Christopher Hitchens: Obama's Latest Craven Deal with Israel

Israel's Shabbos Goy

Why America will come to regret the craven deal Obama is offering Netanyahu.

By Christopher Hitchens

November 17, 2010 "Slate" - - Those of us who keep an eye on the parties of God are avid students of the weekly Sabbath sermons ofRabbi Ovadia Yosef. In these and other venues, usually broadcast, this elderly Sephardic ayatollah provides an action-packed diet that seldom disappoints. A few months ago, he favored his devout audience with a classic rant in which he called down curses on the Palestinian Arabs and their leaders, wishing that a plague would come and sweep them all away. Last month, he announced that the sole reason for the existence of gentiles was to perform menial services for Jews: After that, he opined, their usefulness was at an end. A huge hubbub led to hiswithdrawal of the first of these diatribes. (I would be interested to know if this was on partly theological grounds. After all, the local Palestinians may still have some labor to perform before the divine plan is through with them.) The second sermon, so far as I know, still stands without apology. Why on earth should anybody care about the ravings of this scrofulous medieval figure, who peppers his talk of non-Jews in Palestine with comparisons to snakes, monkeys, and other lesser creations, rather as Hamas and Hezbollah refer to the Jews? Well, one reason is that he is the spiritual leader of the Shas Party, an important member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition. Indeed, two key portfolios, of the Interior and of Construction and Housing, are held by Shas members named Eli Yishai and Ariel Atias.

Yishai recently delighted the Diaspora by saying that only those Jews who converted via the Orthodox route could carry "the Jewish gene." Atias has expressed alarm about the tendency of Israeli Arab citizens to try to live where they please—or "spread," as he phrases it—and has advocated a policy of segregation in housing within Israel proper. He also advocates the segregation by neighborhood of secular from Orthodox Jews, adding that he does not wish his own children to mix with their nonreligious peers. It is Yishai's ministry that is famous for making announcements about new "housing" developments outside Israel itself and in legally disputed territory. Very often, Netanyahu himself has claimed to be taken by surprise at these announcements, which usually involve tense areas of Jerusalem. Thus the huge embarrassment inflicted on Vice President Joe Biden earlier this year, when fresh settlement construction was proclaimed in the middle of his high-level visit. And thus the undisguised irritation of President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week, when yet another round of such housing was scheduled while Obama was in Asia and Netanyahu was in the United States. Apparently, the latest high-level round of the peace process has included the modest and tentative suggestion to Israel that such disclosures be timed with greater tact and coordination in the future.

It's not only the doings of his Interior and Housing ministries of which Netanyahu has to remain resolutely uninformed. His foreign minister is not a part of Israel's most important external negotiation. This is perhaps just as well, since the holder of the post, Avigdor Lieberman, regards the whole "process" as a waste of time. He said as much at the United Nations last September. It was patiently explained at that time that Netanyahu had not been favored with advance notice of the contents of the speech.

Lieberman has another distinction that I believe is unique. He does not live in the country whose foreign ministry he heads. He chooses, rather, to make his home in the West Bank settlement of Nokdim, a tenaciously held outcrop with a population of fewer than 1,000 people. The party which he heads—Yisrael Beytenu—is a nationalist rather than religious faction, but in a competition with Rabbi Yosef for vicious anti-Arab rhetoric, it's not immediately clear which one would emerge the winner.

Now we read that, in return for just 90 days of Israeli lenience on new settlement-building (this brief pause or "freeze" not to include the crucial precincts of East Jerusalem), Netanyahu is being enticed with "a package of security incentives and fighter jets worth $3 billion" and a promise that the United States government would veto any Palestinian counterproposal at the United Nations. Netanyahu, while graciously considering this offer, was initially reported as being unsure whether he "could win approval for the United States deal from his Cabinet." In other words, we must wait on the pleasure of Rabbi Yosef and Ministers Atias, Yishai, and Lieberman, who have the unusual ability to threaten Netanyahu from his right wing.

This is a national humiliation. Regardless of whether that bunch of clowns and thugs and racists "approve" of the Obama/Clinton grovel offer, there should be a unanimous demand that it be withdrawn.

The mathematics of the situation must be evident even to the meanest intelligence. In order for any talk of a two-state outcome to be even slightly realistic, there needs to be territory on which the second state can be built, or on which the other nation living in Palestine can govern itself. The aim of the extreme Israeli theocratic and chauvinist parties is plain and undisguised: Annex enough land to make this solution impossible, and either expel or repress the unwanted people. The policy of Netanyahu is likewise easy to read: Run out the clock by demanding concessions for something he has already agreed to in principle, appease the ultras he has appointed to his own government, and wait for a chance to blame Palestinian reaction for the inevitable failure.

The only mystery is this: Why does the United States acquiesce so wretchedly in its own disgrace at the hands of a virtual client state? A soft version of Rabbi Yosef's contemptuous view of the gentiles is the old concept of the shabbos goy: the non-Jew who is paid a trifling fee to turn out the lights or turn on the stove, or whatever else is needful to get around the more annoying regulations of the Sabbath. How the old buzzard must cackle when he sees the gentiles actually volunteering a bribe to do the lowly work! And lowly it is, involving the tearing-up of international law and U.N. resolutions and election promises, and the further dispossession and eviction of a people to whom we gave our word. This craven impotence will be noticed elsewhere, and by some very undesirable persons, and we will most certainly be made to regret it. For now, though, the shame.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Rahm Emanuel: I'm more hawkish than most Israelis

From Xymphora's Blog

Saturday, May 15, 2010

http://xymphora.blogspot.com/

Xymphora quotes US billionaire and pro Israeli Haim Saban quoting Rahm Emanuel describing his Zionism.

Saban: I had the chance to talk to Hillary about a lot of things including this and I also talked to Rahm Emanuel and Rahm Emanuel for instance told me ‘I am more hawkish than 50 percent of the people in Israel.’"

Webster Tarpley: Obama Declares War on Pakistan (after Bush declared war on Afganistan which Obama continues

Note: I'm sort of half a fan of Webster Tarpley. He comes up with more than his fair share of howlers. But this article is far and away the best I've read or heard about  what the US is doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I've believed for some time that it was the Bush-Cheney plan to destabilize Pakistan and do something crazy about its nukes, but this article gives valuable details. --Ronald Bleier

Obama Declares War On Pakistan

Webster G. Tarpley
Infowars.com
December 14, 2009

http://www.infowars.com/obama-declares-war-on-pakistan/

Obama declared all-out war on Pakistan during his December 1, 2009,
West Point speech.

Obama's West Point speech of December 1 represents far more than the obvious
brutal escalation in Afghanistan - it is nothing less than a declaration of
all-out war by the United States against Pakistan. This is a brand-new war,
a much wider war now targeting Pakistan, a country of 160 million people
armed with nuclear weapons. In the process, Afghanistan is scheduled to be
broken up. This is no longer the Bush Cheney Afghan war we have known in the
past. This is something immensely bigger: the attempt to destroy the
Pakistani central government in Islamabad and to sink that country into a
chaos of civil war, Balkanization, subdivision and general mayhem. The
chosen strategy is to massively export the Afghan civil war into Pakistan
and beyond, fracturing Pakistan along ethnic lines. It is an oblique war
using fourth-generation or guerrilla warfare techniques to assail a country
which the United States and its associates in aggression are far too weak to
attack directly. In this war, the Taliban are employed as US proxies. This
aggression against Pakistan is Obama's attempt to wage the Great Game
against the hub of Central Asia and Eurasia or more generally.

US DETERRED FROM OPEN WAR BY PAKISTAN'S NUKES

The ongoing civil war in Afghanistan is merely a pretext, a cover story
designed to provide the United States with a springboard for a geopolitical
destabilization campaign in the entire region which cannot be publicly
avowed. In the blunt cynical world of imperialist aggression à la Bush and
Cheney, a pretext might have been manufactured to attack Pakistan directly.
But Pakistan is far too large and the United States is far too weak and too
bankrupt for such an undertaking. In addition, Pakistan is a nuclear power,
possessing atomic bombs and medium range missiles needed to deliver them.
What we are seeing is a novel case of nuclear deterrence in action. The US
cannot send an invasion fleet or set up airbases nearby because Pakistani
nuclear weapons might destroy them. To this extent, the efforts of Ali
Bhutto and A.Q. Khan to provide Pakistan a deterrent capability have been
vindicated. But the US answer is to find ways to attack Pakistan below the
nuclear threshold, and even below the conventional threshold. This is where
the tactic of exporting the Afghan civil war to Pakistan comes in.

The architect of the new Pakistani civil war is US Special Forces General
Stanley McChrystal, who organized the infamous network of US torture
chambers in Iraq. McChrystal's specific credential for the Pakistani civil
war is his role in unleashing the Iraqi civil war of Sunnis versus Shiites
by creating "al Qaeda in Iraq" under the infamous and now departed double
agent Zarkawi. If Iraqi society as a whole had lined up against the US
invaders, the occupiers would have soon been driven out. The counter-gang
known as "Al Qaeda in Iraq" avoided that possibility by killing Shiites, and
thus calling forth massive retaliation in the form of a civil war. These
tactics are drawn from the work of British General Frank Kitson, who wrote
about them in his book Low Intensity Warfare. If the United States possesses
a modern analog to Heinrich Himmler of the SS, it is surely General
McChrystal, Obama's hand-picked choice. McChrystal's superior, Gen Petraeus,
wants to be the new Field Marshal von Hindenburg - in other words, he wants
to be the next US president.

The vulnerability of Pakistan which the US and its NATO associates are
seeking to exploit can best be understood using a map of the prevalent
ethnic groups of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and India. Most maps show only
political borders which date back to the time of British imperialism, and
therefore fail to reflect the principal ethnic groups of the region. For the
purposes of this analysis, we must start by recognizing a number of groups.
First is the Pashtun people, located mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Then we have the Baluchis, located primarily in Pakistan and Iran. The
Punjabis inhabit Pakistan, as do the Sindhis. The Bhutto family came from
Sind.

PASHTUNISTAN

The US and NATO strategy begins with the Pashtuns, the ethnic group from
which the so-called Taliban are largely drawn. The Pashtuns represent a
substantial portion of the population of Afghanistan, but here they are
alienated from the central government under President Karzai in Kabul, even
though the US puppet Karzai passes for a Pashtun himself. The issue involves
the Afghan National Army, which was created by the United States after the
2001 invasion. The Afghan officer corps are largely Tajiks drawn from the
Northern Alliance that allied with the United States against the Pashtun
Talibans. The Tajiks speak Dari, sometimes known as eastern Persian. Other
Afghan officers come from the Hazara people. The important thing is that the
Pashtuns feel shut out.

The US strategy can best be understood as a deliberate effort at
persecuting, harassing, antagonizing, strafing, repressing, and murdering
the Pashtuns. The additional 40,000 US and NATO forces which Obama demands
for Afghanistan will concentrate in Helmand province and other areas where
the Pashtuns are in the majority. The net effect will be to increase the
rebellion of the fiercely independent Pashtuns against Kabul and the foreign
occupation, and at the same time to push many of these newly radicalized
mujaheddin fighters across the border into Pakistan, where they can wage war
against the central government in Islamabad. US aid will flow directly to
war lords and drug lords, increasing the centrifugal tendencies.

On the Pakistani side, the Pashtuns are also alienated from the central
government. Islamabad and the army are seen by them as too much the
creatures of the Punjabis, with some input from the Sindhis. On the
Pakistani side of the Pashtun territory, US operations include wholesale
assassinations from unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, murders by CIA and
reportedly Blackwater snipers, plus blind terrorist massacres like the
recent ones in Peshawar which the Pakistani Taliban are blaming on
Blackwater, acting as a subcontractor of the CIA. These actions are
intolerable and humiliating for a proud sovereign state. Every time the
Pashtuns are clobbered, they blame the Punjabis in Islamabad for the dirty
deals with the US that allow this to happen. The most immediate goal of
Obama's Afghan-Pakistan escalation is therefore to promote a general
secessionist uprising of the entire Pashtun people under Taliban auspices,
which would already have the effect of destroying the national unity of both
Kabul and Islamabad.

BALUCHISTAN

The other ethnic group which the Obama strategy seeks to goad into
insurrection and secession is the Baluchis. The Baluchis have their own
grievances against the Iranian central government in Tehran, which they see
as being dominated by Persians. An integral part of the new Obama policy is
to expand the deadly flights of the CIA Predators and other assassination
drones into Baluchistan. One pretext for this is the report, peddled for
example by Michael Ware of CNN, that Osama bin Laden and his MI-6 sidekick
Zawahiri are both holed up in the Baluchi city of Quetta, where they operate
as the kingpins of the so-called "Quetta Shura." Blackwater teams cannot be
far behind. In Iranian Baluchistan, the CIA is funding the murderous
Jundullah organization, which was recently denounced by Teheran for the
murder of a number of top officials of the Iranian Pasdaran Revolutionary
guards. The rebellion of Baluchistan would smash the national unity of both
Pakistan and Iran, thus helping to destroy two of the leading targets of US
policy.

OBAMA'S RUBE GOLDBERG STRATEGY

Even Chris Matthews of MSNBC, normally a devoted acolyte of Obama, pointed
out that the US strategy as announced at West Point very much resembles a
Rube Goldberg contraption. (In the real world, "al Qaeda" is of course the
CIA's own Arab and terrorist legion.) In the world of official US myth, the
enemy is supposed to be "Al Qaeda." But, even according to the US
government, there are precious few "Al Qaeda" fighters left in Afghanistan.
Why then, asked Matthews, concentrate US forces in Afghanistan where "Al
Qaeda" is not, rather than in Pakistan where "Al Qaeda" is now alleged to
be?

One elected official who has criticized this incongruous mismatch is
Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who said in a television
interview that 'Pakistan, in the border region near Afghanistan, is perhaps
the epicenter [of global terrorism], although al Qaida is operating all over
the world, in Yemen, in Somalia, in northern Africa, affiliates in Southeast
Asia. Why would we build up 100,000 or more troops in parts of Afghanistan
included that are not even near the border? You know, this buildup is in
Helmand Province. That's not next door to Waziristan. So I'm wondering, what
exactly is this strategy, given the fact that we have seen that there is a
minimal presence of Al Qaida in Afghanistan, but a significant presence in
Pakistan? It just defies common sense that a huge boots on the ground
presence in a place where these people are not is the right strategy. It
doesn't make any sense to me.' Indeed. 'The Wisconsin Democrat also warned
that U.S. policy in Afghanistan could actually push terrorists and
extremists into Pakistan and, as a consequence, further destabilize the
region: "You know, I asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Admiral Mullen, and Mr. Holbrooke, our envoy over there, a while ago, you
know, is there a risk that if we build up troops in Afghanistan, that will
push more extremists into Pakistan?" he told ABC. "They couldn't deny it,
and this week, Prime Minister Gilani of Pakistan specifically said that his
concern about the buildup is that it will drive more extremists into
Pakistan, so I think it's just the opposite, that this boots-on-the-ground
approach alienates the Afghan population and specifically encourages the
Taliban to further coalesce with Al Qaida, which is the complete opposite of
our national security interest."'1 Of course, this is all intentional and
motivated by US imperialist raison d'état. .

MALICK: "DID OBAMA DECLARE WAR ON PAKISTAN?"

Obama's speech did everything possible to blur the distinction between
Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are after all two sovereign states and both
members of the United Nations in their own right. Ibrahim Sajid Malick, US
correspondent for Samaa TV, one of the largest Pakistan television networks,
called attention to this ploy: 'Speaking to a hall full of cadets at the US
Military Academy of West Point, President Barack Obama almost seemed like he
might be declaring war on Pakistan. Every time he mentioned Afghanistan,
Pakistan preceded mention.. Sitting at the back benches of the hall at one
point I almost jumped out of my chair when he said: "the stakes are even
higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that al Qaeda and
other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe
that they would use them." I was shocked because a succession of American
officials recently confirmed that the Pakistani arsenal is secure.'2 This
article is entitled "Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?", and we can chalk
the question mark up to diplomatic discretion. During congressional hearings
involving General McChrystal and US Ambassador Eikenberry, Afghanistan and
Pakistan were simply fused into one sinister entity known as "Afpak" or even
"Afpakia."

a.. A d v e r t i s e m e n t
b..
In the summer of 2007, Obama, coached by Zbigniew Brzezinski and other
controllers, was the originator of the unilateral US policy of using
Predator drones for political assassinations inside Pakistan. This
assassination policy is now being massively escalated along with the troop
strength: "Two weeks ago in Pakistan, Central Intelligence Agency
sharpshooters killed eight people suspected of being militants of the
Taliban and Al Qaeda, and wounded two others in a compound that was said to
be used for terrorist training.. The White House has authorized an expansion
of the C.I.A.'s drone program in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, officials
said this week, to parallel the president's decision.to send 30,000 more
troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about
the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time - a
controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas - because that is
where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide."3 The US is now training
more Predator operators than combat pilots.

BLACKWATER ACCUSED IN PESHAWAR MASSACRE OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN

The CIA, the Pentagon, and their various contractors among the private
military firms are now on a murder spree across Pakistan, attacking peaceful
villages and wedding parties, among other targets. Blackwater, now calling
itself Xe Services and Total Intelligence Solutions, is heavily involved:
'At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite
division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they
plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives,
"snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside
and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The
Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct
a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the
well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source
within the US military intelligence apparatus.' 4

As shocking as Scahill's report is, it must nevertheless be viewed as a
limited hangout, since there is no mention of the persistent charges that a
large part of the deadly bombings in Peshawar and other Pakistani cities are
being carried out by Blackwater, as this news item suggests: "ISLAMABAD Oct.
29 (Xinhua) - Chief of Taliban movement in Pakistan Hakimullah Mehsud has
blamed the controversial American private firm Blackwater for the bomb blast
in Peshawar which killed 108 people, local news agency NNI reported
Thursday."5 This was blind terrorism designed for maximum slaughter,
especially among women and children.

US ALSO AT WAR WITH UZBEKISTAN?

Scahill's report also suggests that US black ops have reached into
Uzbekistan, a post-Soviet country of 25 million which borders Afghanistan to
the north: 'In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against
suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA,
the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside
Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the
military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the
operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. "That
piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don't know if you
noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan," he said. "So,
did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?"' 6 Such are the
ways of hope and change.

The role of US intelligence in fomenting the Baluchistan rebellion for the
purpose of breaking Pakistan apart is also confirmed by Professor
Chossudovsky: 'Already in 2005, a report by the US National Intelligence
Council and the CIA forecast a "Yugoslav-like fate" for Pakistan "in a
decade with the country riven by civil war, bloodshed and inter-provincial
rivalries, as seen recently in Baluchistan." (Energy Compass, 2 March 2005).
According to the NIC-CIA, Pakistan is slated to become a "failed state" by
2015, "as it would be affected by civil war, complete Talibanization and
struggle for control of its nuclear weapons". (Quoted by former Pakistan
High Commissioner to UK, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Times of India, 13 February
2005).. Washington favors the creation of a "Greater Baluchistan" which
would integrate the Baluch areas of Pakistan with those of Iran and possibly
the Southern tip of Afghanistan, thereby leading to a process of political
fracturing in both Iran and Pakistan.'7 The Iranians, for their part, are
adamant that the US is committing acts of war on their territory in
Baluchistan: "TEHRAN, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) - Iran's Parliament Speaker Ali
Larijani said .that there are some concrete evidences showing U.S.
involvement in recent deadly bomb explosions in the country's
Sistan-Baluchistan province, the official IRNA news agency reported. .. The
deadly suicide attack by Sunni rebel group Jundallah (God's soldiers)
occurred on Oct. 18 in Iran's Sistan-Baluchistan province near the border
with Pakistan when the local officials were preparing a ceremony in which
the local tribal leaders were to meet the military commanders of Iran's
Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).8

US GOAL: CUT THE PAKISTAN ENERGY CORRIDOR BETWEEN IRAN, CHINA

Why would the United States be so obsessed with the breakup of Pakistan? One
reason is that Pakistan is traditionally a strategic ally and economic
partner of China, a country which the US and British are determined to
oppose and contain on the world stage. Specifically, Pakistan could function
as an energy corridor linking the oil fields of Iran and possibly even Iraq
with the Chinese market by means of a pipeline that would cross the
Himalayas above Kashmir. This is the so-called "Pipelinestan" issue. This
would give China a guaranteed land-based oil supply not subject to
Anglo-American naval superiority, while also cutting out the 12,000 mile
tanker route around the southern rim of Asia. As a recent news report points
out: 'Beijing has been pressuring Tehran for China's participation in the
pipeline project and Islamabad, while willing to sign a bilateral agreement
with Iran, has also welcomed China's participation. According to an
estimate, such a pipeline would result in Pakistan getting $200 million to
$500 million annually in transit fees alone. China and Pakistan are already
working on a proposal for laying a trans-Himalayan pipeline to carry Middle
Eastern crude oil to western China. Pakistan provides China the shortest
possible route to import oil from the Gulf countries.. The pipeline, which
would run from the southern Pakistan port of Gwadar and follow the Karakoram
highway, would be partly financed by Beijing. The Chinese are also building
a refinery at Gwadar. Imports using the pipeline would allow Beijing to
reduce the portion of its oil shipped through the narrow and unsafe Strait
of Malacca, which at present carries up to 80% of its oil imports. Islamabad
also plans to extend a railway track to China to connect it to Gwadar. The
port is also considered the likely terminus of proposed multibillion-dollar
gas pipelines reaching from the South Pars fields in Iran or from Qatar, and
from the Daulatabad fields in Turkmenistan for export to world markets. Syed
Fazl-e-Haider, "Pakistan, Iran sign gas pipeline deal," Asia Times, 27 May
2009.9 This is the normal, peaceful economic progress and cooperation which
the Anglo-Americans are hell-bent on stopping.

Oil and natural gas pipelines from Iran across Pakistan and into China would
carry energy resources into the Middle Kingdom, and would also serve as
conveyor belts for Chinese economic influence into the Middle East. This
would make Anglo-American dominion increasingly tenuous in a part of the
world which London and Washington have traditionally sought to control as
part of their overall strategy of world domination.

US domestic propaganda is already portraying Pakistan as the new home base
of terrorism. The four pathetic patsies going on trial for an alleged plot
to bomb a synagogue in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx in New York
City had been carefully sheep-dipped to associate them with the shadowy and
suspicious Jaish-e-Mohammad, allegedly a Pakistani terrorist group. The same
goes for the five Moslems from Northern Virginia who have just been arrested
near Lahore in Pakistan.

INDIA AND IRAN

As far as the neighboring states are concerned, India under the unfortunate
Manmohan Singh seems to be accepting the role of continental dagger against
Pakistan and China on behalf of the US and the British. This is a recipe for
a colossal tragedy. India should rather make permanent peace with Pakistan
by vacating the Vale of Kashmir, where 95% of the population is Moslem and
would like to join Pakistan. Without a solution to this issue, there will be
no peace on the subcontinent.

Regarding Iran, George Friedman, the head of the Stratfor outlet of the US
intelligence community recently told Russia Today that the great novelty of
the next decade will be an alliance of the United States with Iran directed
against Russia. In that scenario, Iran would cut off oil to China
altogether. That is the essence of the Brzezinski strategy. It is urgent
that the antiwar movement in the United States regroup and begin a new
mobilization against the cynical hypocrisy of Obama's war and escalation
policy, which suprasses even the war crimes of the Bush-Cheny neocons. In
this new phase of the Great Game, the stakes are incalculable.

1
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/06/feingold-why-surge-where_n_381729.html

2 Ibrahim Sajid Malick, "Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?," Pakistan for
Pakistanis Blog, 2 December 2009.
http://ibrahimsajidmalick.com/did-Obama-declare-war-on-pakistan/484/

3 Scott Shane, "C.I.A. to Expand Use of Drones in Pakistan," New York Times,
December 3, 2009. See also David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, "Between the
Lines, an Expansion in Pakistan," New York Times, 1 December 2009.

4 Jeremy Scahill, "The Secret US War in Pakistan," The Nation, November 23,
2009

5 "Taliban in Pakistan blame U.S. Blackwater for deadly blast," Xinhua News
Agency, 29 October 2009,
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/29/content_12358907.htm

6 Jeremy Scahill, "The Secret US War in Pakistan," The Nation, November 23,
2009

7 Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Pakistan, Global Research,
December 30, 2007

8 "Iran says having evidences of U.S. involvement in suicide bomb attacks,"
Xinhua, 29 October 2009.

9 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KE27Df03.html

Truthout: Jason Leopold: ACLU Blasts Obama for covering up Bush-Cheney Crimes

Blistering Indictment Leveled Against Obama Over His Handling of Bush-Era War Crimes

Saturday 12 December 2009

by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report
http://www.truthout.org/12110911

During his 36-minute speech after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway Thursday, President Barack Obama explained to an audience of 1,000 how the United States has a "moral
and strategic interest" in abiding by a code of conduct when waging war - even one that pits the
US against a "vicious adversary that abides by no rules."

"That is what makes us different from those whom we fight," Obama said. "That is a source of
our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo
Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend.
And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard."

To many human rights advocates, however, Obama's high-minded declaration rang hollow in
light of fresh reports that his administration continues to operate secret prisons in Afghanistan
where detainees have allegedly been tortured and where the International Committee for the
Red Cross has been denied access to the prisoners.

Obama has substituted words for action on issues surrounding torture since his first days in
office nearly one year ago. Last June, on the 25th anniversary of the Convention Against Torture
and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Obama said the US
government "must stand against torture wherever it takes place" and that his administration
"is committed to taking concrete actions against torture and to address the needs of its victims."

But it's clear that his pledge does not apply to torture committed by Bush administration officials.

That's the point the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) made shortly after Obama's
acceptance speech. Officials from the civil rights organization issued a withering indictment of
the Obama administration's handling of clear-cut cases of war crimes they say were committed
by former Bush officials who the Obama administration not only refuses to prosecute but has gone
to extraordinary lengths to cover up.

"We're increasingly disappointed and alarmed by the current administration's stance on
accountability for torture," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, during a conference call with reporters. "On every front, the [Obama] administration is actively obstructing accountability. This administration is shielding Bush administration officials from civil liability, criminal investigation and even public scrutiny for their role in authorizing torture."

Before leaving office, Dick Cheney said he approved waterboarding on at least three "high value" detainees and the "enhanced interrogation" of 33 other prisoners. President Bush made a somewhat vaguer acknowledgement of authorizing these techniques.

The ACLU and other civil rights groups said Bush and Cheney's comments amounted to an admission of war crimes.

Under the Convention Against Torture, the clear record that the Bush administration used waterboarding and other brutal techniques to extract information from detainees should have
triggered the United States to conduct a full investigation and to prosecute the offenders. In the
case of the
US's refusal to do so, other nations would be obligated to act under the principle of universality.

However, instead of living up to that treaty commitment, the Obama administration is resisting
calls for government investigations and going to court to block lawsuits that demand release of
torture evidence or seek civil penalties against officials implicated in the torture.

Jaffer said that while "the Bush administration constructed a legal framework for torture, now the Obama administration is constructing a legal framework for impunity."

Defending John Yoo

Indeed, last week, Obama's Justice Department asked a federal appeals court in San Francisco to dismiss a lawsuit filed against former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, who authored some
of the memos that justified torture largely by re-defining what the term means.

In seeking to quash that lawsuit filed by alleged "dirty bomb" plotter Jose Padilla, Obama's
lawyers argued, in a friend-of-the-court brief that Justice Department lawyers who advise on
torture and other human rights issues are entitled to absolute immunity from lawsuits.

"The Holder Justice Department insists that they are absolutely not responsible, and that they are
free to act according to a far lower standard of conduct than that which governs Americans
generally," wrote Scott Horton, a human rights attorney and constitutional expert in a column published on the Harper's web site. "Indeed, this has emerged as a sort of ignoble mantra for the Justice Department, uniting both the Bush and Obama administrations."

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley went even further, asserting that the Obama administration's arguments reversed more than six decades of US legal precedents - dating back
to the post-World War II Nuremberg trials - which held that legal wordsmiths who clear the way
for war crimes share the guilt with the actual perpetrators.

The Obama administration "has gutted the hard-fought victories in Nuremberg where lawyers and judges were often guilty of war crimes in their legal advice and opinions," Turley said. "Quite a legacy for the world's newest Nobel Peace Prize winner."

What's remarkable about the Obama Justice Department's amicus brief in the Padilla case is that it didn't need to be filed to begin with. Yoo hired a private defense attorney, albeit one who is paid
for with taxpayer dollars, earlier this year when the Justice Department backed out of representing Yoo due to undisclosed conflicts.

"Qualified Immunity"

In court papers filed last week, the Obama administration took a hard line in another case, arguing that a Supreme Court ruling that gave detainees the right to challenge their indefinite imprisonment doesn't apply to the cases of Yasser Al-Zahrani and Salah Al-Salami, two Guantanamo prisoners who committed suicide in June 2006.

The fathers of the men, who were never charged with a crime, sued Bush administration Defense Department officials in federal court, arguing that the torture their sons endured drove them to hang themselves on June 10, 2006 after being detained for four years.

But the Obama administration said in a legal brief that the Military Commissions Act of 2006
stripped the courts of jurisdiction to hear lawsuits that challenged the "detention, transfer, treatment
or conditions of confinement" of "enemy combatants."

Moreover, in court papers filed in June, the Obama administration said, "Judicial intrusion into this politically sensitive area by creating a damages remedy for detainees could subvert these military
and diplomatic efforts and lead to 'embarrassment of our government abroad.'"

Besides, the Obama administration said, just as John Yoo is entitled to absolute immunity, Defense Department officials are entitled to "qualified immunity" because the "Fifth and Eighth Amendments do not extend to Guantánamo Bay detainees."

Earlier this week, a report prepared by the Seton Hall University School of Law Center for Policy
& Research called into question the veracity of the government's official version of the deaths of the two men and that of a third prisoner, who was also found hanging in his cell on June 10, 2006. The government attributed the suicides to "asymmetrical warfare."

"Both the time and exact manner of the deaths remain uncertain, and the presence of rags stuffed in the detainees' throats is unexplained," the report said.

CIA Renditions and State Secrets

The Obama administration also has mounted an aggressive defense in another high-profile case regarding the Bush administration's wrongdoing.

The Bush administration had invoked the state secrets privilege in a 2007 lawsuit filed against Jeppesen DataPlan, a subsidiary of Boeing, that is accused of knowingly flying people kidnapped by the CIA to secret overseas prisons where they were tortured. Bush's legal move was successful in getting the case tossed out, but the ACLU appealed the decision.

When that appeal came up last February, Obama's Justice Department shocked civil liberties and human rights advocates by dispatching attorneys to federal court in San Francisco, where they invoked the same state secrets privilege.

Even the judge was baffled, and asked a Justice Department attorney if the change in US government leadership would lead to a change in the legal position with regard to state secrets. The answer was a resounding "no."

Still, the appellate court ruled in April that the case could move forward, asserting that state secrets can only be cited with regard to specific evidence, and not used as a means to dismiss an entire lawsuit. Justice Department attorneys will be back in court next week to appeal that decision, carrying forward the Bush administration's legacy of secrecy.

Concealing Evidence

The Obama administration also has tried to block Binyam Mohamed, one of the victims named in Jeppesen lawsuit, from obtaining documentary evidence to support his claims that he was tortured while in US custody.

Terrorism-related charges against Mohamed were dropped last year when his attorneys sued to gain access to more than three dozen secret documents. He was released in February after being imprisoned for seven years and sent back to Great Britain.

In a legal brief, the ACLU said Mohamed was beaten so severely on numerous occasions that he routinely lost consciousness and during one gruesome torture session "a scalpel was used to make incisions all over his body, including his penis, after which a hot stinging liquid was poured into his open wounds."

Obama's determination to protect these dirty secrets of its predecessors even reached across the Atlantic. The Obama administration told British officials that intelligence sharing between the US and the UK might be disrupted if seven redacted paragraphs contained in secret US documents relating to Mohamed's torture allegations were made public by a British High Court.

Those threats were conveyed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the CIA, and Obama's National Security Adviser James Jones, according to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

"The United States Government's position is that, if the redacted paragraphs are made public, then the United States will re-evaluate its intelligence-sharing relationship with the United Kingdom with the real risk that it would reduce the intelligence it provided," the High Court wrote in a ruling in February when it agreed to keep the paragraphs blacked out.

"There is a real risk, if we restored the redacted paragraphs, the United States Government, by its review of the shared intelligence arrangements, could inflict on the citizens of the United Kingdom a very considerable increase in the dangers they face at a time when a serious terrorist threat still pertains."

After the High Court's ruling, the Obama White House issued a statement thanking the British government "for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information" and added that the order would "preserve the long-standing intelligence sharing relationship that enables both countries to protect their citizens."

Following the High Court's reversal, the New York Times published a sharply worded editorial criticizing the Obama administration's hard-line position in the Mohamed case.

"The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration's expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush's cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama's cover-up," the Times wrote.

Torture Photos

Obama also reversed a commitment earlier this year to release photos of US soldiers torturing and abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama said his decision stemmed from his personal review of the photos and his concern that their release would endanger American soldiers in the field, but the reversal also came after several weeks of Republican and right-wing media attacks on him as weak on national security.

The Obama administration then appealed to the US Supreme Court to overturn a federal court order requiring release of the images, and Obama's aides worked with Congress to pass legislation giving the Defense Secretary the power to keep the photographs under wraps.

The legislation passed in November and was promptly signed by Obama. By blocking release of the photographs, Obama essentially killed any meaningful chance of opening the door to an investigation or independent inquiry of senior Pentagon and Bush administration officials who implemented the policies that led to the abuses captured in the images.

In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, the ACLU also questioned the value of Obama's much-touted executive order - signed on his second day in office - demanding a shift away from excessive secrecy toward a presumption in favor of open government.

"We have not seen the presumption translated into the release of more information," Jaffer said. "There are several cases which we are just at a loss to understand why the information we are requesting is still being withheld."

Those documents include ones related to the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program and transcripts of Combatant Status Review Tribunals where detainees "describe the abuse they suffered at the hands of their CIA interrogators."

However, the ACLU's Freedom of Information lawsuit continues to unearth bits of new evidence. For instance, the ACLU obtained hundreds of new documents, including a one-page questionnaire apparently from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to the CIA.

"How close is each technique to the 'rack and screw'?" the questionnaire asked, referring to a medieval torture device.

"Anytime you need to ask a question like that it is deeply disturbing and shows you've strayed from constitutional norms," said ACLU legal fellow Alex Abdo. "You're asking a question as to whether the conduct you're about to authorize relates to rack and screw and that in and of itself should be evidence enough that you're going too far. It never should get to that point."

Other newly disclosed documents show that the Bush White House was deeply involved in discussions about destroying 92 torture videotapes.

Obama and Congress

Perhaps, Obama's most positive act on behalf of open government came in April when he resisted pressure from the CIA and ordered the release of legal memorandums written by lawyers in Bush's Office of Legal Counsel, including Yoo and two former OLC chiefs, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury.

The memos used creative definitions regarding torture to authorize the CIA to apply a variety of torture techniques to so-called "high-value" prisoners, including beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, placing insects inside a confinement box to induce fear, exposing naked detainees to extreme heat and cold, and shackling prisoners to the ceilings of their prison cells or in other painful "stress positions."

In the face of this evidence, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and his counterpart in the House, John Conyers, floated competing proposals early in the year for a 9/11-style "truth commission" or a blue-ribbon investigative panel to look into the circumstances that led the Bush administration to create its policy of torture.

Obama signaled that he was open to the idea of a "truth commission" but he said he was concerned "about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively, and it hampers our ability to carry out critical national security operations."

After Republicans and neoconservative opinion writers went on the attack, Obama quickly retreated, calling lawmakers to the White House for a closed-door meeting in late April to talk them out of the idea of moving forward with independent investigations or even oversight hearings into the Bush administration's use of torture.

Underscoring Obama's concerns about a high-profile investigation, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters at the time: "the President determined the concept didn't seem altogether workable in this case."

Gibbs added, "The last few days might be evidence of why something like this might just become a political back and forth."

Hoping for bipartisanship on pressing issues like the economy and health care, Democrats scuttled the investigative plans. However, Republicans have shown no reciprocal interest in bipartisanship, voting as a virtual bloc against every significant bill that Obama and the Democrats have proposed.

Despite Obama's insistence of "looking forward, not backward," there remains a chance that hearings on Bush's torture practices might still be held next year.

Leahy and Conyers have indicated they intend to hold hearings next year once a long-awaited report by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is released that delves into Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury's legal work surrounding torture, according to Christopher Anders, the ACLU's senior legislative counsel.

Leahy and Conyers "said a number of times that they would have hearings when the OPR report comes out," Anders said in an interview. "It would be a big surprise if they didn't conduct hearings. We fully expect them to hold hearings."

Spokespeople for Conyers and Leahy did not return calls or respond to e-mails seeking comment.

Upcoming Hearings on Torture?

However, according to Christopher Anders, the ACLU's senior legislative counsel, Leahy and Conyers have both said they intend to hold hearings next year once a long-awaited report by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is released that delves into Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury's legal work surrounding torture.

Leahy and Conyers "said a number of times that they would have hearings when the OPR report comes out," Anders said in an interview. "It would be a big surprise if they didn't conduct hearings. We fully expect them to hold hearings."

Anders added that while there is a time and place for independent commissions, the issue of torture is really a matter for Congress to probe.

"These are the hard issues that Congress should really be tackling" Anders said. "It's squarely under their jurisdiction."

Spokespeople for Conyers and Leahy did not return calls or respond to e-mails seeking comment.

The ACLU said that as much as the Obama administration may hope that additional revelations related to the Bush administration's policy of torture will slip underneath the radar, numerous documents expected to be released in the weeks and months ahead will ensure the issue remains front and center for years to come, and calls for accountability will continue.

"The lesson that this is giving to the rest of the world is that countries do not have to be accountable for their actions even when torture and abuse occurs," the ACLU's Anders said. "That's going to make it much more difficult for the United States to push other countries on human rights issues across the board, and it's going to make it much easier for other countries to shirk their own duties to bring accountability for their own actions in the past."

Despite Obama's spotty record on the war crimes that grew out of the Bush's "war on terror," the President still focused his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on the altruism of US foreign policy and America's commitment to upholding human rights.

The ACLU's Jaffer said there is "an obvious tension on what the president is saying on the commitment to human rights and the work we're doing here in the United States to actually hold people accountable for the violations of both domestic and international law."

"A lot of what was authorized by senior Bush administration officials was illegal not only under international law but domestic law as well," Jaffer said. "Many of the methods that were approved by CIA and [Department of Defense] interrogators had previously been described by multiple US administrations as war crimes and some of them have been prosecuted as war crimes.

"Waterboarding in particular is something that has been prosecuted as a war crime before September 11. And yet we are not holding people accountable for having used those techniques, authorized those techniques. Increasingly, we're frustrated by the gap between the Obama administration's rhetoric on accountability and reality. We see the Obama administration actively obstructing accountability on every front."
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For more News From Underground, visit http://markcrispinmiller.com

David Bromwich: Obama's Pattern of Delay: His plan to continue the status quo

Obama’s Delusion
David Bromwich

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n20/print/brom01_.html

Long before he became president, there were signs in Barack Obama of a tendency to promise things easily and compromise often. He broke a campaign vow to filibuster a bill that immunised telecom outfits against prosecution for the assistance they gave to domestic spying. He kept his promise from October 2007 until July 2008, then voted for the compromise that spared the telecoms. As president, he has continued to support their amnesty. It was always clear that Obama, a moderate by temperament, would move to the middle once elected. But there was something odd about the quickness with which his website mounted a slogan to the effect that his administration would look to the future and not the past. We all do. Then again, we don’t: the past is part of the present. Reduced to a practice, the slogan meant that Obama would rather not bring to light many illegal actions of the Bush administration. The value of conciliation outweighed the imperative of truth. He stood for ‘the things that unite not divide us’. An unpleasant righting of wrongs could be portrayed as retribution, and Obama would not allow such a misunderstanding to get in the way of his ecumenical goals.

The message about uniting not dividing was not new. It was spoken in almost the same words by Bill Clinton in 1993; and after his midterm defeat in 1994, Clinton borrowed Republican policies in softened form – school dress codes, the repeal of welfare. The Republican response was unappreciative: they launched a three-year march towards impeachment. Obama’s appeals for comity and his many conciliatory gestures have met with a uniform negative. If anything, the Republicans are treating him more roughly than Clinton. Obama appears securer only because the mainstream media, which hated Clinton beyond reason, have showed up on his side. Americans, however, attend to a congeries of substitute media, at the centre of which lie Fox News Radio and Fox TV, the Murdoch stations. From that source, in the late spring and summer, a message percolated through a crowd of 20 million listeners, a message that was coherent, detailed and subversive of public order. I listened a little every day, as I drove to work and back, and I saw what was coming. The talk aimed to delegitimate the president, and it gave promise of an insurrection. A floating army of the angry and resentful were being urged to express contempt for Barack Obama, and to exhibit their loyalty to principles they felt in danger of losing – the right to bear arms, the right not to pay for health insurance. When representatives from Congress addressed town-hall meetings in the late summer, men in several states came armed with guns in leg holsters. Their local grievance was hostility to Obama’s plan for healthcare, a plan which was detested sight unseen, and which has still not been explained with sufficient clarity to remedy the distrust of the rational. (Clinton made the mistake of handing the construction of a national health system to his wife and a group of advisers she consulted in private. Obama, to avoid that error, left the framing and elaboration of a bill to five committees of Congress: an experiment in dissociation that rendered him blameless but also clueless beyond the broadest of rhetorical commitments.) But beneath all the accusations was a disturbance no ordinary answer could alleviate. The America these people grew up with was being taken away from them. That formulation occurred again and again on talk radio. Barack Obama had become the adequate symbol of forces that were swindling the people of their birthright. ‘This guy’ – another common locution – didn’t have a right to give laws to Americans.

When the Clinton impeachment was going forward, Obama was a young Chicago politician with other things on his mind. He could have learned something then about how the Republicans work. The most questionable of his appeals in the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton was the endlessly repeated bromide with which he dissociated himself from ‘the partisan bickering of the 1990s’ – a piece of spurious evenhandedness if there ever was one. Bill Clinton, who gained his national stature in the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, had been as much a prudent adjuster and adapter as Obama. The fury of the attack on Clinton, which started a few months into his presidency, was not the bickering of two rival parties exactly comparable in point of incivility. Yet such was Obama’s convenient picture of the recent past.

Delays in the passage, first, of Obama’s ‘stimulus package’ to strengthen the economy after last September’s financial collapse, and, second, of his healthcare bill, have been due in large part to his public pauses to wait for Republicans to lend these measures a bipartisan glow. A few came along, at a high price, to vote for the economic stimulus. None has taken up the offer on healthcare. The Republicans stand in place, and give no sign, and watch as the president’s stature dwindles. His reason for waiting doubtless has something to do with fear. Obama receives four times as many death threats as George W. Bush did. Yet he is also encumbered by the natural wish of the moderate to hold himself close to all the establishments at once: military, financial, legislative, commercial. Ideally, he would like to inspire everyone and to offend no one. But the conceit of accommodating one’s enemies inch by inch to attain bipartisan consensus seems with Obama almost a delusion in the literal sense: a fixed false belief. How did it come to possess so clever a man?

Obama’s career up to now, lucky as it was, had been wanting in singular achievements for which he alone was responsible. His experience seems not to have taught him the law of natural selection in politics by which majorities are put together out of remainders. Any act that achieves something concrete will leave small multitudes of the disappointed keening but unheard. There are hurt feelings in politics, which only time can cure if anything can. This is a truth now staring at Barack Obama, on several different fronts, but he does not accept it easily. His way of thinking is close to the spirit of that Enlightenment reasonableness which supposes a right course of action can never be described so as to be understood and not assented to.

The Republican Party of 2009 is a powerful piece of contrary testimony. It has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants and ‘aliens’. The anti-immigrant bias – from which George W. Bush and John McCain were free, but which both were powerless to counteract – is an underground stream of the party that makes it a bearer of racist sentiments no longer avowable in public. I have been studying the ante-bellum South, for a course on the career of Abraham Lincoln, and have been struck by the resemblance between the Republicans today and the pre-Civil War Democrats. The model of the Republicans today is John C. Calhoun, the political theorist of the slave South and deviser of the rationale for local nullification of federal policies.

That the central lesson about his domestic enemies has not yet been learned by Obama is the mystery of the first eight months of his presidency. He has acted as if he were the leader of no party; as if patience and benignity of temper could bring out the best in everyone. This is part of a larger inward confusion about his role. He seems to speak at once, or rather he seems to speak at different times, as organiser and as mediator, national leader and national healer. There is something strange about the alternation of postures, from the point of view of empirical prudence. On the largest issues that he himself raised in his opening months – his decision to close Guantánamo, to press for a two-state solution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and to reform healthcare with a national plan – his pattern has been the grand exordium delivered at stage centre, followed by months of silence. He has left his agents or his advisers or his party or both parties to mind the details. During the protracted delay, the very features that give the impress of his intention are sanded away. Thus, a new kind of pressure on Israel and a resolve to create a Palestinian state appeared to be signalled by his Cairo speech in early June. It was a thoughtful speech, and a courageous one, even if you took it as a series of propositions uttered at a certain time in a certain place. Simply to address the Muslims of the world without condescension was sure to make him unforgiving enemies on the American right – including the considerable body of Christian Zionists in the Southern and border states – and Obama went to Cairo and delivered his speech knowing that. Yet the four months since have seemed much longer than four months. Israel has sapped and undermined the settlement freeze. Binyamin Netanyahu gambled that he could trespass against objections by Obama’s negotiators, Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell, and the gamble has worked. The American desiderata were never backed by a sanction, and the Netanyahu government approved thousands of new units for the expansion of the Israeli colonies. This the Americans called ‘not helpful’.

Healthcare has been fretted according to a different schedule of neglect. Here, the undermining came first and Obama’s speech later. After a summer of radio coaching had rendered the opposition to healthcare so clamorous that many town-hall meetings erupted in disorder and some had to be closed early, Obama on 9 September addressed a joint session of Congress, and there, at last, he gave a measured and impressive presentation, which for the first time made the general case for his plan. It sent his approval ratings back above 50 per cent, and it was overshadowed only by the shout of a representative from South Carolina (Calhoun’s state), ‘You lie!’ – in effect a challenge to a duel with the president on the floor of Congress. This breach of protocol could hardly have come from a spontaneous welling-up of anger in Joe Wilson of South Carolina. To violate the hush of that monumental chamber required as much forethought and wild resolution as it would take to shout ‘God damn!’ in a cathedral. Wilson had done nothing previous of note, except mount a defence of the flying of the Confederate flag in the capitol of South Carolina. So the discord that the 9 September address was meant to salve showed its face again at the speech itself. There are people in America who sniff the taint of tyranny in every programme of the federal government; and a lot of them were listening to their radios in April, May, June and July. But there have also been grounds for fear that were genuine: a fact the prosperous neoliberal consensus lightly brushed off. Non-fanatical Americans of modest means have wondered how their children will pay for the emergency measures we are buying now but refusing to tax ourselves for.

Early suspicion of the bank bail-outs found a ready target of displaced resentment in the later demand for health insurance reform. Healthcare had never seemed a main concern of Obama’s as a candidate, and this looked like one more exorbitance. The new president had run up a staggering bill, close to a trillion dollars, to pay the brokerage houses to stave off a depression. He expected a gratitude he did not get. His choice of tactics could never have been easy to explain in a climate where so many bankers survived and so many ordinary people lost their homes and jobs. ‘And you are losing your health coverage, too!’ Obama says. But in a country where 85 per cent have coverage of some sort, more have been worrying about their homes and their jobs. Most people’s health insurance payments are taken out of their monthly pay cheques and put into private plans offered by their employers; when an employer cuts your job you lose the insurance too; but it betrayed a planner’s conceit in Obama to imagine that people would worry first, and most acutely, about the loss of their insurance. Many without a history of political resentment, some of whom voted for Obama, are startled that they keep being asked to foot the bill. It was easier to blame ‘big government’ than to say that the bankers and brokers and the whole financial establishment, with Goldman Sachs at its core, did not deserve the bail-outs. Obama’s speech on 9 September arrived too late to work as a counter-charm.

The pattern of the major announcement, the dilatory follow-up and the tardy self-defence has shown an alarming consistency in his administration. Obama ordered the closing of the prison at Guantánamo Bay as the first act of his presidency. Eight months later, Guantánamo remains open and unsolved, the date of its closing has been postponed, and the question of what to do with the prisoners has become the most explosive of all the matters that confront Obama’s authority. After signing the order in January, he took a long break; and his enemies rallied. Two elements of the syndrome should be distinguished. First, Obama is trying to do a great deal at once, not all of it thrust on him by the disasters of the previous administration. It is also beginning to appear that Obama has a slower ratio to the passage of time than most politicians. When he was attacked for the Guantánamo order, on the grounds that it placed the security of Americans in jeopardy, he let it be known that the issue was undergoing reappraisal; then, on 21 May, he gave a speech on law and national security at the National Archives: the worst speech of his presidency. He said that his paramount duty was ‘to keep the American people safe’: that word, safe, which was accorded a primacy by George W. Bush it had not been given by any earlier president, Obama himself now ranked ahead of the words justice, right, liberty and constitution. The National Archives speech was, more particularly, a response to the charges made by Dick Cheney over several preceding weeks.

In a speech delivered on the same day, 21 May, the former vice president, who has never really retired, gave a digest of his own published criticisms. The decision to release photos of the victims of torture, and to rule out ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ in the future, could only ‘lead our government further away from its duty to protect the American people’. Cheney intimated that if an attack occurred in the coming years, the fault would be Obama’s for having restored an antiquarian understanding of civil liberties and obedience to international law. Obama’s answer was sober and resolute in appearance, but, in detail, the National Archives speech was a capitulation on most of the points specified by Cheney. Prisoners would now be divided into five categories: those who could be freed because they were innocent; those who could be extradited to foreign countries; those who fell under the jurisdiction of military tribunals; those who could be tried in civilian courts in the US; and then a fifth category – those whom we lacked evidence to convict but who (it had been decided) were too dangerous to set free. These prisoners would be held indefinitely under a new legal dispensation still to be devised.

Preventive detention was a step President Nixon had proposed to Congress in 1970, but he never found the support or the temerity to put the programme into effect. Yet here was a Democratic president and professor of constitutional law doing what Nixon and for that matter Cheney and his assistants had only dreamed of. We have yet to see the final result, but the lesson of the encounter would seem to be: when you announce a great change, steal a march on your opponents by clinching the declaration with the deed. In no decision of his administration has Obama followed the wisdom of that Machiavellian precept. His government is also hampered by its want of a spokesman who can hit hard with words when the president wishes not to be seen to strike. Obama’s confidant David Axelrod, who managed his campaign and is often summoned to speak to the press on his behalf, emits a pleasant porridge of upper-media demotic. Another close adviser, Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago friend, is a technocrat to the bone, genially officious but lacking in any pith and point. These people are no match for Cheney, or for the president’s antagonists in the substitute media who speak under no restraint.

What Cheney and the radio demagogues sowed, the less gifted members of the Republican minority in Congress gratefully reaped. The minority leader of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, said on 17 September on the PBS show NewsHour: ‘We’re in the middle of a modern-day political rebellion in America.’ Interviewer: ‘Rebellion?’ Boehner: ‘Rebellion’. He repeated the word without compunction, and added: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’ The tone of our public ‘conversation’ (he chose with malice the soft liberal word) Boehner pronounced to be healthy. He only hoped the crowds ‘would be civil’ or somehow would not become ‘too hateful’. But with Cheney at its head – a rebel against the constitution and a man above the laws since 2002 – the popular movement for nullification of the laws of the federal government has again become a force in American life.

Talk radio in the United States is a law unto itself. With the diffusion of authority that has followed wide adoption of the internet, Fox News Radio and Fox TV may be the only major outlets that still command a sizeable fraction of the audience of the old networks. The intuition of Obama and his advisers must have been that any protest in these byways of discourse was right-wing business as usual. That lazy assumption left them unequipped for the gravity of the challenge. They thought the anger would simmer and die down. It did not occur to them that it might simmer and boil. If a threat is seen to spring from a determined opponent, Obama’s inclination is generally to let it go. He will emerge (he trusts) in the long run as the man who takes long views. By the effects of these postponements, however, he is forever giving new hostages to the truckle of compromise; he is put in the position of backing away while his enemies pick up strength; and in a leader whose nature is conciliatory, this means that the declared scope of every undertaking slowly shrinks and recedes. Guantánamo will be closed but not as soon as we said. Israel must recognise the wrong of further expansion of the settlements, but Israel will not be required to stop soon. Healthcare will be passed on some terms or other, but government will not compete with the big insurers; price reductions will be conceived and executed by private consortiums; illegal immigrants will stay uninsured; and even legal immigrants will be prohibited from buying coverage.

There were plenty of people in December 2008 who nursed a prejudice against Obama but were still in search of reasons to back it. Rush Limbaugh was the radio talker who brought those people to a boil. Limbaugh’s style is a mixture of bluster, clowning and poison, in proportions hard to capture without his voice in your ear – a ‘fat’ voice, someone called it, that shifts in a beat from muttering to imprecation. It is always excited, always breathless, yet the pace is unhurried. Part of the appeal lies in a conscious and amiable egotism. ‘Rush Limbaugh,’ he will introduce himself after an ad, ‘with talent on loan from God.’ ‘El Rushbaugh, serving humanity (simply by being here).’ He tells people to believe him and believe no one else: ‘Shown by scientific study to be right 99.1 per cent of the time.’ He was capable, early, of nicknaming Obama ‘Bamster’ (to rhyme with ‘ham’), a semi-affectionate take-down in the parlance of fraternity boys. He nicknamed the health plan, with automatic sarcasm, ‘ObamaCare’. But the tone grew noticeably more bitter by late July. ‘You don’t know how difficult it is for me to say: the president of the United States is lying through his teeth.’ By 5 August it was ominous to the point of open menace: ‘The president of the United States, who is president of all of us, has decided to take aim at over half of the American people as political opponents.’

He was the scourge of Obama in the summer, a palpable challenge to his claim of legitimacy, as much as Cheney was in the spring. On his show of 27 July, Limbaugh could boast without exaggeration: ‘July is the month of horrors for Obama and the Democrats. And I am largely the reason why.’ In the absence of these accusers, the Republican Party would be adrift. With the impetus of such voices, it now stands a chance of winning the midterm elections in 2010. Limbaugh was placed on the defensive some months ago when he said that he wanted President Obama to fail. This seemed an insult to the office as well as the man. It also seemed to suggest a peculiarly self-separating definition of national loyalty. But he justified himself by remarking that Obama’s success would mean the end of America as we knew it. (The president had to fail for the country to succeed.) A link between Cheney and Limbaugh certainly exists. Limbaugh, unlike the other far right hosts, shuns the interviewing of guests, and yet Cheney, who for his part shuns interviews, was the guest of Limbaugh even when he was vice president. More recently Limbaugh has interviewed him in the role of ex officio party counsellor.

When I started taking notes for this piece at the end of the summer, violence was in the air. Has it passed? A protest march was shepherded to the Washington Mall and a monster rally of 100,000 was held on 12 September, the day after the anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. One message of the demonstration was a rebuke of Obama’s supposed offence against patriotic memory by his naming of 11 September as National Day of Service and Remembrance. Service – except for military service – is heard on the American right as a codeword or moral wedge for socialism: it is to socialism as doubt is to atheism. Probably they wanted something more like Pearl Harbor Day (though that is no longer commemorated). But when was there ever a rational fit between the size of a grievance flourished by an audience like this and a single cause the crowd can name?

‘They’ve taken on too much, too fast,’ Limbaugh said of Obama’s domestic curriculum, ‘and they’re not doing it right.’ That was in late spring; and it was close to common sense. By late summer the mood on the right was reminiscent of the rage against Kennedy in 1962, which passed through November 1963 unchastened, and attained a temporary climax with the nomination of Barry Goldwater as the Republican presidential candidate in 1964. It surfaced again in the run-up to the Clinton impeachment in 1996-97; but the fury of that time was allowed to take a detour through sex mania. Given the emotions he was up against, Clinton may have got off lightly.

Malthus’s doctrine on population and the necessity of many living in adversity, Hazlitt wrote, was a gospel ‘preached to the poor’. Equality in the United States in the early 21st century has become a gospel preached by the liberal elite to a populace who feel they have no stake in equality. Since the Reagan presidency and the dismemberment of the labour unions, America has not known a popular voice against the privilege of the large corporations. Yet without such a voice from below, all the benevolent programmes that can be theorised, lacking the ground note of genuine indignation, have turned into lumbering ‘designs’ espoused by the enlightened for moral reasons that ordinary people can hardly remember. The gambling ethic has planted itself deep in the America psyche – deeper now than it was in 1849 or 1928. Little has been inherited of the welfare-state doctrine of distributed risk and social insurance. The architects of liberal domestic policy, put in this false position, make easy prey for the generalised slander that says that all non-private plans for anything are hypocritical.

Afghanistan is the largest and the most difficult crisis Obama confronts away from home. And here the trap was fashioned largely by himself. He said, all through the presidential campaign, that Iraq was the wrong war but Afghanistan was the right one. It was ‘a war of necessity’, he said this summer. And he has implied that he would accept his generals’ definition of the proper scale of such a war. Now it appears that Afghanistan is being lost, indeed that it cannot be controlled with fewer than half a million troops on the ground for a decade or more. The generals are for adding troops, as in Vietnam, in increments of tens of thousands. Their current request was leaked to Bob Woodward, who published it in the Washington Post on 21 September, after Obama asked that it be kept from the public for a longer interval while he deliberated. The leak was an act of military politics if not insubordination; its aim was to show the president the cost of resisting the generals.

The political establishment has lined up on their side: the addition of troops is said to be the most telling way Obama can show resoluteness abroad. This verdict of the Wall Street Journal, the Post and (with more circumspection) the New York Times was taken up by John McCain and Condoleezza Rice. If Obama declined at last to oppose Netanyahu on the settlement freeze, he will be far more wary of opposing General Petraeus, the commander of Centcom. Obama is sufficiently humane and sufficiently undeceived to take no pleasure in sending soldiers to their deaths for a futile cause. He will have to convince himself that, in some way still to be defined, the mission is urgent after all. Afghanistan will become a necessary war even if we do not know what marks the necessity. Robert Dole, an elder of the Republican Party, has said he would like to see Petraeus as the Republican candidate in 2012. Better to keep him in the field (this must be at least one of Obama’s thoughts) than to have him to run against.

For Obama to do the courageous thing and withdraw would mean having deployed against him the unlimited wrath of the mainstream media, the oil interest, the Israel lobby, the weapons and security industries, all those who have reasons both avowed and unavowed for the perpetuation of American force projection in the Middle East. If he fails to satisfy the request from General McChrystal – the specialist in ‘black ops’ who now controls American forces in Afghanistan – the war brokers will fall on Obama with as finely co-ordinated a barrage as if they had met and concerted their response. Beside that prospect, the calls of betrayal from the antiwar base that gave Obama his first victories in 2008 must seem a small price to pay. The best imaginable result just now, given the tightness of the trap, may be ostensible co-operation with the generals, accompanied by a set of questions that lays the groundwork for refusal of the next escalation. But in wars there is always a deep beneath the lowest deep, and the ambushes and accidents tend towards savagery much more than conciliation.

David Bromwich teaches literature and political thought at Yale. He writes on America’s wars for the Huffington Post.

Pam Martens: Federals team up with Wall St to foreclose on families

October 5, 2009

A CounterPunch Special Investigation: Part One of a Series

Wall Street Titans Use Aliases to Foreclose on Families While Partnering With a Federal Agency

By PAM MARTENS

http://counterpunch.org/martens10052009.html

A federal agency tasked with expanding the American dream of home ownership and affordable housing free from discrimination to people of modest means has been quietly moving a chunk of that role to Wall Street since 2002. In a stealth partial privatization, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) farmed out its mandate of working with single family homeowners in trouble on their mortgages to the industry most responsible for separating people from their savings and creating an unprecedented wealth gap that renders millions unable to pay those mortgages. This industry also ranks as one of the most storied industries in terms of race discrimination. Rounding out its dubious housing credentials, Wall Street is now on life support courtesy of the public purse known as TARP as a result of issuing trillions of dollars in miss-rated housing bonds and housing-related derivatives, many of which were nothing more than algorithmic concepts wrapped in a high priced legal opinion. It’s difficult to imagine a more problematic resume for the new housing czars.

To what degree this surreptitious program has contributed to putting children and families out on the street during one of the worst economic slumps since the ’30s should be on a Congressional short list for investigation. HUD’s demand for confidentiality from all bidders and announcement of winning bids to parties known only as “the winning bidder” deserves its own investigation in terms of obfuscating the public’s right to know and the ability of the press to properly fulfill its function in a free society.

Despite three days of emails and phone calls to HUD officials, they have refused to provide the names of the winning bidders or the firms that teamed as co-bidders with the winning party. Obtaining this information independently has been akin to extracting a painful splinter wearing a blindfold and oven mitts.

That a taxpayer-supported Federal agency conducts a competitive bid program of over $2 billion and then refuses to announce the names of the winning bidders is beyond contempt for the American people. If the Obama administration does not quickly purge this Bush mindset from these Federal agencies, he is inviting a massive backlash in the midterm elections.

The HUD program was benignly called Accelerated Claims Disposition (ACD) and was said to be a pilot program. A pilot program might suggest to those uninformed in the ways of the new Wall Street occupation of America a modest spending outlay; a go slow approach. In this case, from 2002 to 2005, HUD transferred in excess of $2.4 billion of defaulted mortgages insured by its sibling, the FHA, into the hands of Citigroup, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns while providing the firms with wide latitude to foreclose, restructure or sell off in bundles to investors. HUD retained a minority interest of 30 to 40 percent in each joint venture. Citigroup was awarded the 2002 and 2004 joint ventures; Lehman Brothers the 2003; Bear Stearns the 2005. I obtained this information by reconciling the aliases used by these firms in foreclosures of HUD properties to the addresses of the corporate parents. I further confirmed the information by checking the official records at multiple Secretaries of State offices where the firms must register their subsidiaries to do business within the state.

What the program effectively did was allow the biggest retail banks in the country to get accelerated payment on their defaulted, FHA-insured, single family mortgage loans while allowing another set of the biggest investment banks to make huge profits in fees for bundling and selling off the loans as securitizations. Once the loans were securitized (sold off to investors) they were no longer the problem of HUD or the Wall Street bankers. The loans conveniently disappeared from the radar screen and the balance sheet. The family’s fate had been sold off by HUD to Wall Street in exchange for a small piece of the action. Wall Street then sold off the family’s fate to thousands of investors around the world for a large piece of the action.

HUD has attempted to spin this program as a win-win for everyone with the suggestion that families would have more options under this program. In a HUD February 17, 2006 report titled “Evaluation of 601 Accelerated Claims Disposition Demonstration,” a few kernels of truth emerged. It was noted on page 4 that the private partners “determine how best to maximize the return on the loan…Loans liquidated through note sales generally earn a higher return than property sales, so the JV [joint venture] has an incentive to maximize the share of note sales relative to property sales.” Rather than evaluating the success of the program on how many families were able to get a loan modification and remain in their homes, the report notes that “The benchmark for progress is the share of loans that have reached resolution.”

From its 2002 joint venture, Citigroup dumped en masse 2,599 loans in one securitization alone in August 2004. It sold another 1,177 at other unknown times. From its 2004 joint venture, it dumped 1,814 in one fell swoop. The 2006 HUD report notes that following securitization “there is no information available on the [home] retention after the sale.”

According to HUD’s web site, another major award of $400 million to $800 million in defaulted mortgages was slated for October 23 of last year in the midst of a foreclosure and eviction crisis. Lemar Wooley, in HUD’s Office of Public Affairs, advises that the deal never happened as a result of “no acceptable bids being received.” Given that we have been promised change we can believe in, I would have much preferred to hear: “We’ve sacked this program as an abhorrent example of privatizing profits and socializing losses while turning our backs on the neediest of our society.”

While this was clearly not a win-win for families in financial distress, two other red flags come to mind. The 2006 HUD report notes that to be eligible for this program, loans had to be four full payments past due (five full payments past due for the 2005 Bear Stearns deal). But to securitize the loans, the Wall Street firms had to bring the loans into performing status, that is, up to date in their payments. The question arises as to whether the investors in the securitizations were advised that these were heretofore defaulted HUD loans. One might be forgiven for pondering that as a material fact required in a prospectus since there is much data available showing that loans once in default tend to redefault. Some of these investors might unknowingly be you and your family members. The loans could be sitting right now in public employee pension funds, mutual funds held in 401(k)s, etc.

The second concern is that many of the homes in the deals were foreclosed on in 2006, 2007 and 2008. By HUD not keeping these loans and insisting on its legal mandate for lenders to attempt loan modifications, special forbearance or partial claims to bring the loans current, what impact did this program have on the foreclosure glut and overall property value declines.

It is worth noting what happened to the firms that HUD deemed qualified for this program: Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008. Bear Stearns required a weekend rescue by JPMorgan Chase and the Fed on March 16/17, 2008. Citigroup, which got the lions share of the HUD deals, exists today only because of a $45 billion direct infusion from unwilling taxpayers (overruled by their Congress) and hundreds of billions of dollars more in various other government backstop operations – some still undisclosed despite Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation.

Future articles in this series will look at how these deals started under the Clinton administration with awards to Goldman Sachs, GE Capital, Blackrock and others, with the dubious protection of Merrill Lynch as the overseer for HUD. This program also went virtually unnoticed until charges of rigged computers and bid rigging erupted in headlines. We will also look at the human suffering resulting from this macabre rewriting of the social contract in America. The series begins today with the most unlikely candidate of all for helping people in need: Citigroup.

* * *

Read More: http://counterpunch.org/martens10052009.html

Marcy Wheeler: John Brennan's Deputy National Security Advisor advises continuing illegal spying

John Brennan's dangerous national security advice
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
Friday Aug. 14, 2009


Editor's note: Glenn Greenwald is on vacation this week. Marcy Wheeler, who blogs at Firedoglake, is guest-blogging today.

Last year, Glenn posted some statements from now-Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan on counterterrorism. The post contributed to pressure that led Brennan to withdraw his candidacy to be CIA Director (which is how he ended up as Deputy NSA, which doesn't require congressional approval).

In addition to passages on rendition and torture, Glenn linked to an NPR story attributing Obama's switch on counterterrorism issues -- particularly his infamous flip-flop on retroactive immunity for the telecoms that had illegally spied on Americans -- to Brennan.

What's important in that statement is Obama's reference to "the information I've received." He's advised on intelligence matters by John Brennan, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Like many intelligence professionals, Brennan says the FISA program is essential to the fight against terrorism.

By adopting Brennan's view, Obama improves his standing with the intelligence community; for someone looking ahead to a presidential administration, that's important.

So it was under Brennan's tutelage that Obama came to the following conclusion about Bush's illegal domestic surveillance program.

"That, in my mind, met my basic concerns. And given that all the information I've received is that the underlying program itself actually is important and useful to American security, as long as it has these [civil liberties safeguards] on them, I felt it was more important for me to go ahead and support this compromise," Obama said.

That's all very, um, interesting in retrospect, given what we've recently learned about Brennan's very complicit role in Bush's illegal program. The IG Report on the surveillance program revealed that from at least May 2003 until April 2005 (and possibly until Brennan retired in late 2005) intelligence centers that Brennan headed -- the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and the National Counterterrorism Center -- developed the threat assessments and a list of Al Qaeda affiliated organizations used in the program's targeting. While that section of the report is rather vague about how these threat assessments were used, it appears that John Brennan was either in charge of developing the information that substituted for "probable cause," and/or affirmed the urgency of the Al Qaeda threat to justify the program itself (though the assessments were approved by more senior people). For a period, it appears, John Brennan decided who would get wiretapped and who wouldn't (including organizations like Al Haramain, now suing for having been illegally wiretapped).

Spencer Ackerman asked Brennan last week about his role in the program. Brennan gave a response that Alberto Gonzales himself could have given:

I fulfilled all my responsibilities at NCTC that I was asked to fulfill. And there are a number of different programs, some of which have come out in the press, some of which have not. Some of the things that have come out in the press have been inaccurate in terms of the representations there. And when I look back in terms of my service at the NCTC and those places I believe I fulfilled those responsibilities to the best of my abilities.

These issues related to the so-called domestic surveillance programs and other things -- one of the things I mentioned, there's a lot of hyperbole and misrepresentations about what actually happened. And a lot of times people go down certain roads believing reports as facts. And that's not the case. So I'm not going to go into sort of what my role was in that instance because a lot of those activities are still considered classified and not in the public domain, irrespective of what the press reports might be out there.

For a guy who counseled Obama that this program was "important and useful to American security," Brennan's response is pathetically weak, making himself out to be a guy doing no more than "fulfilling his duties," rather than pushing the program on the presidential candidate as a big success, rather than (apparently) picking and choosing who got illegally surveilled.

There's something fundamentally wrong about the guy who pushed Obama to flip-flop on a campaign pledge now treating the program with this much false ambivalence.

Of course, Brennan may be down-playing his role in the illegal program out of more than just a desire to hide his complicity. After all, the IG Report itself is much more ambivalent about the program's benefit to counterterrorism.

The IGs also examined the impact of PSP information on counterterrorism efforts. Many senior IC officials believe that the PSP filled a gap in intelligence collection thought to exist under the FISA statute shortly after the al-Qa'ida terrorist attacks against the United States. Others within the IC, including FBI agents, CIA analysts and officers, and other officials had difficulty evaluating the precise contribution of the PSP to counterterrorism efforts because it was most often viewed as one source among many available analytic and intelligence-gathering tools in these efforts.

And much closer to home for Brennan, here's a telling detail about how the NCTC developed its threat assessments.

NCTC analysts involved in preparing the threat assessments told the ODNI OIG that only a portion of the PSP information was ever used in the ODNI threat assessments because other intelligence sources were available that provided more timely or detailed information about the al-Qaida threat to the United States. [my emphasis]

That is, the analysts who worked with Brennan at NCTC found that this surveillance program wasn't the best source of information on terrorist threats out there. Never mind, though, because Brennan was going to convince Obama to keep it anyway.

The centrality of Brennan in not just this program, but in the NCTC's collection and dissemination of information on threats--including those threats purportedly presented by US persons--is troublesome for another reason. A few weeks ago, peace activists in the Tacoma, WA area exposed a member of Fort Lewis' Force Protection Service who had infiltrated their groups and gained access to the list-serve they used to communicate with members via email. That information, collected by a military employee or contractor, was shared with the national network of agencies of which NCTC forms the core.

He admitted that he did pass on information to an intelligence network, which, as you mentioned earlier, was composed of dozens of law enforcement agencies, ranging from municipal to county to state to regional, and several federal agencies, including Immigration Customs Enforcement, Joint Terrorism Task Force, FBI, Homeland Security, the Army in Fort Lewis.

This is not supposed to happen. It's not supposed to happen because Posse Comitatus should prevent the military from this kind of domestic spying (though it is, after all, what NSA is doing as well). And it's not supposed to happen because Congress mandated that this kind of information sharing only take place after consultation with a Privacy and Civil Liberties Review Board. And this consultation (or not) with a board is an area where Obama has continued Bush's disdain for civil liberties. Not only has President Obama, thus far, failed to nominate anyone to serve on that board. But his Administration recently removed all mention of the board from the White House website. The Obama Administration continues to push this kind of information sharing. But they have, literally, disappeared all concern for civil liberties.

Back when he persuaded candidate Obama to flip-flop on a key campaign promise, Brennan appears to have oversold the benefits of the program (according to the IG Report). More importantly, when Obama flip-flopped, he promised to build more protections for civil liberties. Right now, he's not even fulfilling what Congress has mandated.

Glenn was right, last year, to oppose John Brennan for CIA Director. But in his current role as Deputy National Security Advisor, Brennan has not only sustained the Bush's domestic wiretap program, but he seems to be pushing a homeland security strategy that completely ignores civil liberties protections while constructing this massive, abusive -- and not terribly effective -- network of spying on American citizens.

-- Marcy Wheeler