|
FOCUS: Constitutional Crisis Deepens as Trump Fights Checks and Balances |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Saturday, 11 February 2017 11:58 |
|
Boardman writes: "Trump's screaming tweet, complete with all caps in the original, captures the essence of this president's bald move to take total power over the United States. When he says 'the security of our nation is at stake,' he refers demagogically to the imaginary threat of terrorists from seven countries."
Donald Trump. (photo: AP)
Constitutional Crisis Deepens as Trump Fights Checks and Balances
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
11 February 17
SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!
– Tweet from Donald J. Trump, February 9, 2017
 rump’s screaming tweet, complete with all caps in the original, captures the essence of this president’s bald move to take total power over the United States. When he says “the security of our nation is at stake,” he refers demagogically to the imaginary threat of terrorists from seven countries. He is right to say “the security of our nation is at stake,” but not at all in the way he means – the security of our nation is profoundly at stake in this case because, if he wins, then presidential orders will become dictatorial decrees beyond the reach of the courts. Our constitutional crisis continues.
At issue is Executive Order 13769, issued January 27, 2017, establishing the so-called Muslim ban on immigrants from seven countries (Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya). The order was prepared with limited vetting and implemented with no advance planning, creating immediate, global chaos that led to numerous court challenges and partial stays of the order. The case brought January 30 by the states of Washington and Minnesota together persuaded a Washington State judge (appointed by President Bush) to issue a nationwide temporary restraining order (TRO), enjoining the U.S. government from enforcing key provisions of the Executive Order (which the government apparently took its time to obey). The government’s motion for an emergency stay of the TRO was heard February 7 by a three-judge federal district Appeals Court (one step below the U.S. Supreme Court). On February 9, the Appeals Court unanimously affirmed the lower court’s ruling and left the TRO in place, unmodified, until the lower court holds a duly-scheduled hearing of the government’s appeal of the TRO before deciding whether to make the TRO permanent.
Trump’s Executive Order has created a watershed crisis in U.S. constitutional government. Trump fired an acting attorney general for questioning his order’s constitutionality and legality. Several lower federal courts have found the order, in the words of the Appeals Court, “unconstitutional and violative of federal law.” The issue is likely to reach the Supreme Court before long. If the Supreme Court rules for the president, then he will be able to rule by decree. If the Supreme Court upholds the lower courts, that will check the president’s power to rule by decree, but only until the next challenge to the U.S. Constitution’s traditional balance of powers.
9th Circuit Appeals Court rejects attack on Constitution
What follows is a brief summary of the Appeals Court’s 29-page order, including the constitutional issues that court identified. The language of the Appeals Court order is as restrained and dignified as the president’s tweets are hysterical and outrageous. The court begins (p. 3) by stating the basis for deciding the issue:
To rule on the Government’s motion, we must consider several factors, including whether the Government has shown that it is likely to succeed on the merits of its appeal, the degree of hardship caused by a stay or its denial, and the public interest in granting or denying a stay.
In sketching the background for the Executive Order, the court notes (p. 3) that the only specific attack or threat cited to justify the danger to national security is 9/11. The court described elements of the Executive Order and their impact as they were implemented.
In a February 10 tweet, President Trump asserted:
LAWFARE: “Remarkably, in the entire opinion, the panel did not bother even to cite this (the) statute.” A disgraceful decision!
Since the court cites the Immigration and Nationality Act, codified at 8 U.S.C. (p. 4), it’s not clear what statute Trump had in mind. The court also wrote (p. 6) that in issuing its initial restraining order:
The district court preliminarily concluded that significant and ongoing harm was being inflicted on substantial numbers of people, to the detriment of the States, by means of an Executive Order that the States were likely to be able to prove was unlawful.
The U.S. government claimed that the states had no standing to sue, no right to sue, because the states had not suffered sufficient injury from the Executive Order. The government did not dispute that the state universities “are branches of the States under state law” (p.8). After reviewing the impact of the Executive Order on members of the state universities, the court held (p.12):
We therefore conclude that the States have alleged harms to their proprietary interests traceable to the Executive Order. The necessary connection can be drawn in at most two logical steps: (1) the Executive Order prevents nationals of seven countries from entering Washington and Minnesota; (2) as a result, some of these people will not enter state universities, some will not join those universities as faculty, some will be prevented from performing research, and some will not be permitted to return if they leave. And we have no difficulty concluding that the States’ injuries would be redressed if they could obtain the relief they ask for: a declaration that the Executive Order violates the Constitution and an injunction barring its enforcement. The Government does not argue otherwise.
According to government lawyers, the federal courts have no legitimate authority to review any presidential orders “to suspend the admission of any class of aliens: (p. 13). The government argues that such orders are even more unreviewable when the president is motivated by national security claims, even if the orders violate constitutional rights and protections. The government claims that court review of unconstitutional orders violates the principle of separation of powers in government. The court rejects these arguments (p. 14):
There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy…. Within our system, it is the role of the judiciary to interpret the law, a duty that will sometimes require the “[r]esolution of litigation challenging the constitutional authority of one of the three branches….” We are called upon to perform that duty in this case.
The court notes (p.15) that the government is so desperate to find support for its claims that it misquotes from a case (Kleindienst v. Mandel) to reach a false conclusion. Even in national security cases, the courts have a legitimate role, contrary to the government argument. The court points out that, while the Supreme Court counsels deference to national security decisions of the White House or Congress, the Supreme Court also made clear that (pp. 17-18):
… the Government’s “authority and expertise in [such] matters do not automatically trump the Court’s own obligation to secure the protection that the Constitution grants to individuals,” even in times of war…. it is beyond question that the federal judiciary retains the authority to adjudicate constitutional challenges to executive action.
Addressing the government’s motion to stay the lower court order, the Appeals Court points out that a stay is not a matter of right, but a matter of court discretion based on the particular circumstances of the case. The government, by requesting the stay, bears the burden of showing that those circumstances support the request:
Our decision is guided by four questions: “(1) whether the stay applicant has made a strong showing that he is likely to succeed on the merits; (2) whether the applicant will be irreparably injured absent a stay; (3) whether issuance of the stay will substantially injure the other parties interested in the proceeding; and (4) where the public interest lies.” [citation omitted]
The court concludes that the government fails to satisfy any of the four criteria. The court cites the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment requirement that “No person … be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law …” and describes the government position in quietly scathing terms (pp. 19-20):
The Government has not shown that the Executive Order provides what due process requires, such as notice and a hearing prior to restricting an individual’s ability to travel. Indeed, the Government does not contend that the Executive Order provides for such process. Rather, in addition to the arguments addressed in other parts of this opinion, the Government argues that most or all of the individuals affected by the Executive Order have no rights under the Due Process Clause. [emphasis added]
To make this argument, the government lawyers must ignore the plain language of the Constitution referring to “No person” and hope that no one notices that the individuals affected by the Executive Order are, in fact, living, breathing persons. People noticed, and people noticed that this attitude is authoritarian and in antithesis to American democratic standards.
The government tries to mitigate the Executive Order by referring to an “Authoritative Guidance” issued by White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn addressing and seeking to remedy certain portions of the order relating to lawful permanent residents. The court rejects this government argument with withering dry scorn (pp. 21-22):
The Government has offered no authority establishing that the White House counsel is empowered to issue an amended order superseding the Executive Order signed by the President and now challenged by the States, and that proposition seems unlikely. Nor has the Government established that the White House counsel’s interpretation of the Executive Order is binding on all executive branch officials responsible for enforcing the Executive Order. The White House counsel is not the President, and he is not known to be in the chain of command for any of the Executive Departments.
In analyzing this and other poorly thought out, incomplete, and incompetent aspects of the government’s case, the court points out (p. 24) that “it is not our role to try, in effect, to rewrite the Executive Order.” What the court says, with somewhat sly due deference, is that it’s up to the White House to do its job correctly.
The court turns to the states’ argument that the Executive Order violates both the Constitution’s First Amendment’s command that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. White citing Supreme Court holdings supporting the states’ argument, the Appeals Court chooses not to address it in the context of the government’s emergency motion. The court reserves the right to address the issues when the appeal of the TRO is heard.
Although the court does not address it directly, the underlying absurdity of the Executive Order is that it is based on fear-mongering over imaginary threats. If the “terrorist threats” endlessly uttered by the Chicken Littles of government and media had any basis in reality, then suspending the Executive Order might actually be dangerous and might even lead to “irreparable injury.” The court rejects that government argument, too (p.26):
The Government has not shown that a stay is necessary to avoid irreparable injury…. Despite the district court’s and our own repeated invitations to explain the urgent need for the Executive Order to be placed immediately into effect, the Government submitted no evidence to rebut the States’ argument that the district court’s order merely returned the nation temporarily to the position it has occupied for many previous years. The Government has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the Order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States. Rather than present evidence to explain the need for the Executive Order, the Government has taken the position that we must not review its decision at all. [emphasis added]
In contrast, the court found that the states had provided ample evidence that the Executive Order had already caused irreparable damage to some people and that, if reinstated, it would cause irreparable damage to many more.
Assessing the general public interest, the court saw favorable arguments on both sides. The public has a “powerful interest in national security,” but the public also has an interest in “free flow of travel, in avoiding separation of families, and in freedom from discrimination.” At this point, the court denies the government’s motion for an emergency stay, in effect because there is no perceptible emergency. Or rather there is no emergency as the government defines it. Taken as a whole, the court’s order illustrates a serious constitutional emergency perpetrated by the president against his own government and people. While the court doesn’t list other public interests, the public also surely has a substantial interest in a government that follows the constitutional due process of law, that acts in good faith, that supports its arguments with facts based in reality, and that does not claim the right to act dictatorially with no checks and balances.
White House acts as if it is not only ABOVE the law, it IS the law
Late on February 10, Trump administration sources said there would be no appeal of this decision to the Supreme Court. That leaves the future district court decision as a possible vehicle for a Supreme Court ruling. But late on February 10, the president hinted at just issuing a brand new Executive Order (adding “I like to surprise you.”). This might be good for the White House, avoiding a possible Supreme Court decision requiring them to act within the constitutional framework of the law. That might also be better than a Supreme Court decision that reinforced the president’s power to rule by decree. We don’t know how far the Supreme Court will go either for ideology or to protect judicial authority. We can be pretty sure that our constitutional crisis will not be over any time soon, and may not turn out well for the Constitution.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
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.
 |
|
The Mysterious Disappearance of the Biggest Scandal in Washington |
|
|
Saturday, 11 February 2017 09:36 |
|
Corn writes: "The biggest election-related scandal since Watergate occurred last year, and it has largely disappeared from the political-media landscape of Washington."
Painted Matryoshka dolls, or Russian nesting dolls, bearing the faces of U.S. Republican president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin at a souvenir shop in Moscow. (photo: Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)
The Mysterious Disappearance of the Biggest Scandal in Washington
By David Corn, Mother Jones
11 February 17
he biggest election-related scandal since Watergate occurred last year, and it has largely disappeared from the political-media landscape of Washington.
According to the consensus assessment of US intelligence agencies, Russian intelligence, under the orders of Vladimir Putin, mounted an extensive operation to influence the 2016 campaign to benefit Donald Trump. This was a widespread covert campaign that included hacking Democratic targets and publishing swiped emails via WikiLeaks. And it achieved its objectives. But the nation's capital remains under-outraged by this subversion. The congressional intelligence committees announced last month that they will investigate the Russian hacking and also examine whether there were any improper contacts between the Trump camp and Russia during the campaign. (A series of memos attributed to a former British counterintelligence officer included allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.) Yet these behind-closed-doors inquiries have generated minimum media notice, and, overall, there has not been much outcry.
Certainly, every once in a while, a Democratic legislator or one of the few Republican officials who have bothered to express any disgust at the Moscow meddling (namely Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio) will pipe up. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi days ago called on the FBI to investigate Trump's "financial, personal and political connections to Russia" to determine "the relationship between Putin, whom he admires, and Donald Trump." Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), responding to Trump's comparison of the United States to Putin's repressive regime, said on CNN, "What is this strange relationship between Putin and Trump? And is there something that the Russians have on him that is causing him to say these really bizarre things on an almost daily basis?" A few weeks ago, Graham told me he wanted an investigation of how the FBI has handled intelligence it supposedly has gathered on ties between Trump insiders and Russia. And last month, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) pushed FBI Director James Comey at a public hearing to release this information. Yet there has been no drumbeat of sound bites, tweets, or headlines. In recent days, the story has gone mostly dark.
Look at the White House daily press briefings. Since Trump entered office, there has been far more back-and-forth between reporters and Press Secretary Sean Spicer on the inauguration crowd size, Trump's bathrobe, and Melissa McCarthy than the Russia scandal. Trump associates are perhaps being questioned by House and Senate intelligence committee investigators, and the FBI, which according to news reports has looked at possible ties between Trump advisers and Russia, might also still be on the case. Yet this has not been a top priority for White House reporters.
Here are two questions that could have been posed to Spicer at his first briefing:
* Have any past or present Trump associates, inside or outside his administration, been contacted or questioned by the intelligence committees, the FBI, or any other government body investigating the Russian hacking or interactions between Trump's circle and Russia?
* During the presidential campaign, did Trump or any of his political or business associates have any interactions with Russian officials or Russian intermediaries?
That did not happen. At Spicer's first briefing, Anita Kumar of McClatchy did ask, "Has the president spoken to any of the intelligence agencies about the investigation into the Russian connections? And will he allow that to go on?" Spicer replied, "I don't believe he has spoken to anyone specifically about that and I don't know that. He has not made any indication that he would stop an investigation of any sort." This was an important question that warranted a response that was less equivocal—and reporters could have pointed that out.
At the next day's briefing, on January 24, Margaret Talev of Bloomberg asked Spicer about reports that Comey was remaining in his post and whether Comey and Trump had discussed "the Russia investigation and the parameters of that." Spicer responded, "I don't have anything on that." Spicer's nonresponse didn't prompt any news.
In the fortnight since, the key twin questions—what is Trump doing regarding the Russian hacking, and are Trump associates being investigated for interactions with Russia?—have not been regular items on the agenda during the White House briefings. When Trump spoke to Putin by phone on January 28, subsequent media reports noted that the call focused on how relations could be improved. There was no public indication that Trump had said anything to Putin about the Russian intervention in the US election. And in the following days, White House reporters did not ask Spicer about this apparent omission.
There have been plenty of significant topics for journalists to press Spicer and the administration on—the travel ban on refugees and immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, Trump's plan to dump Obamacare, various nominations and a Supreme Court pick, Trump's fact-free charge of widespread voter fraud, Steve Bannon's participation on the National Security Council, Trump's contentious calls with foreign leaders, the president's erratic behavior, and much more. But the lack of media attention to the Russia story, at the White House briefings and beyond, is curious. It is true that the intelligence committee probes are being conducted secretly, and there are no public hearings or actions to cover. (Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, hoping to confine this scandal, succeeded in preventing the creation of a special committee or an independent commission to probe this affair—either of which would have probably sparked more coverage than the highly secretive intelligence committees.) Still, in the past, pundits, politicians, and reporters in Washington have not been reluctant to go all-out in covering and commenting upon a controversy subjected to private investigation.
In this instance, the president's own people may be under investigation, and Trump has demonstrated no interest in holding Putin accountable for messing with US elections in what may be considered an act of covert warfare. Still, there has been no loud demand from the DC media (or most of the GOP) for answers and explanations. This quietude is good news for Putin—and reason for him to think he could get away with such an operation again.
|
|
|
Trump Accuses Media of Not Reporting Voices He Hears in Head |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 10 February 2017 14:17 |
|
Borowitz writes: "In a blistering attack on the media, President Trump said on Monday that the press has consistently refused to report the voices he hears in his head every day."
Donald Trump. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
Trump Accuses Media of Not Reporting Voices He Hears in Head
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
10 February 17
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 n a blistering attack on the media, President Trump said on Monday that the press has consistently refused to report the voices he hears in his head every day.
Trump praised the “really terrific information” he gets from the voices, which often speak to him when he is roaming the White House in his bathrobe in the middle of the night.
“They tell me that I won by the most votes ever and had the biggest Inauguration crowd ever,” Trump said. “These are fantastic voices and they’re doing a great job.”
Trump said the refusal to report what the voices tell him makes the media “the most dishonest people on earth.”
“There might be a hundred people protesting outside the White House, and at the exact same time, five hundred voices talking to me inside my head,” he said. “Guess which the press will write about?”
Offering an example of the media’s deceitfulness, Trump referred to the widely circulated story about him hanging up on the Prime Minister of Australia. “What they didn’t say is that I had to hang up because I was getting an incoming call in my head,” he said.
Trump said that because the voices in his head “keep saying that I’m the best President ever,” he does not expect the media to quote them anytime soon.
“If you want to find out what the voices in my head are saying, don’t even bother reading the newspaper,” he said. “Follow me on Twitter.”
|
|
FOCUS | A Who's Who of Donald Trump's Mixed Up Universe: Through the Looking Glass, How Can We Recognize Our Friends in the Mixed-Up World of Donald Trump? |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=31568"><span class="small">Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 10 February 2017 12:35 |
|
Gordon writes: "You know you're living in a looking-glass world when former Vice President Dick Cheney speaks out against one of Donald Trump's executive orders."
Donald Trump and Dick Cheney. (photo: Reuters/Scott Morgan/Chip East/Salon)
A Who's Who of Donald Trump's Mixed Up Universe: Through the Looking Glass, How Can We Recognize Our Friends in the Mixed-Up World of Donald Trump?
By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
10 February 17
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just a modest reminder that we’re on a planet where supporting places like TomDispatch matters. In that context, let me point out that, for a donation of $100 ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can still get a signed, personalized copy of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, the latest book from today’s author, Rebecca Gordon. It seems like a particularly topical book since it’s already possible to start imagining the kinds of war crimes trials that might someday be appropriate for the crew now taking over the U.S. national security state. And speaking of imagining our future world, I want once again to urge all of you to pick up a copy of Splinterlands, John Feffer’s stunning dystopian novel about our fracturing world (and the latest entry in the Dispatch Books publication list). It’s a genuine must-read in the age of Trump and signed, personalized copies of it are similarly available at our donation page. Just go there and check it all out! Tom]
We’re in a strange new world -- of fantasists (see Kellyanne Conway’s terrorist “massacre” in Bowling Green, Kentucky), delusionaries (see Sean Spicer’s account of the “Iranians” who attacked an “American” naval vessel), and dreamers (if having a nightmare is your idea of dreaming). Only the other day, for instance, at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Trump said definitively, “We're taken advantage of by every nation in the world, virtually. It's not going to happen anymore.” Honestly, you have to wonder what planet the former reality show host has been on these last decades.
And all of this has, in a couple of short weeks, started to change our world. Just ask Kjell Magne Bondevik, the former prime minister of Norway, who was stopped at Dulles International Airport on his way to that same prayer breakfast, held and questioned (even when it was clear that he had indeed been the prime minister of an allied country) because he had traveled to Iran three years earlier. Of course, looked at another way, he had also been the head of one of the many freeloading nations on the planet who, as President Trump now points out, have taken our country for a ride, so he undoubtedly got what he deserved. After all, in 2008, pressured by a “multi-departmental American lobbying effort,” Norway caved and agreed to buy the most expensive, cost-overrun-prone weapons system in history, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, rather than a perfectly reasonable Swedish plane. (If they hadn’t, it might have adversely affected sales to other U.S. allies ready to take us for a ride.) And nine years later, in 2017, despite endless delays and soaring costs, the Norwegians are still buying the planes -- 52 in all at an estimated price tag of $40 billion. What a crew of moochers!
Admittedly, it’s been a one-way planet for one hell of a long time, but Donald J. Trump is finally readying himself to reverse that and turn it into... well, possibly a hell on earth. At least, European leaders (Britain's excepted) seem to think so, as they find themselves packed into more or less the same unfriendly basket of deplorables as Iran. I had a friend years ago who told me that I’d know I was on a different planet when European powers -- Charles De Gaulle’s long-gone France aside -- started to say no to Washington. We may now officially be on that altered world, one where even Australia, America’s most faithful ally, might start uttering a no or two to a president who considers hanging up on its prime minister good form. (I assume by now that somewhere in the Forbidden City, the Chinese leadership is dancing in the streets, knowing that on Donald Trump’s planet their country is likely to look like the only reasonable imperial power around.)
These days, you may hear a similar chorus of "No's" coming out of the U.S. government where federal employees are beginning to form support groups and take courses “on workers’ rights and how they can express civil disobedience.” Consider this my way of saying that, in the Trump era, you’re going to have to buy a scorecard to figure out what “team” the various players on this increasingly confused world of ours belong to, creating endless complications for those of us already thinking about how to make it into the post-Trump years. Fortunately, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, author of American Nuremberg, has been thinking about friendship, alliances, and how to figure out who’s who in a world in which, even with that scorecard, it may be difficult to sort the players and the teams out.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Through the Looking Glass
How Can We Recognize Our Friends in the Mixed-Up World of Donald Trump?
 ou know you’re living in a looking-glass world when former Vice President Dick Cheney speaks out against one of Donald Trump’s executive orders. He’s a good example of how past adversaries of movements for peace and justice are lining up against our current adversary, the new president.
The United States, Cheney told radio host Hugh Hewitt, should not exclude people from our territory on the basis of religion. That was just a few days after Trump had signed an executive order entitled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” Such a move, said Cheney, “goes against everything we stand for and believe in.”
In the same interview, Cheney revealed the origins of his personal affinity for Muslim refugees. His own ancestors, he said, arrived on this continent to escape religious persecution. “They were Puritans,” he explained, adding, “There wasn’t anybody here then when they came.” No one? It was a sparkling display of precisely the European-American solipsism that so deeply marked the Cheney years in power.
Refugees, he acknowledged, do represent “a serious problem.” To begin to solve it, however, “You gotta go back and look at why they’re here. They’re here because of what’s happening in the Middle East.”
The refugees Cheney refers to aren’t “here,” of course, or what would be the point of Trump’s entrance ban? Otherwise, I’d have to agree with the former vice president: you do need to look at “what’s happening” but also -- something he didn’t mention -- what happened in the Middle East to explain their need for refuge. Refugees from Iraq and Syria (among other places) have indeed lost their homes and homelands by the millions, in significant part because of the very invasions and occupations that Cheney and his president, George W. Bush, launched in the Greater Middle East, radically destabilizing that part of the world.
The Enemy of My Enemy?
What should it mean for those of us hoping to resist the grim presidency of Donald Trump to find Dick Cheney, even momentarily and on a single issue, on our side? One thing it certainly can’t mean is that Cheney stands for the same “everything” that moved thousands of people to rush to U.S. airports, demanding the release of visitors, immigrants, and green card holders detained under Trump’s new order. Although in the Muslim refugees of today he may indeed recognize a reflection of his Puritan ancestors, Cheney’s disagreement with Donald Trump does not, in fact, make him a friend of the cause of compassion, justice, or the rule of law.
Few of us who spent eight years opposing Bush and Cheney or who remember their record of invasions, occupations, torture, black sites, and so much more are likely to imagine that his opposition to the ban on refugees makes him our friend. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t take some satisfaction from where he’s landed on this issue.
It’s been harder, however, for many of us to find clarity when it comes to certain of the other war hawks who, for their own reasons, don’t trust Trump.
It’s a trap most of us avoided last summer when 50 members of the national security establishment, including former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and one of George W. Bush’s CIA directors, Michael Hayden, wrote an open letter warning the world that Trump lacked “the character, values, and experience to be president.” We recognized that the letter signers themselves lacked the “character, values, and experience” to comment. After all, in the Middle East and elsewhere, this bunch had helped to pave the way for Trump’s rise.
In recent months, as the Russian hacking scandal hit and Trump’s feud with the CIA gained ever more media attention, that Agency has proven another matter. Here is a real danger to avoid: in our efforts to delegitimize Donald Trump, it’s important not to inadvertently legitimize an outfit that most of us have long opposed for its vicious campaigns around the world. Just because Donald Trump all but called its operatives Nazis shouldn’t lead the rest of us to forget its long history of deceit or accept its pronouncements at face value because they happen to fit what we would like to believe.
When Barack Obama said that there was convincing evidence Russia had used its hacking efforts to throw the U.S. election to Trump, the president-elect not surprisingly labeled the claim “ridiculous.” But there’s also been a bit of sympathy for the CIA in some odd places. For example, long-time CIA critic and Hullabaloo founder Heather Digby Parton (generally known as “Digby”) wrote at Salon that the CIA “understandably” felt there was something “a tad unfair” about the Trump transition team calling the Agency “the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” After all, they were under a lot of pressure from the White House back then. As Digby wrote, “It’s now known that Vice President Dick Cheney went out to [CIA headquarters in] Langley [Virginia] in order to personally twist arms and ‘stovepipe’ the intelligence report on Iraq.”
That’s certainly true, but it’s also true that the CIA director of that moment, George Tenet, assured President Bush that there was a “slam dunk case” that Saddam Hussein had such weaponry. The fact is that the CIA caved in to pressure from top administration officials for the intel they so desperately wanted for the invasion they already knew they were going to launch in Iraq. That is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the agency’s integrity or political independence. An "independent" CIA is bad enough, but the CIA’s vulnerability to political pressure from the White House is another reason we should be cautious about using Agency pronouncements as an instrument against Donald Trump. That's the slippery terrain we find ourselves on now.
Digby is certainly no admirer of the CIA, and her article wasn’t primarily focused on the quality of its intelligence under Bush, but on a far more recent turf war between the Agency and the FBI. She rightly calls out FBI Director James Comey for his 11th hour intervention in the election, the way he alerted Congress to the (vanishingly tiny) possibility that the hard drive on the computer that Anthony Weiner shared with his wife, Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, might have contained evidence of Clinton’s failure to protect State Department emails. Nevertheless, the reader is left to infer that -- at least when it comes to intelligence rather than clandestine operations -- the CIA’s pronouncements might prove a reliable instrument against Donald Trump, an urge that was relatively commonplace among opponents of the new president.
For example, the Atlantic, which has carried excellent reporting about CIA deceptions, published a piece by Kelly Magsamen, who served on the National Security Council (NSC) under both Bush and Obama, expressing alarm at Trump’s plan to exclude the CIA director from his version of the NSC. (In fact, the new president reversed himself on the matter almost immediately.) It's not surprising that Magsamen would have this view. For those of us who would like to dismantle the entire national security edifice, however, it would be shortsighted indeed to attack Trump by shoring up the reputation of an agency -- the CIA -- that, as former counterintelligence officer John Kiriakou has suggested, the country and the world “do not need.” Kariakou, you may remember, was jailed for discussing the CIA’s torture program with a journalist.
Support for America’s spooks has continued to resound in odd places. For example, there’s been much outrage expressed at President Trump’s bizarre behavior on a visit to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In a performance that was indeed shocking, he used the occasion to complain about the way the media underestimated the size of the crowd at his inauguration, after which he asserted that God had stopped the rain during his Inaugural Address.
What many commentators found far more bizarre and disturbing, however, was that Trump gave his performance in front of a memorial wall commemorating CIA agents who had died on the job. Writing for the not-exactly-right-wing Huffington Post, Neil McCarthy claimed that the wall honors “un-named heroes who have died in our service.” In a New Yorker article headlined “Trump’s Vainglorious Affront to the CIA,” former Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Robin Wright chided the new president for his lack of respect for the Agency’s martyrs. Trump, she suggested, should have followed the example of President Ronald Reagan, who on his first visit to the CIA told the assembled staff:
“The work you do each day is essential to the survival and to the spread of human freedom. You remain the eyes and ears of the free world. You are the ‘trip wire’ over which totalitarian rule must stumble in their quest for global domination...”
While I would never applaud anyone’s untimely, violent death, the fact that Donald Trump (despite his denials) has been feuding with the CIA shouldn’t erase that agency’s history or just what those agents died defending. Trump’s annoyance shouldn’t magically transform an agency responsible for decades of violent and bloody coups against democratic governments in places like Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, and Chile into an organization “essential to the survival and spread of human freedom.” Whatever pleasure we may take in Trump’s irritation, it doesn’t vindicate the murder of between 26,000 and 41,000 Vietnamese, many of then tortured to death, in the CIA’s notorious Phoenix program during the Vietnam War. It doesn’t erase the training in torture and repression its agents provided to dictatorships around the world. And it certainly doesn’t make the CIA’s use of terror and torture in its black sites as part of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” any less horrific or illegal.
Nor does the CIA’s future look much more promising than its past. When it comes to torture, its new head Mike Pompeo has clearly wanted to have it both ways. During his confirmation hearing, he proved unwilling to call waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” methods torture, but did acknowledge that they are illegal under a 2015 law, which limits interrogation techniques to those described in the U.S. Army Field Manual.
There are two problems with reliance on that law. The present Field Manual contains a classified annex, which permits among other things repeated 12-hour bouts of sensory deprivation and solitary confinement for up to 30 days at a time. Both of these are forms of the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment prohibited by the U.N. Convention against Torture. In addition, the manual itself is up for revision in two years. A new version might provide very different guidance.
But it’s not clear that Pompeo is actually wedded to the manual anyway. As Human Rights Watch (HRW) points out, in his written testimony for his confirmation hearing he “indicated that he would consult with CIA staff to determine whether the application of the Army Field Manual was an ‘impediment’ to intelligence-gathering, and whether it needed to be rewritten.” Note as well that Gina Haspel, Pompeo’s newly appointed deputy director at the Agency, is notorious for her involvement in its black sites and torture practices in the Bush years (as well as the destruction of video tapes of waterboarding sessions -- evidence, that is, of those criminal activities).
Trump himself supports such torture practices. On January 25th, he told ABC News that he still clings to his belief that torture “works.” His evidence? The testimony of “people at the highest level of intelligence” who “as recently as twenty-four hours ago” told him that it works “absolutely.” It seems likely one of those “people” was Gina Haspel, who has a good reason to cling to that same belief.
In reporting ABC’s interview with Trump, CNN, like most mainstream media, allowed itself to be distracted by the question of whether or not torture is an effective way of getting information from someone. It isn’t, as the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in its landmark 2014 report. However, the question really shouldn’t be whether torture “works.” The question should be: Is it either moral or legal? And Donald Trump notwithstanding, the answer in both cases is no.
Pompeo is also a big fan of NSA-style mass surveillance and has called for the reinstatement of the NSA’s massive secret collection of telephone, Internet, and social media metadata. The telephone data part of the program officially expired in November 2015 as a result of the USA Freedom Act, passed earlier that year. Under the new arrangement, metadata is held by the phone companies, rather than directly by the NSA, which now needs a FISA warrant to get access to those records. Internet and social media records are still directly available to the NSA, however.
But that’s not enough for Pompeo. Human Rights Watch points to a 2016 Wall Street Journal op-ed, in which Pompeo urged Congress to “'pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata' -- that is, records of communications, such as their dates, parties, and durations -- 'and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database.'”
HRW observes that, in spite of “repeated written and oral questions in the context of the hearing, Pompeo remained vague on what he meant by the potentially expansive and discriminatory term ‘lifestyle information.’” As one devoted to the lesbian “lifestyle,” I don’t find this particularly encouraging.
Fortunately for those of us who hope to see the national security state dismantled someday, as recent events have indicated, that edifice and its friends in both parties are not a seamless whole. There are runs and tears throughout its fabric, and part of our job is to help open those gaps wider -- always keeping in mind that while politics may make strange bedfellows, there are some people you don’t ever want to sleep with. Even in the Trump era, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend, at least not when that enemy is the CIA.
Enemies of Enemies of Enemies
If the CIA is the enemy of my enemy, then Vladimir Putin’s government in Russia must be the enemy of the enemy of my enemy. Is it therefore my friend?
This is a complicated and delicate question. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has just set its doomsday clock forward to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, 30 seconds closer to catastrophe.
In the shadow of nuclear war, who wouldn’t be eager to see tensions between Russia and the United States defused? At the same time, I become uncomfortable when some of my colleagues on the left appear to believe that any adversary of U.S. hegemony may represent a potential ally for us.
For example, the Nation’s Stephen Cohen, whose many years of writing on the Soviet Union served as an important corrective to the official narrative of the time, characterizes those who today are wary of Putin as “enemies of détente.” He points to a New York Times editorial whose descriptions "of Putin’s leadership over the years" were "so distorted they seemed more like Saturday Night Live’s ongoing parodies" and calls out Times columnist Paul Krugman’s "neo-McCarthyite baiting" of Trump for his admiration of Putin.
I can agree with Cohen that Krugman goes over the top when he refers to the present administration as the “Putin-Trump regime.” But it’s a mistake to equate legitimate suspicion of Russia and Putin with the efforts of Senator Joe McCarthy to discredit the U.S. left (and liberals) during the Cold War. The Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union, and distrust of Vladimir Putin is not McCarthyism.
Cohen is certainly correct that Putin has good reason to be wary of what he calls "NATO’s highly provocative buildup on Russia’s Western border." But even if Russia quite rightly objects to the way NATO has moved east, it doesn’t prove that Putin’s government didn’t try to influence the U.S. election. Such things are hardly beyond the realm of possibility. After all, the United States has a long history of doing just that to countries around the world (as did the Soviet Union in its day).
That the Washington establishment opposes Russian challenges to the U.S. urge for global dominance doesn’t make Vladimir Putin any less an autocrat, or Russia under his rule any more a country to emulate. Indeed, on January 27th, the Russian parliament voted 380-3 to decriminalize domestic violence. A week later, Putin signed the bill into law. Which way, I wonder, would Donald Trump go if similar legislation were on the table here?
What About Friends?
When the thieves who run our government fall out, we should be glad -- and find ways to drive the wedge deeper. When John McCain does something we approve of, like objecting to Trump’s executive order on immigration, we can agree with him, but notice as well that, in the next breath, he says he supports Trump’s “commitment to rebuilding our” (already vast and unprecedentedly powerful) military.
There’s a difference between people who find themselves sharing the same adversary and people who can be, to use an old-fashioned term, in solidarity with each other. Those of us who oppose U.S. military adventurism abroad and inequality, racism, and sexism at home need to remember who our friends are. The next few years must be a time of building broad coalitions and tightening the bonds among organizations and people who believe that, even now, a better world is still possible.
In the mixed-up looking-glass universe that is Trumplandia, we are going to need our friends more than ever. This is true domestically, which means, for instance, that tenants’ rights groups will need to keep jumping into struggles for immigrant rights (as is already happening in many places), and veterans’ organizations will need to keep on supporting fights to preserve Native land and water rights as in the struggle over the Dakota Access pipeline. It’s true on the international level, as well. We will need to build strong ties with people in Europe fighting the rise of the far right there, and to continue our solidarity with the victims of U.S. military actions around the world.
But it’s also true at the level of our individual lives. Now especially we need contact with the people we love to keep us strong and hopeful. Now is a good time to remind your friends that you love them, and that you will have their backs. It’s a time to march together, but also to eat together. To strategize and organize, but also to make each other laugh. It’s a time to remember who our adversaries are, but also to cherish our friends.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, as well as Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
|
|
