Land of the Safe, Home of the Afraid

David Bromwich, May 25, 2009:

... Obama's May 21 speech at the National Archives combined a general repudiation of the Bush-Cheney policies with a surprising concession to methods that the former vice president, Dick Cheney, tried to graft onto the Constitution. This approach the Constitution repels as surely as a healthy body rejects poison; for in the Cheney interpretation, the common-law right of prisoners to be charged with a crime and to have due process in challenging the accusation was abridged in cases specified by the executive. Cheney singled out for detention as "enemy combatants" persons suspected of being hard-core terrorists without there being sufficient identification to charge or sufficient evidence to convict them.

We may think ourselves a safe country, but we can hardly be the United States of 1776, of 1865, and of 1945 so long as we retain a power imported by Dick Cheney and his lawyers from the 17th century into the 21st -- the power of government to imprison and keep in jail a person against whom nothing has been proved and nothing charged. It is a bondage as complete as slavery; and like slavery, it can last for life. ...

President Obama did not mean to copy the tenor but he did curiously echo the phraseology of the Bush presidency. Obama said: "my single most important responsibility as President is to keep the American people safe." Such talk about safety rather than liberty and justice, as the paramount value of American life, had almost no history before the Bush-Cheney administration. There can be no doubt that safe was the favorite adjective of George W. Bush, just as protect was his favorite verb. Yet there is not one word in the Constitution about protecting the people. The good of safety is assumed, of course, and the words of the preamble say the constitutional framework will (among its other purposes) "provide for the common defense." Yet that is a purpose for which any government might be formed. The American government is admirable and original not in its ideas about defense but its ideas about liberty and justice. And the president's powers in time of war are so far from the essence of his duty that they are not included in the presidential oath, or even, very prominently, in the enumeration of the powers of his office. The president is required to see that the laws are faithfully executed. In the presidential oath, he swears to do his best "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Italics added, and italics, apparently, necessary. The president protects the people by protecting the laws. He does not protect the laws by protecting the "safety" of the people. Indeed, not the safety of all the people, every moment, but the substance of the laws themselves makes the value of the way of life of a free people over time. How odd to forget this. At the National Archives, Barack Obama was speaking in front of a copy of the Constitution itself.

But he told us first about safety: "That is the first thing that I think about when I wake up in the morning. It is the last thing that I think about when I go to sleep at night." He then did his best to play a part he likes far too much, that of the national healer. He urged Americans to believe that, in ordering the torture and imprisonment of persons whom they had deprived of legal rights, the leaders of the Bush administration may have done bad things but always did them entirely from good motives. "Our government made a series of hasty decisions. And I believe that those decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people."

Is this true? And should we sincerely believe it? When we look at the leaders of other countries that have gone wrong -- Argentina, say -- do we assume the leaders could only have acted badly from the most pure and selfless love of the good? This exertion of fellowship flies in the face of honesty and a common knowledge of human nature.

Obama added: "I also believe that -- too often -- our government made decisions based upon fear rather than foresight, and all too often trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, we too often set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And in this season of fear, too many of us -- Democrats and Republicans; politicians, journalists and citizens -- fell silent."

The result, he concluded, was that "we went off course." But: "I have no interest in spending our time re-litigating the policies of the last eight years. I want to solve these problems, and I want to solve them together as Americans."

This casting away an evil of the past by moderately changing the policies and ignoring the crimes of one's predecessor -- this is in fact impossible to do. The reason is that some of the people who took us off course have not yet given up the steering wheels at which they sit, in one sub-cabin or another of the republic. The only way to face the future is to understand the present, and the only way to understand the present is to inquire into the past. ...

President Obama committed himself, in this speech, to hold in indefinite captivity persons the United States does not charge with specific acts, and whom it does not mean to bring to trial. The reason for such indefinite detention can only be that we do not know who the prisoners are, exactly, and therefore do not know what the charges would be; or that we know we have given the prisoners cause to resent us, after their capture if not before. This points to a darker category: persons whom we cannot bring to trial because all of the evidence against them was obtained under torture. These people either are abused but guilty, or if originally innocent, may reliably be supposed full of hatred toward the people and country that did such things to them.

This last is the fifth of Obama's five categories: "those who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people." What species of twilight creature is alluded to here? Someone, it seems, whom we know to be certainly dangerous to the American people but about the danger of whom we cannot possibly open evidence at a trial, or even venture to make specific charges.

Insight into this category of prisoners may be gained from William Glaberson's May 23 article in the New York Times on President Obama's detention plan.

"Some proponents of an indefinite detention system," writes Glaberson, "argue that Guantanamo's remaining 240 detainees include cold-blooded jihadists and perhaps some so warped by their experience in custody that no president would be willing to free them." Note the words so warped by their experience in custody. So once we have ruined them body and soul, with or without tenable initial grounds of suspicion, we grant ourselves the right to go on harming them forever. Set free, they would wreak too sure a vengeance or stand as too glaring a testimony against us. Note well: it is worse, in some ways, to have been innocent than to have been guilty at Guantanamo. The guilty man can at least stand trial. Regarding the innocent, our own guilt is so complete that to prevent its effects we must keep him in prison indefinitely. Thus we compound our crimes before trying the persons we think we can succeed in convicting as war criminals. ...

In the week before this Memorial Day, we saw a new president under unseemly attack, trying to catch his balance. He shared some good thoughts at the National Archives. Yet this speech was one more speech by Barack Obama that deferred action. It suggested the comprehension of an enormous wrong which it decided only partly to remedy. And it set several plainly unconstitutional designs on the way to enactment, for no better reason than that the public morale has sunk so low as to expect such action. But the idea of prolonged detention without charge or trial was new. It gave a shock that will last; that should not be absorbed. And the move was unexpected by lawyers with whom the president had conferred just before giving the speech. As Vincent Warren, the executive director of Center for Constitutional Rights, put it in an interview with Amy Goodman:

the idea of detaining people not because they've committed a crime, but because of their general dangerousness or that they may commit a crime in the future: that's something that the documents that President Obama was standing in front of, particularly the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, simply doesn't permit. And when I heard that in his speech, I was deeply, deeply shocked that he would go in that direction.

Let us say it: something is seriously wrong in this administration -- though we are not yet in a position to judge the cause. We do not know who the lawyers are that gave Barack Obama advice that goes against a long career of ostensible commitments. And it is too early yet to say at what point a new president, confused by the depth of his burdens and uncertain how much even now he believes of what he used to say, becomes instead a man we are compelled to see as lacking in convictions. It cannot be a virtue that he sheds the Constitution with a gentler demeanor than George W. Bush.

The former vice president is engaging in a public refusal of the transfer of power. He embodies to perfection his party's failure to learn "the habit of trained and disciplined good temper towards the opposite party when it fairly wins its innings." Yet President Obama is unconsciously abetting that refusal when -- out of fear, or a wish for leverage elsewhere, or a wish to stand in the middle -- he treats justice as a desirable but not an all-important good.

A misjudged statesmanship has allowed Obama to think himself magnanimous when he declines to expose the wrongs he has come to know. The way to right a wrong is not to install a somewhat reformed version of the wrong. People, by that means, may be spared embarrassment, but their instinct for truth will be corrupted. It is a false prudence that supposes justice can come from a compromise between a lawful and a lawless regime. On the contrary, the less you tell of the truth, the more prone your listeners will be to commit the next barbarous act that is proposed to them under the cover of a national emergency or a necessary war.

MR. OBAMA: RESIGN NOW

Ted Rall, May 28:

We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama's inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through. ...

I refer here to Obama's plan for "preventive detentions." If a cop or other government official thinks you might want to commit a crime someday, you could be held in "prolonged detention." Reports in U.S. state-controlled media imply that Obama's shocking new policy would only apply to Islamic terrorists (or, in this case, wannabe Islamic terrorists, and also kinda-sorta-maybe-thinking-about-terrorism dudes). As if that made it OK.

In practice, Obama wants to let government goons snatch you, me and anyone else they deem annoying off the street.

Preventive detention is the classic defining characteristic of a military dictatorship. Because dictatorial regimes rely on fear rather than consensus, their priority is self-preservation rather than improving their people's lives. They worry obsessively over the one thing they can't control, what Orwell called "thoughtcrime" -- contempt for rulers that might someday translate to direct action.

Locking up people who haven't done anything wrong is worse than un-American and a violent attack on the most basic principles of Western jurisprudence. It is contrary to the most essential notion of human decency. That anyone has ever been subjected to "preventive detention" is an outrage. That the President of the United States, a man who won an election because he promised to elevate our moral and political discourse, would even entertain such a revolting idea offends the idea of civilization itself.

Obama is cute. He is charming. But there is something rotten inside him. Unlike the Republicans who backed Bush, I won't follow a terrible leader just because I voted for him. Obama has revealed himself. He is a monster, and he should remove himself from power. ...

The Old Grey Lady explains why Obama wants this "entirely new chapter in American law" in a boring little sentence buried a couple past the jump and a couple of hundred words down page A16: "Yet another question is what to do with the most problematic group of Guantánamo detainees: those who pose a national security threat but cannot be prosecuted, either for lack of evidence or because evidence is tainted."

In democracies with functioning legal systems, it is assumed that people against whom there is a "lack of evidence" are innocent. They walk free. In countries where the rule of law prevails, in places blessedly free of fearful leaders whose only concern is staying in power, "tainted evidence" is no evidence at all. If you can't prove that a defendant committed a crime -- an actual crime, not a thoughtcrime -- in a fair trial, you release him and apologize to the judge and jury for wasting their time.

It is amazing and incredible, after eight years of Bush's lawless behavior, to have to still have to explain these things. For that reason alone, Obama should resign.

Health care can wait, tax breaks for wind industry can't

Nebraskan lawmakers heroically tabled a bill providing tax breaks for nonprofit health clinics, so that the money could all go to the "economically viable" wind industry.

Click the title of this post to read the whole story at National Wind Watch.

wind power, wind energy, human rights

More wind = more backup

[S]wings of 500 megawatts of wind can disappear from a system in an hour or less, creating scheduling havoc for system operators, as it did in Texas in February 2008. The system operator relied on interruptible contracts with industrial customers to retain reliability during that event. ... The maximum change in Colorado over a 24-hour period was a 743-megawatt increase and a 485-megawatt decrease. In Minnesota, the utility saw as much as a 517-megawatt increase and a 488-megawatt decrease, [Eric Pierce, Xcel Energy's managing director of energy trading,] said. ... When wind outages are more widespread, spinning and operating reserves are required just like for any thermal operator. In some areas, no enough excess is currently available if winds shift suddenly. What seems to be developing is an industry consensus that as renewable energy penetration increases, reserve margins will need to be larger across [a] regional transmission organization.

-- William Opalka, Energy Biz, May/June 2009

wind power, wind energy

Healthcare reform

Medicare for all! Now!

Deep vs. shallow ecology

‘Both historically and in the contemporary movement, [Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Arne Naess] saw two different forms of environmentalism, not necessarily incompatible with each other. One he called the “long-range deep ecology movement” and the other, the “shallow ecology movement.” The word “deep” in part referred to the level of questioning of our purposes and values when arguing in environmental conflicts. The “deep” movement involves deep questioning, right down to fundamental root causes. The short-term, shallow approach stops before the ultimate level of fundamental change, often promoting technological fixes (e.g. recycling, increased automotive efficiency, export-driven monocultural organic agriculture) based on the same consumption-oriented values and methods of the industrial economy. The long-range deep approach involves redesigning our whole systems based on values and methods that truly preserve the ecological and cultural diversity of natural systems.’ —Alan Drengson, Foundation for Deep Ecology

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, human rights, vegetarianism, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

A problem with wind energy

Why isn’t as much time and effort spent educating and encouraging people to conserve rather than defacing our landscape? ... Long-term benefits like preserving the character of Vermont and energy conservation are more important than short-term solutions that create more problems than they solve.

--Jane FitzGerald, Milton, Vt., Burlington Free Press, May 15, 2009

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, Vermont