Obama the Pioneer

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon

06 August 12

arlier this week, The New Yorker's Steve Coll wrote an excellent column on President Obama's kill list and assassination powers. Regarding the lawsuit brought by the ACLU and CCR on behalf of three American victims of Obama's assassinations - a legal challenge which CBS News' Andrew Cohen called "the most important lawsuit filed so far this year" and "the most important lawsuit filed in the war on terror since President Barack Obama took office" - Coll argued that it "is to the due-process clause what the proposed march of neo-Nazis through a community that included many Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, was to the First Amendment": "an instance where the most onerous facts imaginable should lead to the durable affirmation of constitutional principle, as Skokie did."

Coll also pointed to "evidence [] suggesting that the Obama Administration leans toward killing terrorism suspects because it does not believe it has a politically attractive way to put them on trial," which tracks Noam Chomsky's pithy observation earlier this year: "If the Bush administration didn't like somebody, they'd kidnap them and send them to torture chambers. If the Obama administration decides they don't like somebody, they murder them." Coll also dissects the standard excuses offered by Obama defenders for the seizure of this power, including the moral and factual defects of the excuse that it's acceptable to kill an accused Terrorist suspect if it's difficult to apprehend and try him (in the Awlaki case, the Obama administration never even charged or indicted him before executing him).

But what really stood out was Coll's recounting of the events leading up to Awlaki's assassination:

President Barack Obama had personally authorized the killing. "I want Awlaki," he is said to have told his advisers at one point. "Don't let up on him." The President's bracing words about a fellow American are reported in "Kill or Capture," a recent and important book on the Obama Administration's detention and targeted-killing programs, by Daniel Klaidman, a former deputy editor of Newsweek.

With those words attributed to Obama, Klaidman has reported what would appear to be the first instance in American history of a sitting President speaking of his intent to kill a particular U.S. citizen without that citizen having been charged formally with a crime or convicted at trial.

Please re-read that bolded part to appreciate the magnitude of Obama's trail blazing. When The New York Times, back in April, 2010, first confirmed the inclusion of an American citizen on Obama's hit list, it, too, noted: "It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said." But it was only recently known what a personal role Obama himself played in ordering the historically unprecedented hit. As a result, writes Coll, "President Obama and his advisers have opened the door to violent action against American citizens by future Presidents when the facts may be much less compelling." In fairness to Obama, he did campaign on a promise of change, and vesting the President with the power to order the execution of citizens in secret and with no oversight certainly qualifies as that.

Another part of Coll's article relates to the big, exciting Election Year controversy of the moment: the perfectly legitimate demand that Mitt Romney release more of his tax returns. Here we have the political campaign of the same President who, in another moment of trailblazing, has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, and whose top aides secretly met at coffee houses with industry lobbyists to draft bills so as to evade disclosure and record preservation requirements, marching, apparently with a straight face, behind the banner of transparency to demand disclosure of his opponent's tax returns.

Specifically with regard to Obama's assassinations, Coll notes the extreme secrecy behind which they are ordered: "None of Obama's legal advisers has testified similarly about what secret system and classified legal memos may exist for judging, in the case of an American citizen targeted overseas, whether and why a capture attempt may be feasible." Indeed, when Awlaki's father sued in advance to try to prevent the U.S. Government from killing his American son without due process, the Obama DOJ told a federal court that Obama's assassination program was too secret even to permit judicial adjudiciation of its legality.

So to summarize the Obama campaign's apparent argument: it's absolutely vital that we know all about the GOP nominee's tax shelters and financial transactions over the last decade (and indeed, we should know about that), but we need not bother ourselves with how the Democratic nominee is deciding which Americans should die, his claimed legal authority for ordering those hits, the alleged evidence for believing the target deserves to be executed, or the criteria used to target them. So low are one's expectations for an American Election Year that there are very few spectacles so absurd as to be painful to behold, but the Obama campaign's waving of the transparency flag definitely qualifies.

The new Egyptian government has demanded the immediate release of the one Egyptian citizen still detained at Guantanamo: the 54-year-old Tariq Mahmoud Ahmed, who has been imprisoned in the camp since late 2001. The spokesman for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said this when explaining the demand: "He was not charged with any crime until now. He is an Egyptian citizen detained in an illegal manner." Indeed, in the 11 years he has been held, Ahmed was charged with a crime only once, back in 2008, but those charges were dropped before he could contest them and he was never re-charged. So now we have Egypt denouncing the illegal detention practices of the U.S., and it's virtually impossible to contest the validity of those objections. Anyone who believes President Obama bears no responsibility for this ongoing scheme of due-process-free indefinite detention, on the ground that Congress prevented him from closing Guantanamo, should review the actual facts.

UPDATE: In Esquire today, Tom Junod looks at the current fixation in Washington over bolstering the secrecy regime and further punishing leaks, and persuasively argues that the problem in the U.S. is excessive secrecy, not excessive disclosures. He describes what he encountered in the course of writing his recent influential article on Obama's assassinations, "The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama":

I answer from my own experience: For four months, I tried to find out what happened to Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. I never did. Nobody has. There have been no "leaks" about him. By the terms of the current debate, however, the silence regarding the death by drone of a 16-year-old American is what should be applauded. Indeed, by the terms of the current debate, any official who steps forward and finally reveals how Abdulrahman al-Awlaki died would be liable to criminal prosecution, not to mention the shrill castigation of the likes of Mitt Romney and John McCain.

But if as a journalist I would call him a source instead of a leaker, it's as an American I would call him a hero instead of a criminal.

For all the current hysteria about massive leaking, the reality is that the U.S. Government operates behind a more impenetrable wall of secrecy than ever before - exercising the most extremist and threatening powers a government can wield, without a shred of transparency - led by a President whose campaign argues that the Republic will be jeopardized if Mitt Romney isn't more transparent about his personal tax shelters

The State of America's Children 2012

By Marian Wright Edelmen, Reader Supported News

06 August 12

upreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." When we look at the state of our union and the state of America's children in 2012, his words ring very true. It's impossible to deny that our nation's economy, professed values of equal opportunity, future, and soul are all in danger right now.

There are 16.4 million poor children in rich America, 7.4 million living in extreme poverty. A majority of public school students and more than three out of four Black and Hispanic children, who will be a majority of our child population by 2019, are unable to read or compute at grade level in the fourth or eighth grade and will be unprepared to succeed in our increasingly competitive global economy. Nearly eight million children are uninsured. More children were killed by guns in 2008-2009 than U.S. military personnel in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to date. A Black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime; a Latino boy a one in six chance of the same fate.

Millions of children are living hopeless, poverty- and violence-stricken lives in the war zones of our cities; in the educational deserts of our rural areas; in the moral deserts of our corrosive culture that saturates them with violent, materialistic, and individualistic messages; and in the leadership deserts of our political and economic life where greed and self interest trump the common good over and over. Millions of our children are being left behind without the most basic human supports they need to survive and thrive when parents alone cannot provide for them at a time of deep economic downturn, joblessness, and low wage jobs that place a ceiling on economic mobility for millions as America's dream dims. Unemployment, underemployment, and economic inequality are rife and will worsen if massive cascading federal, state, and local budget cuts aimed primarily at the poor and young succeed. Homeless shelters, child hunger, and child suffering have become normalized in the richest nation on earth. It's time to reset our moral compass and redefine how we measure success.

The Children's Defense Fund has just released The State of America's Children® 2012 Handbook. This report is a portrait of where our children are right now and a tool to spur us to set the vision of where we need to go to stop the downward mobility of our children and grandchildren and the diminution of America's future. It provides key national information in a range of areas to help inform and enable anyone who cares about children to effectively stand up for them. State tables show how children are faring state by state and how each state compares to other states in protecting children. For example, when we looked closely at poor children across the nation, ten states plus the District of Columbia had child poverty rates of 25 percent or higher: Mississippi was the highest at 32.5 percent, followed by D.C., New Mexico, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Only New Hampshire had a child poverty rate of 10 percent or lower. When it comes to ensuring equal chances for children everywhere in our country we have a long way to go. And when we realize that nationwide a child is born into poverty every 29 seconds it should sound alarms from coast to coast.

I hope this report will be a piercing siren call that wakes up our sleeping, impervious and self-consumed nation to the lurking dangers of epidemic child neglect, illiteracy, poverty and violence. It's way past time for those of us who call ourselves child advocates to speak and stand up and do whatever is required to close the gaping gulf between word and deed and between what we know children need and what we do for them. In a year filled with choices for our communities, states, and nation -- from our budgets to our leaders -- please educate yourself and others about the urgent challenges facing our children and insist our nation make better investment choices to ensure their and our futures.

A transforming nonviolent movement is needed to create a just America. It must start in our homes, communities, parent and civic associations, and faith congregations across the nation. It will not come from Washington or state capitols or politicians. Every single person can and must make a difference if our voiceless, voteless children are to be prepared to lead America forward. Now is the time to close our action and courage gaps, reclaim our nation's ideals of freedom and justice, and ensure every child the chance to survive and thrive.

Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund and its Action Council.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.