May 22, 2009
Two Sides of the Same Coin: Heads-Heads
By Sibel Edmonds
“In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows
how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the
handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.”
-- Plato
During the campaign, amid their state of elation, many disregarded
Presidential Candidate Senator Barack Obama’s past record and took any
criticism of these past actions as partisan attacks deserving equally partisan
counterattacks. Some continued their reluctant support after candidate Obama
became grand finalist and prayed for the best. And a few still continue their
rationalizing and defense, with illogical excuses such as ‘He’s been in office for
only 20 days, give the man a break!’ and ‘He’s had only 50 days in office, give
him a chance!’ and currently, ‘be reasonable - how much can a man do in 120
days?!’ I am going to give this logic, or lack of, a slight spicing of reason,
then, turn it around, and present it as: If ‘the man’ can do this much
astounding damage, whether to our civil liberties, or to our notion of
democracy, or to government integrity, in ‘only’ 120 days, may God help us with
the next [(4 X 365) - 120] days.
I know there are those who
have been tackling President Obama’s changes on change; they have been
challenging his flipping, or rather flopping, on issues central to getting him
elected. While some have been covering the changes comprehensively, others have
been running right and left like headless chickens in the field - pick one
hypocrisy, scream a bit, then move on to the next outrageous flop, the same,
and then to the next, basically, looking
and treating this entire mosaic one piece at a time.
Despite all the
promises Mr. Obama made during his campaign, especially on those issues that
were absolutely central to those whose support he garnered, so far the
President of Change has followed in the footsteps of his predecessor. Not only
that, his administration has made it clear that they intend to continue this
trend. Some call it a major betrayal. Can we go so far as to call it a ‘swindling
of the voters’?
On the State Secrets Privilege
Yes, I am
going to begin with the issue of State Secrets Privilege; because I was the
first recipient of this ‘privilege’ during the now gone Administration; because
long before it became ‘a popular’ topic among the ‘progressive experts,’ during
the time when these same experts avoided writing or speaking about it; when
many constitutional attorneys had no idea we even had this "law" - similar
to and based on the British ‘Official Secret Act; when many journalists did not
dare to question this draconian abuse of Executive Power; I was out there,
writing, speaking, making the rounds in Congress, and fighting this ‘privilege’
in the courts. And because in 2004 I stood up in front of the Federal Court building in DC, turned to
less than a handful of reporters, and said, ‘This, my case, is setting a
precedent, and you are letting this happen by your fear-induced censorship. Now
that they have gotten away with this, now that you have let them get away,
we’ll be seeing this ‘privilege’ invoked in case after case involving
government criminal deeds in need of cover up.’ Unfortunately I was proven
right.
So far The Obama administration has invoked the state
secrets privilege in three cases in the first 100 days: Al Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama, Mohammed v.
Jeppesen Dataplan, and Jewel v.
NSA.
In
defending the NSA illegal wiretapping, the Obama administration maintained
that the State Secrets Privilege, the same draconian executive privilege used
and abused voraciously by the previous administration, required the dismissal
of the case in courts.
Not only has the new
administration continued the practice of invoking SSP to shield government
wrongdoing, it has expanded its abuses much further. In the Al Haramain case, Obama’s
Justice Department has threatened to have the FBI or federal marshals break
into a judge's office and remove evidence already turned over in the case,
according to the plaintiffs attorney. Even Bush didn't go this far so brazenly.
In a well-written disgust provoking piece
Jon Eisenberg, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, poses the question: “The president's lawyers continue
to block access to information that could expose warrantless wiretapping. Is
this change we can believe in?”
This is the same
President, the same well-spoken showman, who went on record in 2007, during the
campaign shenanigans, and said the following:
“When I am president we won’t work
in secret to avoid honoring our laws and
Constitution.”---Presidential Candidate, Barack Obama, 2007
Yes, this is the same
President who had frowned upon and criticized the abuses and misuse of the
State Secrets Privilege.
On NSA
Warrantless Wiretapping
The new Administration
has pledged to defend the Telecommunications Industry by giving them immunity
against any lawsuit that may involve their participation in the illegal NSA
wiretapping program. In 2007, Obama’s
office released the
following position of then Senator Obama: “Senator Obama unequivocally opposes
giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies ... Senator Obama
will not be among those voting to end the filibuster.” But then Senator Obama made
his 180 degree flip, and voted to end the filibuster. After that, along with
other colleagues in Congress, he tried to placate the critics of his move by
falsely assuring them that the immunity did not extend to the Bush
Administration - the Executive Branch who did break the law. Another flip was
yet to come, awaiting his presidency, when Obama’s Justice Department defended
its predecessor not only by using the State Secrets Privilege, but taking it
even further, by astoundingly granting
the Executive Branch an unlimited immunity for any kind of ‘illegal’ government
surveillance.
Let me emphasize, the Obama Administration’s action in this
regard was not about ‘being trapped’ in situations created and put in place by
the previous administration. These were willful acts fully reviewed, decided
upon, and then implemented by the new president and his Justice Department.
Accountability on Torture
President Obama’s action and inaction on Torture can be
summarized very clearly as follows: First give an absolute pass, under the
guise of ‘looking forward not backward,’ to the ultimate culprits who had
ordered it. Next, absolve all the
implementers, practitioners and related agencies, under the excuse of
‘complying with orders without questioning,’ and then start giving the
‘drafters’ of the memos an out by transferring the decision for action to the states.
After granting the ‘untouchable’ status to all involved in
this shameful chapter in our nation’s dangerous downward slide, he now refuses
to release the photos, the incriminating evidence, and is doing so by using the
exact same justification used repeatedly by his predecessors: ‘Their release
would endanger the troops,’ as in ‘the revelation on NSA would endanger our
national security’ and ‘stronger whistleblower laws would endanger our
intelligence agencies’ and so on and so forth.
Not only that, he goes even further to shove his secrecy
promotion down other nations’ courts throat. In the case
of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and a legal resident in Britain who was
held and tortured in Guantanamo from 2004 to 2009, and filed lawsuits in the
British courts to have the evidence of his torture released, Mr. Obama’s
position has been to threaten the British Government in order to conceal all
facts and related evidence. This case involves the brutal torture and so very
‘extraordinary’ rendition practices of the previous administration, the same
practices that ‘in words’ were strongly condemned by the President during his
candidacy.
Today he and his administration unapologetically maintain
the same Bush Administration position on extraordinary rendition, torture, and
related secrecy to cover up. Here
is Ben Wizner’s, the attorney who argued the case for the ACLU, response “We
are shocked and deeply disappointed that the Justice Department has chosen to
continue the Bush administration’s practice of dodging judicial scrutiny of
extraordinary rendition and torture. This was an opportunity for the new
administration to act on its condemnation of torture and rendition, but instead
it has chosen to stay the course.” Yes indeed, President Obama has chosen to
protect and support the course involving torture, rendition and the abuse of
secrecy to cover them all up.
The Revival of Bush Era Military Commission
After all the talk and pretty speeches given during his
presidential campaign on the ‘failure’ of Bush era military tribunals of
Thankfully the ‘on the record’ statements of Candidate Obama
in 2008 on this issue, contradicting his action today, are accessible to all:
“It's time to better protect the American
people and our values by bringing swift and sure justice to terrorists through
our courts and our Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
Suspect terrorists (emphasis on ‘suspect’) cannot have just
trials consistent/in line with our ‘courts and Uniform Code of Military
Justice’ via military commissions. It’s almost an oxymoron! And if you add to
that the other Obama-approved ingredients such as secrecy, rendition, and
evidence obtained under torture, what have we got? Anything resembling our
courts and Uniform Code of Military Justice system?
On War and Bodies Piling Up
Here is the first paragraph in a New York Times report on
“The number of civilians
killed by the American air strikes in
The
report also includes the disagreement over the exact number of ‘Civilian
Casualties’ in
“Government
officials have accepted handwritten lists compiled by the villagers of 147 dead
civilians. An independent Afghan human rights group said it had accounts from
interviews of 117 dead. American officials say that even 100 is an exaggeration
but have yet to issue their own count.”
Does it really matter - the difference between
147 and 117 or just 100 when it comes to children, grandmothers…innocent lives
lost in a war with no well-defined objectives or plans? If for some it indeed
does matter, then here is a more specific and detailed report:
“A copy
of the government's list of the names, ages and father's names of each of the
140 dead was obtained by Reuters earlier this week. It shows that 93 of those
killed were children -- the youngest eight days old -- and only 22 were adult
males.”
Maybe releasing the photographs of the nameless
unrepresented victims of these airstrikes should be as important as those of
torture. Because, from what I see, they and their loss of lives have been
reduced to some petty number to fight about.
When I was around twelve years old, in
This baby was the victim of an air strike, a
bombing that killed her entire family and leveled her modest home to the
ground. My father pointed at this heartbreaking baby and said, “Sibel, this is
war. This is the real face of war. This is the result of war. Do you think
anything can justify this? I want to replace the glamorous exciting phony
images of those war movies in your head. I want you to remember this for the
rest of your life and stand against this kind of destruction…”
And I do. This is why I am offended by those petty numbers when it comes
to civilian deaths. This is the reason I believe some may need pictures of
these atrocities as much as those of torture to replace those ‘Shock & Awe’
footages fed to them by our MSM.
All this death and destruction is carried out
while the administration’s Afghan policy is still murky and confused, and it’s
strategy ambiguous. Sure, our so-called ‘New’ Afghan Strategy includes more troops
and asks for a much larger budget allocation; nothing new there. It is another
war with no time table. It is the continuation of the same abstract ‘War on
Terror’ without any definition of what would constitute an ‘accomplished
mission.’ One minute there is pondering on possible ‘reconciliation’ with the
Taliban, and the next minute seeking to topple it. In fact, to confuse the
matter even further, we now hear this distinction between ‘Good Taliban, Bad Taliban,
and the Plain Ugly Taliban.’ As stated by
Karzai on Meet the Press on
I can go on listing cases of Mr. Obama’s change on change.
Whether it is his reversal
on protection for whistleblowers, despite his campaign promise to the contrary, or
his expansion of the Un-American title of ‘Czardom,’
where we now have more czars than ever:
Border Czar, Energy Czar, Cyber Security Czar…Car Czar…maybe even a Bicycle
Czar!. Or…But for now I’ll stick with the major promises that were ‘Central’ to
him getting elected, all of which he has
flipped on in less than 150 days in office, a track record indeed.
What I want the readers to do is to read the extremely
important cases above, step back in time to those un-ending campaign trail
days, and answer the following questions:
How would Senator McCain have acted on these same issues if
he had been elected? How would Senator Hilary Clinton? Do you believe there
would have been any major differences? Weren’t their records almost identical
to Senator Obama’s on these issues? If you are like me, and answer ‘same,’ ‘same,’
‘no,’ and ‘yes,’ then, why do you think we ended up with these exact same
candidates, those deemed ‘viable’ and sold to us as such?
With too much at stake, too many unfinished agendas for the
course of our nation, and too many skeletons in the closet in need of hiding
for self-preservation, the ‘permanent establishment’ made certain that they took
no risk by giving the public, via their MSM tentacles, a coin that no matter
how many times flipped would come up the same - Heads, Heads.
“Politics will
eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate
in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he
could ever be.” --Marshall Mcluhan
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*For discussion of this piece
visit Sibel Edmonds’ Forum
Sibel
Edmonds is the founder and director of National Security
Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC). Ms. Edmonds worked as a language specialist for the
FBI. During her work with the bureau,
she discovered and reported serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and
intentional blocking of intelligence that had national security implications.
After she reported these acts to FBI management, she was retaliated against by
the FBI and ultimately fired in March 2002. Since that time, court proceedings
on her case have been blocked by the assertion of “State Secret Privilege”; the
Congress of the