many civilians might the US kill in such an action? More civilians than we are currently killing in Pakistan and Afghanistan? Have we learned nothing?

The proper response to this presidential power-grab is a Congressional vote – as soon as possible.

***

But it seems clear enough: exactly the same alliance that gave us Iraq is giving us Libya: the neocons who want to see the US military deployed across the globe in the defense of freedom and the liberal interventionists who believe that the US should intervene whenever atrocities are occurring. What these two groups have in common is an unrelenting focus on the reason for intervention along with indifference to the vast array of unintended consequences their moralism could lead us into. I do not doubt their good intentions and motives. No human being can easily watch a massacre and stand by. Yet we did so with Iran; and we are doing so in Yemen and Bahrain as we speak, and have done so for decades because we rightly make judgments based on more than feeling.

And I will take it a step further.  Shame on President Obama. The man waffled for a week, then embraced a war (aTHIRD or FOURTH war) with no reasonable explanation of the US interest furthered thereby. He sought no Congressional input whatsoever, and in fact was on a plane to South America as the decision was announced.

Where are the grown-ups in Washington? And where is the outrage from the American people? This is not a joke or a game.

Update: The United States (and Britain) have launched 112 Tomahawk missiles at targets in Libya.  Two points:

  1. The cost of 112 Tomahawk missiles is at least $569,000 each or a total of approximately $64,000,000. That does not include the cost of transport, training or personnel to launch the devices.
  2. Compare this number to the number of Tomahawk missiles launched at the beginning the Bush’s war against Saddam: 40.

President Obama calls this a “limited military action.”

Update 2: The cost of the Tomahawk missiles launched today is greater than 5 years of the NPR funding the GOP wants to cut off.

Update 3: It was exactly 8 years ago today that the US launched its invasion of Iraq.

Now not to suggest any sort of conspiracy theory, but here’s quite a coincidence: on March 19, 2003 (i.e. exactly eight years ago), US forces began military operations in the second Iraq War.

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Obama wants copyright enforcement

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The Obama White House, which cannot seem to be able to convict any of the bankers that almost took down our entire economy, has issued a 20 page proposal seeking to greatly ratchet up law enforcement activity in alleged intellectual property/copyright infringement.

A couple of highlights from a summary written by Declan McCullagh:

  • Under federal law, wiretaps may only be conducted in investigations of serious crimes, a list that was expanded by the 2001 Patriot Act to include offenses such as material support of terrorism and use of weapons of mass destruction. The administration is proposing to add copyright and trademark infringement, arguing that move “would assist U.S. law enforcement agencies to effectively investigate those offenses.”
  • Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s generally illegal to distribute hardware or software–such as the DVD-decoding software Handbrake available from a server in France–that can “circumvent” copy protection technology. The administration is proposing that if Homeland Security seizes circumvention devices, it be permitted to “inform rightholders,” “provide samples of such devices,” and assist “them in bringing civil actions.”

This type of enforcement is unnecessary and is nothing but a huge subsidy to the entertainment industry who thereby avoids having to fund their own IP protection efforts.  Outrageous pandering to special interests.

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The New York Times finally wakes up

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The New York Times building in New York, NY ac...

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For a supposedly intelligent and responsible newspaper, the New York Times is sometimes scandalously slow in getting the point. I have written about the abuse of Private Manning before.

Yesterday, finally, the Times catches on and decides to call out the Obama administration for its abuse of Private Manning.

Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been imprisoned for nine months on charges of handing government files to WikiLeaks, has not even been tried let alone convicted. Yet the military has been treating him abusively, in a way that conjures creepy memories of how the Bush administration used to treat terror suspects. Inexplicably, it appears to have President Obama’s support to do so.

Private Manning is in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. For one hour a day, he is allowed to walk around a room in shackles. He is forced to remove all his clothes every night. And every morning he is required to stand outside his cell, naked, until he passes inspection and is given his clothes back.

Military officials say, without explanation, that these precautions are necessary to prevent Private Manning from injuring himself. They have put him on “prevention of injury” watch, yet his lawyers say there is no indication that he is suicidal and the military has not placed him on a suicide watch. (He apparently made a sarcastic comment about suicide.)

 

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Latest TSA attacks on privacy

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Output from mobile backscatter van surveillance

There they go again.

According to Forbes:

Newly uncovered documents show that as early as 2006, the Department of Homeland Security has been planning pilot programs to deploy mobile scanning units that can be set up at public events and in train stations, along with mobile x-ray vans capable of scanning pedestrians on city streets.

***

In August of last year, Joe Reiss, the vice president of marketing of security contractor American Sciences & Engineering told me in an interview that the company had sold more than 500 of its backscatter x-ray vans to governments around the world, including some deployed in the U.S. Those vans are capable of scanning people, the inside of cars and even  the internals of some buildings while rolling down public streets. The company claims that its systems’ “primary purpose is to image vehicles and their contents,” and that “the system cannot be used to identify an individual, or the race, sex or age of the person.” But Reiss admitted that the van scans do penetrate clothing, and EPIC president Marc Rotenberg called them “one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.”

In other words, you may already have been scanned in public without even being notified that such was the case. You can see a document collection related to these programs for yourself via the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).  Also, note that EPIC has sued DHS over airport porno scanners, and oral arguments are scheduled for March 10, 2011.

EPIC deserves your support.

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Obama comes through

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Finally.

The Obama administration will no longer defend in court the provisions of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act that prohibits the Federal government from recognizing same sex marriages.  The administration believes that such provisions are unconstitutional.

President Obama believes that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and will no longer defend the 15-year-old law in federal court, the Justice Department announced today.

The decision, which stunned and delighted gay-rights activists, means that the administration will withdraw its defense of ongoing suits in two federal Appeals Courts and will leave it to Congress to defend the law, known as DOMA, against those challenges. It will remain a party to the lawsuits. The law itself remains in effect.

DOMA, signed by President Clinton in 1996, allows states not to recognize same-sex marriages preformed in other states and provides a federal definition for “marriage” that excludes same-sex couples.

In a statement, Attorney General Eric Holder said, “After careful consideration, including a review of my recommendation, the president has concluded that, given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny.”

He said that Obama also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, which defines “spouse” as a member of the opposite sex, “fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional. Given that conclusion, the president has instructed the depart

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Security theater meets fraud

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There is an interesting story in the Times this morning about a man named Dennis Montgomery. He apparently developed software that he claimed could detect and stop the next Al Qaeda attack on the US and the US paid him more than $20 Million.

But the technology was an elaborate fraud.

The software he patented — which he claimed, among other things, could find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts of the Arab network Al Jazeera; identify terrorists from Predator drone videos; and detect noise from hostile submarines — prompted an international false alarm that led President George W. Bush to order airliners to turn around over the Atlantic Ocean in 2003.

The software led to dead ends in connection with a 2006 terrorism plot in Britain. And they were used by counterterrorism officials to respond to a bogus Somali terrorism plot on the day of President Obama’s inauguration, according to previously undisclosed documents.

***

In December 2003, Mr. Montgomery reported alarming news: hidden in the crawl bars broadcast by Al Jazeera, someone had planted information about specific American-bound flights from Britain, France and Mexico that were hijacking targets.

C.I.A. officials rushed the information to Mr. Bush, who ordered those flights to be turned around or grounded before they could enter American airspace.

“The intelligence people were telling us this was real and credible, and we had to do something to act on it,” recalled Asa Hutchinson, who oversaw federal aviation safety at the time. Senior administration officials even talked about shooting down planes identified as targets because they feared that supposed hijackers would use the planes to attack the United States, according to a former senior intelligence official who was at a meeting where the idea was discussed. The official later called the idea of firing on the planes “crazy.”

When claims have been brought regarding the technology the Federal government has deployed a “state secrets” privilege in an attempt to keep the fraud a secret.

Do recall that President Obama has pledged to limit the use of the state secrets privilege to substantively important matters, as highlighted by Glenn Greenwald back  in in 2009 and as shown in this excerpt from his campaign website

Once again, the current Administration fails to implement the “change we can believe in” and it rolls out the state secrets privilege not to protect security-related secrets, but rather to cover up governmental incompetence.