Tag Archives: national security

plus ca change

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While the spinners parse President Obama’s speech to the UN General Assembly according to the foreign policy clichés of the moment, it’s at least interesting to wonder if any US president can effect any change in foreign affairs that is more than symbolic, or alter the ideologies of the nation’s military and intelligence agencies or change their behavior. I had planned to write something about this, but Gary Wills has written something more authoritative than anything I could have said, in the New York Review of Books.

“A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire’s secrets,” Wills writes.

He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.

This perhaps explains why President Obama’s campaign promises to dismantle criminal enterprises within the national defense establishment are likely to remain unfulfilled. Read the entire Wills essay here.

I’m now wondering if the new direction that those of us who ardently supported the President when he ran for office hoped for was ever more than a pipe dream that ended when it was found that AIG and certain banking institutions were “too big to fail.” It now appears that the banking industry with its rightist ideology will be too big for government to reign in, though that really means that there is so much interdependence between the interests and power bases of Wall Street bankers and those of key legislators that serious regulation of capitalist excess is impossible. And it now appears that certain cartels, the medical-industrial complex and the national defense cartel, with their rightist ideologies, have become so powerful that they cannot be successfully opposed.

The Republican party may be in disarray, but the ideological right is not only alive and well but also very much in control.

after the speech

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I’ve just listened on CSPAN to the president’s May 21st speech about national security and the planned closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. I’m struck, upon hearing the speech entire, by its substance and seriousness. I’m now listening to Richard Cheney’s outrageous attack delivered immediately following the speech last Thursday. It seems clear that Republicans have made here the same sort of cynical political calculation they made about the stimulus package — oppose it and hope it fails.

But that calculation is less interesting than what seems to be the media determination to give the Republican search for a successful wedge issue equal time. The president has characterized the Republican attack as fear mongering. I think it goes far beyond that; it’s a mixture of fear mongering, hate mongering, nativism, and naked self-interest — I’m listening to Mitch McConnell smile his way through it now — and I don’t understand giving it the play it’s now being given on CSPAN, not to mention the sensational treatment it has been given by CNN and the other cable news outlets.

David D. Kirkpatrick and David M. Herszenhorn report in today’s New York Times that Republicans had planned the present concerted attack before the president’s inauguration. That’s useful knowledge. But these reporters’ conclusion that “Republicans have now beaten the Democrats twice on this issue in the last two years with overwhelming votes against transferring detainees to the United States,” says more about media cynicism than about anything else.

And there seems a constant stream of media “scrutiny” directed against the president’s popularity, such as the piece in this morning’s New York Times bearing the headline: Some Obama Enemies are Made Totally of Straw, presumably a news piece but remarkably long on assertion and short on evidence. The CSPAN piece I just listened to, the one that included Mitch McConnell’s enlightened critique, came down solidly on the side of “protecting the American people.” The moral argument about Guantanamo is now dismissed as a public relations argument designed to court favor in Europe. And the critique of the Bush administration’s lawless pursuit of presidential power is now obscured by the charge of phony moralism.

Of course the Clintons wrote the book on this strategy and gave it to the Republicans. Amongst the ranks of congressional Democrats, brave souls, who voted en masse to deprive the president of funds to close Guantanamo, there must be some who view the president’s popularity askance and would willingly see it diminished.

before the speech

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“President Obama will attempt today to answer critics of his dismantling of Bush-era policies on detention and interrogation,” says Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post in a piece that sets today’s expected speech in the context of a meeting at The White House in which the president discussed the potentially explosive issue of closing the Guantanamo Bay prison.

Obama yesterday invited to the White House leaders of about a dozen human and civil rights organizations as well as law professors. Administration participants in the 90-minute session included Holder, White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Several participants discussed the meeting on the condition of anonymity. One said Obama argued that there was no trade-off between American values and national security, but that GOP demagoguery in Congress was dominating the issue. Another said Obama seemed irritated that some of those who attended the meeting had recently compared his policies to those of Bush.

Of course Republicans are demagoguing this issue for all they’re worth, led by Richard Cheney, the ghost of administrations past. And the democrats are running for cover as fast as their little legs can carry them.

It’s not clear to me why the Guantanamo detainees are so much more dangerous than ordinary American criminals that they can’t be housed in ordinary American prisons. But the potential presence of these allegedly dangerous individuals within the borders of the United States is being hyped with all the usual scare talk designed to spread fear of aliens running amuck in the country, blowing up our houses and raping our daughters.

And now we’re given a newly released report, previously held back by fears at the Pentqagon that it’s release “could further inflame the debate over closing the facility [at Guantanamo] and upset the White House.” This report alleges that “27 Guantanamo detainees released to other countries since 2002 had been confirmed as subsequently engaging in terrorist activities and another 47 are strongly suspected of doing so.”

I strongly suspect that this report was leaked for political effect and that like other Pentagon claims designed to alarm the electorate it won’t stand serious scrutiny. Still in the theater of Guantanamo hype, one has only to shout “fire!”