Tag Archives: Obama

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!”

giving kangaroos a bad name

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Bush era military commissions were constituted for the express purpose of ensuring convictions. It was an axiom of Bush era “justice” that there was no such thing as an alleged terrorist. As one commentator on NPR noted yesterday or the day before, if you determine that you want to convict somebody of a crime and rig up a court in which to do so, you’ve given kangaroos a bad name. But apparently that’s the reason for the Obama administration’s revival of the Bush era military commissions, according to stories in this morning’s New York Times and Washington Post.

According to Post writers Michael D. Shear and Peter Finn:

Inside the administration, the debate over the military commissions was rigorous, with Obama eventually siding with the generals and other military officials who feared that bringing some detainees before regular courts would present enormous legal hurdles and could risk acquittals.

Of course any honest litigation risks acquittal of the accused. In this case it would appear that legitimate trials of the thirteen or so alleged terrorists for whom Obama is reviving the military commissions would be jeopardized by the fact that these detainees were not given Miranda warnings by the FBI lawyers who re-interviewed them and obtained confessions to replace earlier statements obtained under torture.

The whole thing stinks, but it seems likely that the military considers these thirteen to be guilty and dangerous. It also seems likely that Obama considers that he has made a least of evils choice in a situation that offered him no good. The rest is spin, particularly the administration claim of consistency for a policy choice that clearly violates Obama campaign promises. I’m thinking the spin is aimed less at ACLU and other liberal criticism, which it appears to counter, than at the fulminations of Richard Cheney and Obama’s obdurate Republican opponents in the congress. According to Robert Gibbs:

The president has been consistent in his views on this issue and been consistent on what was lacking in order to ensure justice, in order to ensure protection, and most of all to ensure that this process goes forward with and doesn’t see repeated legal stalls in going through the court system.

This is ethical doublespeak that would do credit to Karl Rove. How can the military commissions “ensure justice” when they have been expressly constituted, and now revived, in order to ensure convictions, or in Gibbs’s words, “to ensure that this process goes forward with and doesn’t see repeated legal stalls in going through the court system”? Still, it may clarify the policy intention.

The depredations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon weakened the presidency itself, just as George Bush did during his eight years of overstepping and criminal conduct in office. But I think Jimmy Carter may have been mistaken when he more or less embraced a weakened presidency. I’ve always been of the opinion that it was the Iran hostage crisis that brought Carter down.

I can understand why Obama doesn’t want to uncover and expose the crimes and misdemeanors of his predecesor. I can even understand some limited continuation of Bush era policies when undoing them would cause harm in itself. The country doesn’t need another Watergate. However, in trying to appear tough on national defense Obama risks appearing pusillanimous in the face of right-wing criticism. That prospect bothers me a lot.

And there’s one other thing. Will the government seek the death penalty against any defendants tried by military commissions? It’s a very disturbing thought that we might put to death persons whom we have already tortured and incarcerated without trial for many years. It’s even more disturbing that we might do such a thing on the basis of determinations made by kangaroo courts.

worldlessness

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My beloved and I were in London in 2004 as the Abu Ghraib scandal was breaking in the news. I remember buying a copy of The Guardian at the desk of our little Bloomsbury hotel and reading the first European accounts I saw of abuses there. I also remember two conversations about my country’s Iraq adventure: one with a British woman, somewhat more elderly than I am, at breakfast one morning; and another with a French couple we shared a table with for dinner one evening at an outdoor café. Both conversations made me uneasy.

As I listened to these chance acquaintances explain that they still liked Americans even though they had serious reservations about the American government and its actions, I entertained the possibility, for the first time in my life, of being a stateless person, a person without a country. For a moment I shared something with refugees from totalitarian oppression. I experienced something similar in conversation with a Dutch couple in Berlin just a couple of years ago. They wept as they spoke of Franklin Roosevelt, but about my country’s present affairs they could only shake their heads and look away.

As an American I like to think of myself as a citizen of the whole world. I expect, wherever I travel, to be met as a potential friend and not as an enemy by those whom I encounter. I consider that the cultural, linguistic, and historical differences that cast us as foreigners to one another are embedded in the world that grows up around us, as Hannah Arendt puts it, that forms “in the interspaces between men in all their variety.”

Arendt speaks of refugees and refugee groups — persons who live in a diaspora — as worldless. In the well-known essay on Lessing that opens Men in Dark Times, she argues that among refugee groups social cohesiveness expresses itself in that fraternity so praised by the romantics, a kind of absolute solidarity as little tolerant of difference as its totalitarian oppressors. On the other hand, in the world of politics social cohesivness expresses itself as friendship.

For these, and many other reaons, it’s particularly gratifying to me that my new president is making the sort of entrance upon the world stage that he is making this week. Just as he has revivified public discourse in the United States and freed it from domination by the true believing, so he seems to be engaging the great world as a statesman, as a world leader who seeks the good of all rather than the perpetuation of American hegemony.

–worldless no more; it’s a fine thing.

a new era of responsibility

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I thought it was a magnificent speech, not so much somber as sober — but radical all the same. The pundits are gradually parsing it–I’m listening to MSNBC as I write–and commenting on its challenge to a new assumption of responsibility for our public affairs by all Americans. Even Pat Buchanan seems to have been inspired. Of course Fox News has already panned the speech, so it must have been even better than I thought. Too bad about Michael Gerson–somebody should ask him to dance.

Then after all the flap about who was going to pray, Joseph Lowery stole the show, quoting James Weldon Johnson in the beginning and concluding with a riff that closed with a call and response. I watched in a room full of students and faculty at SLU who had gathered in the headquarters of the African American Studies Program. There were maybe a hundred of us, people drifting in and out listening to a panel at the beginning that included my beloved and some other faculty, eating snacks and lunch, some of them weeping, some laughing. Nobody was unhappy.

So — there it is. My guy is now the 44th President of the United States of America. I’m recalling the bicentennial celebration in the nineteen seventies when, for a while, it felt good to be a patriot. One thing that happens in such times is that the great clichés return from banishment and sometimes even comfort us. President Obama today evoked words of George Washington before the Delaware crossing: “Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].” For my ear the following passage was the heart of the speech:

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

The event started for me when Aretha Franklin sang “America,” channeling Mahalia Jackson. I thought Professor Alexander’s poem was surprisingly good and loved the piano quartet (Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero, and Anthony McGill) that played an arrangement of a couple of hymn tunes by John Williams. It was a fine morning, and it made me think again that not the least accomplishment of the former junior Senator from Illinois is that he has begun to rehabilitate love of country for many of us who have felt that we were abandoned as Americans by the reactionary politics of the past almost forty years since the beginning of the Reagan era. He is telling us again and again that love of country is at one with our better angels, not the corporate egotism and jingoism of the recent past.

Perhaps patriotism doesn’t have to be the last refuge of a scoundrel. Perhaps it can again become a call to practice those habits of the heart that Tocqueville found among our ancestors almost two centuries ago: a self-interest understood to require concern for others and for the common good. “[H]ard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism,” as President Obama said today:

— these things are old. These things are true.