* investigation and prosecution of the criminals of the Bush administration, right to the top if necessary, must go forward

Tom Friedman writes in the NYT (4/29/09) …

• Weighing everything, President Obama got it about as right as one could when he decided to ban the use of torture, to release the Bush torture memos for public scrutiny and to not prosecute the lawyers and interrogators who implemented the policy.
• The president’s decision to expose but not prosecute those responsible for this policy is surely unsatisfying.
• Then why justify the Obama compromise? Two reasons:
• the first is that because justice taken to its logical end here would likely require bringing George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to trial, which would rip our country apart;
• and the other is that Al Qaeda truly was a unique enemy, and the post-9/11 era a deeply confounding war in a variety of ways.

LMW COMMENT … Friedman’s justification for failing to prosecute those who broke the law falls flat. First, we must recognize there is no evidence that torture of prisoners accomplished anything useful, and may have done great harm by producing false information. In fact, it appears that the Bush/Cheney torture objective was precisely to produce false information – linking Saddam and bin Laden – to justify their horrendously stupid decision to invade Iraq. To excuse those who knowingly broke the law, not for high purposes of national interest, but to further their own low goals of a war of choice for political and personal reasons, is in itself inexcusable. I am hopeful that President Obama will eventually allow himself to be convinced that investigation and prosecution of the criminals of the Bush administration, right to the top if necessary, must go forward.

read Friedman’s entire column at … http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/opinion/29friedman.html?ref=opinion

 

* quite a hundred days

Todays NYT editorial (4/29/09) …

• President Barack Obama has made a strong start at addressing many of the most critical of the long list of failed policies and urgent threats bequeathed to him by former President George W. Bush.
• He is trying to rebuild this country’s shattered reputation with his pledge to shut down the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, his offer to talk with Iran and Syria, and, yes, that handshake with Venezuela’s blow-hard president, Hugo Chávez.
• Mr. Obama is right that there can be no lasting recovery until the country reforms its health care system and tackles the clear and present danger of global climate change.
• The government is promoting women’s reproductive rights. It is restoring regulations to keep water clean and food safe. The White House has promised to tackle immigration reform this year.
• These are very tough times, but Mr. Obama seems to have lifted the spirits of a divided and fearful nation. In the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, 72 percent of Americans said they were optimistic about the next four years.
• During the campaign, then-Senator Obama declared that “government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves.” 
• In his first 100 days, President Obama has started to show Americans just what he meant.

LMW COMMENT … What a pleasure to have an intelligent president whose breadth of vision and persistent pragmatic approach offer exactly the hope he promised to bring to America and the world. Even in the face of the worst set of problems imaginable, we feel confident that President Obama will help us find a way to restored morality and prosperity, while at the same time defending our country against threats of terror, disease, greed, and ignorance. Quiet a hundred days.

read the entire editorial at … http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/opinion/29wed1.html?ref=opinion

 

* torture to make the case for the Iraq invasion … despicable … and there must be accountability

Frank Rich writes in the NYT (4-26-09) …

• Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” 
• As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence. 
• In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. 
• But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. 
• Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding. our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it … it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. 
• Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. 
• The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality. 
• President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. 
• What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law. 

LMW COMMENT … Frank Rich is so right. President Obama might prefer not “looking back,” but he really has no choice. As constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley has stated so clearly and often, to be a nation of laws we must enforce the law. The laws that were broken, purposely and knowingly, by the Bush administration are not trivial matters. Bush and Cheney and their cabal broke laws in order to convince the American people to support an invasion of Iraq which Bush and Cheney had long before determined as their war of choice. Linking Saddam and Al- Qaeda was one part of their strategy. Linking Saddam and anthrax, as I portray in my soon-to-be-published novel CASE CLOSED, was another part of the infuriating pattern of lies that led us to Iraq and all of the horrific consequences that then flowed.

read Rich’s entire column at … http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/opinion/26rich.html

* they tortured for lies to justify the invasion of Iraq

Jonathan Landay writes in McClatchy Newspapers (4/22/09) …

• The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
• Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003.
• In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.
• “Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”
• Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.
• A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the 
• Bush and his top lieutenants charged that Saddam was secretly pursuing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in defiance of a United Nations ban, and had to be overthrown because he might provide them to al Qaida for an attack on the U.S. or its allies.

LMW COMMENT … George Bush and Dick Cheney were intent on invading Iraq before the 9/11 attacks. After the 9/11 attacks, they were desperate to find reasons to justify their already planned invasion. When the reasons did not exist, they made them up. After 9/11, they lied that there were links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. After the anthrax attacks, they lied that there was anthrax in Iraq and that Saddam had the means to deliver biological weapons to the U.S. These people were despicable in their continuing desperate (and successful) attempts to deceive the American people and the Congress, at the ultimate cost of over 3,000 American lives and hundreds of billions of unnecessary expenditures. They had no moral scruples about torture, which is against the law, or about telling lies, which was just the normal way they did their business.

 

Read the entire article at … http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66622.html

 

* torture is illegal … those who ordered it, and justified it, should be prosecuted

AP reports today (4/21/09) …

•  President Barack Obama left the door open Tuesday to prosecuting Bush administration officials who devised the legal authority for gruesome terror-suspect interrogations, saying the United States lost “our moral bearings” with use of the tactics.
• The president had said earlier that he didn’t want to see prosecutions of the CIA agents and interrogators who took part in waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, so long as they acted within parameters spelled out by government superiors who held that such practices were legal at the time.

LMW COMMENT … It is not acceptable, as President Obama repeatedly and correctly says we are a nation of laws, to willfully avoid prosecutions for political reasons. It’s probably also illegal. So I agree completely with the idea of investifating those who approved illegal (and also unproductive) torture. If laws were broken there should be prosecutions, including Cheney and Bush if they are implicated. Since Cheney has already confessed, it shouldn’t be too hard to make the case.

read the entire article at … http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090421/ap_on_go_pr_wh/obama_interrogation_memos_10

* our problems require long term perspective and patience

Thomas Friedman writes in the NYT (4-15-09)

• This is not the great age of diplomacy.
• this is increasingly an age of pirates, failed states, nonstate actors and nation-building — the stuff of snipers, drones and generals, not diplomats.
• “We are dealing with states and leaders who either cannot deliver or will not deliver,” notes the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy professor Michael Mandelbaum. “The issues we have with them look less like problems that can be solved and more like conditions that we have to manage.”
  • The ones who can’t deliver — the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan — are the ones who promise to do all sorts of good things
  • The ones who won’t deliver — Iran and North Korea — time and again tell us: “Yes, we need to talk.” But at the end of the day, their hostile relationships with America or the West are so central to the survival strategy of their regimes, so much at the core of their justifications for remaining in power, that it is not in their interest to deliver real reconciliation, but just to pretend to deliver it.
• The only thing that could change this is a greater exercise of U.S. and allied power.
  • In the case of Afghanistan and Pakistan, that power would have to be used to actually rebuild these states from the inside into modern nations.
  • And in the case of the strong states — Iran and North Korea — we would have to generate much more effective leverage from the outside to get them to change their behavior along the lines we seek.

LMW COMMENT … Friedman has stated the problem beautifully, and he cannot be faulted for failing to supply solutions. All of the problems we face in this complex world, domestic or global, seem to fit Professor Mandelbaum’s description as problems which cannot be solved but must instead be managed. Such problems require a long term perspective and a great deal of patience, which, fortunately for us, are attributes that President Obama has in abundance. A major part of his mission is to teach and convince a majority of Americans to share those virtues, which also means abandoning the single-issue divisive politics that seems to infect so many of us far too often. So far, Obama seems to be succeeding: Republican hate politics has become laughable and the polls show a majority of Americans displaying unusual common sense.

 

Read the entire column at … http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/opinion/15friedman.html?ref=opinion

 

* it’s time for the Obama administration to demonstrate its management skills

 Michael Hirsh writes in Newsweek (4/10/09) …

• Not long ago (March 23), a group of skeptical Democratic senators met at the White House with President Obama, his chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
• The six senators said the financial reform policies the president was pursuing were not going far enough, and the people Obama was choosing as his regulators were not going to change things fundamentally enough.
• While it clearly wants to install serious supervision, the Obama administration—along with other key authorities like the New York Fed—appears willing to stand back while Wall Street resurrects much of the ultracomplex global trading system that helped lead to the worst financial collapse since the Depression.
• A newly assertive Wall Street emerged recently; its goal: to stand against heavy regulation of “over-the-counter” derivatives … even as we are still picking up the debris, we seem to be ready to embrace that world once again.

LMW COMMENT … As hard as it is to deal with big issues in the glare of public crisis, the real test of President Obama’s governance will come in the relative quiet of sustained deliberation and management. Will Obama shine here as he has in the limelight? Will his management skills prove the equal of his obvious political skills? Management is harder and less dramatic than politics, but in the long run it is far more important. American voters have rarely valued management skills, at any level of government. Maybe it’s time we did.

 

Read the entire article at … http://www.newsweek.com/id/193360

 

* our country needs a responsible opposition political party … too bad we don’t have one

Terence Samuel writes in the American Prospect (4/10/09) …

• President Barack Obama could have only hoped for modest, small-bore successes to come out of his eight-day, three-summit jaunt through Europe and the Middle East.
•  It will be a while before we know with any certainty whether Obama achieved anything of lasting value
•  But the virulent reaction from conservatives has been bizarre enough to render them irrelevant in any serious conversation about the country’s future.
• the bottom line is that if Republicans continue these smears, they have no hope of being taken seriously when it comes time to debate the major issues confronting the country.
• This week’s New York Times/CBS poll shows the depth of the GOP’s troubles: The party faces a 58 percent disapproval rating among Americans. 
• The crazy talk is not going to improve those numbers.

LMW COMMENT … Our country needs a responsible opposition political party. No matter how much some of us support President Obama, he needs Republicans to question his policies and argue their points of view, some of which are quite compelling. Congressional Democrats, like any legislative majority, surely need Republicans to keep them balanced and honest. It serves no one’s purpose for Republicans to continue to impale themselves on the nonsensical lances of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jimdal and the others of their sorry ilk. I don’t know what Democrats are supposed to do about Republican failings (except maybe vote for Arlen Specter in his upcoming Republican primary), but it is a problem for us as well as them.

 

Read the entire article at … http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=republicans_tripping

* domestic terror – we should push the NRA to focus on the murders, not the guns

 Cynthia Tucker writes in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (4/12/09) …

• mass shootings are a form of madness
• but what’s even more insane is our passive reaction.
  • the proliferation of weapons of war on our streets and in our homes? 
  • the indulgence of a gun culture that insists average Americans should own assault rifles? 
  • the complicity with a gun industry that supplies Mexican drug cartels?
• Who cares?
• If these attacks were the work of foreign-born terrorists, the White House would be swamped with protests
• But attacks by Americans on fellow Americans are met with public indifference and official cowardice.

LMW COMMENT …

After reading Tucker’s column, I went to the NRA web site. There I found a long list of issues and lengthy, well-articulated positions, seemingly all in favor of virtually no control over the acquisition of all types of weapons.

What I didn’t find was a single thought on how to prevent the misuse of those weapons, as in the 7 mass murders in U.S. in the past month.  Apparently this is not a matter of concern to NRA members. But why not? And why do we let them get away with such irresponsible behavior?

I think we need to change the terms of the argument. We need to address gun-advocates and political leaders who are afraid of the gun lobby, not on the guns themselves, but on their horrible misuse. We need to change the focus the enormous energy devoted to anti-gun arguments pro and con so that we try to determine how to prevent the slaughtering of innocent people by deranged individuals who have come to possess weapons of mass murder.

On this topic, we should all agree, with the goal if not the means. Those who argue for the proliferation of the weapons used in such killings have a moral obligation to address the consequences of their positions. Surely we can find some politicians with the courage to bring the NRA into this discussion.

 

Read the entire column at … http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/tucker/stories/2009/04/12/tuckered_0412.html

 

* we should arrest the prosecutors who blew the Sen. Stevens case !!!

 Senator Ted Stevens’ lawyers have issued the following statement (thanks to CAROL for sending it to me) …

•  We are grateful to learn that Attorney General Eric Holder has decided to drop all charges against Senator Ted Stevens. 
• That decision is justified by the extraordinary evidence of government corruption in the prosecution of Senator Stevens. This jury verdict was obtained unlawfully.
• The government disregarded the Constitution, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and well-established case law, which require the government to reveal to the defense all evidence that demonstrates the innocence of the accused.
• Not only did the government fail to disclose evidence of innocence, but instead intentionally hid that evidence and created false evidence that they provided to the defense.
• The misconduct of government prosecutors, and one or more FBI agents, was stunning.

LMW COMMENT …

I don’t know if Sen. Stevens is guilty of crimes or not, but it is incumbent on prosecutors to prove their case, and do so without cheating. There are rules which are supposed to protect us all against over-zealous prosecution, and too many prosecutors disregard those rules to get unwarranted convictions.

This leads to two tragedies, the person improperly convicted, and the fact that nobody ever brings charges against the prosecutors who broke the law.

This is an issue I have studied carefully. And I did more.

I wrote a novel, called A GOOD CONVICTION, which tells the story of a young man convicted of a murder he did not commit by a prosecutor who knew he didn’t do it. You can read more about my book, and order it, at …

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Conviction-Lewis-M-Weinstein