MADDOW:  Do you think that the current system, the gang of eight briefing system, allows the CIA to be good at spying and to be doing their work legally?

CLARKE: I think briefings of the gang of eight, those very sensitive briefings, as opposed to the broader briefings -- the gang of eight briefings are usually often a farce. They catch them alone, one at the time usually. They run some briefing by them.

The congressman can‘t keep the briefing. They can‘t take notes. They can‘t consult their staff. They don‘t know what the briefings are about in advance. It's a box check so that the CIA can say it complied with the law. It's not oversight. It doesn't work.

To their credit, Congressional Democrats -- over the objections of right-wing Republicans -- have been attempting since the middle of last year to fix this serious problem, by writing legislation to severely narrow the President's power to conceal intelligence activities from the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and abolish the "Gang of Eight" process.  After all, those Committees were created in the wake of the intelligence abuses uncovered by the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, and their purpose is "to provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States."  But if they're not even told about what the Executive Branch is doing in the intelligence realm, then they obviously can't exert oversight and ensure compliance with the law -- which is the purpose of keeping them in the dark, as the last decade demonstrated.

Yet these efforts to ensure transparency and oversight have continuously run into one major roadblock:  Barack Obama's threat to veto the legislation.  Almost immediately after leading Democrats on the Intelligence Committee unveiled their legislation last year, the Obama White House issued a veto threat with extremely dubious (and Bush-replicating) rationales:  such oversight would jeopardize secrecy and intrude into "executive privilege."  In response to Obama's veto threat, Democrats spent the last nine months accommodating the White House's objections by significantly diluting their legislation -- their new bill would actually retain the "Gang of Eight" briefings but impose notification and other oversight requirements -- and two weeks ago the House passed that diluted bill.  

But no matter:  as Walter Pincus reports today in The Washington Post, Obama is now threatening to veto even this diluted bill, and is echoing GOP talking points when doing so:

The White House has renewed its threat to veto the fiscal 2010 intelligence authorization bill over a provision that would force the administration to widen the circle of lawmakers who are informed about covert operations and other sensitive activities. . . .

In a letter sent to the senior members of the intelligence panels, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter R. Orszag said Gang of Eight notifications are made in only "the most limited of circumstances" affecting "vital interests" of the United States, arguing that the new requirement would "undermine the president's authority and responsibility to protect sensitive national security information."

Orszag also opposed a Senate bill provision that required notification of "any change in a covert action," which he described as setting up "unreasonable burdens" on the agencies, particularly the CIA . The House bill also requires notification of intelligence "significant undertakings," a term that Orszag described as "vague and uncertain."

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), ranking minority member of the House intelligence panel, noted that the White House objections were similar to those raised by Republicans, especially regarding notifications provisions. . . .

Orszag wrote that the notification provisions were one of three items in the bills that would draw a veto recommendation from the president's advisers. Another such provision would give the Government Accountability Office legal authority to review practices and operations throughout the intelligence community. The White House contends that broadening the GAO's purview would upset current relations with the office, which already has access to some intelligence activity, and adversely affect oversight relationships between the committees and the community. The provision would also permit any committee of Congress with an arguable claim of jurisdiction over an intelligence activity to request a GAO investigation of that activity.

In other words, the Obama White House -- just as was true for the Bush White House, and using the same rationale -- does not want any meaningful oversight (i.e., briefings beyond the absurd Gang of Eight sham) on whether it's breaking the law in the conduct of its intelligence activities.  One of the Intelligence Community's most loyal Congressional servants -- Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein -- told The Post that she thinks a deal can be worked out with the White House, meaning that the bill needs to be diluted even further, to the point of virtual nothingness, in order for the White House to accept it.

It's critical to note that this is far from an abstract concern, because the Obama administration has almost certainly been hiding intelligence activities from the Intelligence Committees, thus ensuring it operates without oversight.  Read this October, 2009 article from The Hill -- headlined:  "Feingold sees similarities between Bush and Obama on intelligence sharing" -- in which Senate Intelligence Committee Member Russ Feingold explains "his suspicion that the Obama administration is continuing some of the stonewalling practices of the George W. Bush administration when it comes to providing full intelligence briefings to the relevant committees in Congress."  And indeed, all year long, there's been a series of disclosures about highly controversial intelligence programs that appear to be "off-the-books" and away from the oversight of the Intelligence Committee.  In late January, it was revealed that the President was maintaining a "hit list" of American citizens he had authorized to be assassinated far from any "battlefield," followed by yesterday's story describing the use of shadowy private contractors to collect intelligence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

All of this is sadly consistent with the Obama administration's devotion to extreme levels of secrecy and resistance to oversight.  Last month, Eli Lake reported that Obama has simply failed to make a single appointment to, or even activate the budget of, the The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the body created pursuant to the report of the 9/11 Commission to safeguard civil liberties in intelligence activities; it has thus been completely dormant.  And, with a few very mild exceptions, Obama -- since he was inaugurated -- has affirmatively embraced one radical secrecy doctrine after the next that used to be controversial among Democrats (back when Bush used them).

The refusal of the Bush administration to brief the Intelligence Committees on its most controversial intelligence programs was once one of the most criticized aspects of the Bush/Cheney obsessions with secrecy, executive power abuses, and lawlessness.   The Obama administration is now replicating that conduct, repeatedly threatening to veto legislation to restore real oversight.

 

UPDATE:  Marcy Wheeler notes what is probably the worst part of all of this, something I consider truly despicable:  the administration is also threatening to veto the bill because it contains funding for a new investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, on the ground that such an investigation -- in the administration's words -- "would undermine public confidence" in the FBI probe of the attacks "and unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions."

As I've documented at length, not only are there enormous, unresolved holes in the FBI's case, but many of the most establishment-defending mainstream sources -- from leading newspaper editorial pages to key politicians in both parties -- have expressed extreme doubts about the FBI's case and called for an independent investigation.  For the administration to actively block an independent review of one of the most consequential political crimes of this generation would probably be its worst act yet, and that's saying quite a bit.

 

UPDATE II:  On the same day he threatened to veto this oversight and transparency legislation, President Obama issued a proclamation celebrating "Sunshine Week" and hailing himself and his administration as "the most open and transparent ever."  He further praised himself as follows:  "We came to Washington to change the way business was done, and part of that was making ourselves accountable to the American people by opening up our government."

As for the first:  not only did Joe Biden tell Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israel's actions are endangering U.S. troops in the region, but -- more important -- as Foreign Policy's Mark Perry reports, both Adm. Mike Mullen and Gen. David Petraeus within the last couple of months stressed the same causal connection to Obama officials:  "Israel's intransigence could cost American lives."  It's rather difficult to maintain the fiction that only fringe Israel-haters see the connection between our support for Israel and Muslim hatred toward the U.S. when two of America's most respected military officials (responsible for U.S. troops in the region) are making that case explicitly.  Moreover, the Mullen/Petraeus alarm is almost certainly what accounts for the Obama administration's sudden (and commendable) willingness to so publicly oppose Israel.  As Perry says:  "There are important and powerful lobbies in America: the NRA, the American Medical Association, the lawyers -- and the Israeli lobby. But no lobby is as important, or as powerful, as the U.S. military."  

As for the second point:  I've previously noted the glaring contradiction among neoconservatives, whereby they simultaneously (a) tell American Jewish voters to vote Republican because (they claim) the GOP is better for Israel and (b) insist that it's anti-Semitic to point out that some are guided by their allegiance to Israel when forming their political beliefs about U.S. policy.  Obviously, anyone who does (a) is, by logical necessity, endorsing the very premise in (b) which they want (when it suits them) to label anti-Semitic.  Neoconservatives constantly make political appeals to Jewish voters expressly grounded in the premise that American Jews are guided by allegiance to Israel (vote Republican because it's better for Israel), yet then scream "anti-Semite" at anyone who points this out.  When faced with this glaring contradiction, their typical response -- as illustratively voiced by Commentary's Jennifer Rubin, after she argued in a 2008 Jerusalem Post column that American Jews should vote against Obama because he'd be bad for Israel -- is to deny that "that the interests of the U.S. and Israel are antithetical" and insist that "support for Israel in no way requires sacrificing one’s concerns for America’s interests."  In other words:  to advocate for Israel is to advocate for the U.S. because their interests are wholly indistinguishable, even synonymous.

Yet here we have a major split between the U.S. and Israel, with key American military and political leaders explaining that the opposite is true:  that Israeli actions are directly harming U.S. interests and jeopardizing American lives.  And what is the reflexive, unambiguous response of virtually every American Israel-centric neocon?  To side with Israel over the U.S.  AIPAC, the ADL, Elliott Abrams, AIPAC-loyal Democrats in the House, Marty Peretz, Commentary, etc. etc. all quickly castigated the U.S. Government and defended Israel, notwithstanding the dangers to Americans posed by Israeli conduct and the massive price paid by the U.S. in so many ways for this relationship (by contrast, J Street called the administration's anger towards Israel both "understandable and appropriate").  There's nothing wrong with taking Israel's side per se -- one is and should be free to criticize one's own government in its foreign policy -- but incidents like this make it increasingly futile to try to suppress what is glaringly visible:  that (as is true for numerous groups in the U.S.) a significant segment of the neoconservative Right (which includes some evangelical Christians and some American Jews) are guided in their political advocacy by their emotional, religious, and cultural attachment to another country, and want U.S. policy shaped to advance that devotion.

On a related note:  there has been a long-standing effort to equate those who make this observation with anti-Israel hatred or even anti-Semitism.  Two widely-cited reports did exactly that with regard to me recently:  this pseudo-scholarly report from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and this post on the blog of the American Jewish Committee, both of which hurl all sorts of ugly though trite accusations at me for daring to suggest that some American Jews are guided in their political advocacy by allegiance to Israel.  I'll just note that the author of both "reports" is someone named Adam Levick, who -- with extreme, unintended irony -- lists this as his biography on his Twitter account:

I'm an American who just made Aliyah (moved to Israel), and love America and my new country.

If you're going to try to render unspeakable the observation that some American neocons are devoted to Israel, it's probably best to have the crusade led by someone with a different biography (The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, who went to serve in the IDF as a prison guard incarcerating Palestinians, is probably also not a good candidate to lead that crusade).  As I've said many times, there's nothing wrong per se with harboring cultural affections for other countries -- many individuals in the culturally diverse U.S. do -- but stridently denying what is so obviously true, and smearing those who point it out, does more than anything else to make something innocuous seem nefarious.

Finally, the reason Israel engages in this intransigent, arrogant conduct is because it believes (with good reason) that U.S. officials will never be willing to (and, in any event,  cannot) take any real action against it.  At this point, the Obama administration -- as reflected by the excellent questions posed yesterday to David Axelrod by ABC News' Jake Tapper -- still seems far from ready to do so.  Still, there's no denying that the very public condemnation of Israel by the Obama administration is unprecedented at least over the last two decades, will produce benefits on its own (including sentiments like this and this being increasingly expressed even among those Obama supporters who don't typically speak out about this issue), and will subject Obama officials to serious political pressure and attacks, from which they ought to be defended.  It's true that none of this will ultimately matter unless the administration is willing to back this up with meaningful action -- i.e., credible threats to change policy -- but this last week was an important and substantial first step toward that vital goal.

Many of the issues I write most about here -- from civil liberties erosions and radical, lawless National Security State policies to the wars that justify them -- have their roots in our involvement in the Middle East, and our self-destructive, blind support for Israeli actions is a major (though not the only or even primary) factor in all of that.  It's impossible to care about the former without wanting to do something substantial about the latter.

 

UPDATE:  Former AIPAC official M.J. Rosenberg has more on the extreme and highly revealing AIPAC attacks on the Obama administration and the political strategy it intends to pursue.

 

UPDATE II:  Here's a perfect example of the glaring double standard I'm talking about:  hard-core GOP loyalists are today promoting this claim that the tension between the Obama administration and Israel will cause American Jews to stop voting Democratic and (according to John Podhoretz) stop donating to Democratic candidates.  The neoconservative Right has been making similar predictions for years with complete futility, but think about it:  what is the core assumption of such a claim?   That American Jews determine their political beliefs based on what is best for Israel rather than the U.S. -- exactly the "dual loyalty" assumption that, when made by others, this very same faction brands as anti-Semitic.

 

UPDATE III:  AP details the seriously nasty backlash now developing against the Obama administration from the Israel-centric Right, led by AIPAC, Joe Lieberman and John McCain.  Lieberman dismissed this as nothing more than a "family feud" and demanded that this all end.  You may have thought the U.S. and Israel are separate countries with the obligation to protect their own interests, but according to Lieberman, they're all part of the same "family" that should never publicly disagree, because doing so only helps Our Enemies, which (of course) we have fully in common.   Meanwhile, John Cole analyzes the neocon threats that the Obama administration will pay a serious political price for its defiance of the Israeli Government as a result of the upcoming AIPAC conference.

Remi Brulin, who teaches graduate and undergraduate courses at NYU, has spent many years -- as part of his PhD dissertation at the Sorbonne in Paris -- examining the use of the word Terrorism in international relations, the law, and the media (particularly as used by The New York Times).  The history of this term -- how and why it came to be such a politically prominent and consequential label, the radically inconsistent meaning it has based on who is wielding it, the failure to create a universally or even widely recognized definition -- reveals how long it has been manipulated as a propagandistic tool.  

Of course, "the War on Terror" era has made this manipulation even more blatant and destructive -- attacks by Muslims even when aimed at purely military targets (Fort Hood or even armies invading their own countries) are automatically deemed "Terrorism," while attacks designed by the U.S., Israel and their allies with the clear purpose of terrorizing civilian populations into submission are not (nor is it Terrorism when a non-Muslim American flies his plane into the side of a government building or randomly shoots Pentagon police for political ends). 

But the deceit inherent in that inconsistent application has been going on for several decades -- from the Israeli attempt in the 1970s to universalize their local disputes under the rubric of that term, to America's arming of the Nicaraguan contras, El Salvadoran death squads and even the Iranian regime in the 1980s, to the decades-long and ongoing games of who is (and is not) declared a "state sponsor of terror."  Interestingly, while many leading Senate Democrats and many establishment media outlets routinely and publicly accused the U.S. of being a "state sponsor of terrroism" in the 1980s (primarily by virtue of its actions in Central America), the very mention of such a possibility is now one of the greatest taboos.

Brulin is my guest today on Salon Radio to discuss these matters, and the 30-minute discussion -- which I genuinely found fascinating -- can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below (as always, the podcast can be downloaded in MP3 here, and ITunes here).  A transcript is here.

I want to make one related point about the contentious exchange I had several weeks ago with various Newsweek editors (both publicly and via email) concerning their internal discussion of the meaning of Terrorism, an exchange I was unable to address fully at the time because I was traveling.  As a result of various email exchanges, I was persuaded that several (though not all) of the Newsweek editors who clearly appeared to be themselves endorsing highly biased definitions of the term were, in fact, intending to describe ironically how the term is typically used by others (that includes Managing Editor Kathy Jones, who defended herself here).  I explicitly noted that possibility in what I first wrote, and now re-affirm the point I made about it:  large media outlets such as Newsweek play a significant role in how the term Terrorism is used and understood (they are not innocent bystanders, or mere "messengers," as they tried to claim).  What was most striking about Newsweek's three-day discussion of what is and is not Terrorism was that virtually nobody attempted to define what the term meant.

It is that lack of definition that is the source of most of the mischief.  The reason no clear definition of Terrorism is ever settled upon is because it's virtually impossible to embrace a definition without either (a) excluding behavior one wishes to demonize and thus include and/or (b) including behavior (including one's own and those of one's friends) which one desperately wants to exclude.  As Brulin explains, this dilemma is often "resolved" by countries trying to create definitions that simply bar the possibility that they themselves could ever engage in Terrorism (as exemplified by the long-standing efforts of the U.S. to insist that Terrorism is, by definition, something that only non-state actors can engage in, even as it labels other governments "state sponsors of terrorism").  But media outlets such as Newsweek shouldn't be parties to those propagandistic efforts; if they're going to use the term -- and they do, promiscuously -- they ought first to decide what it means and then apply it consistently or, if that can't be done, refrain from using it (as Reuters, rare among Western media outlets, has commendably attempted to do).

The discussion with Brulin is here:

Remi Brulin: Yes, thanks for having me, Glenn.

GG: Let me just begin by asking you to summarize what the focal point of your research has been; you've been researching this topic for several years now. What has been the scope of your research, what kinds of things have you been looking at, and what is the general scope of what you're writing about?

RB: As you said, I've been researching this for a while now, about eight years, and what I'm looking at specifically is the American political discourse on terrorism, basically since '45 but what I show is that the discourse, the term 'terrorism' started being used in the discourse only in '81, beginning with the Reagan years. What I also look at is how the media, particularly in the case of my dissertation The New York Times, has used the term over the years.

And the big question, of course, is the question of the definition of terrorism, meaning who do we call terrorists, and who do we not call terrorists, and whether there is questions of double standards and everything. And this is relevant because at the international level, there is no agreed-upon definition of terrorism, and at the US level, meaning for example the Executive Branch, there also is no one single definition of terrorism, and yet the term is used over and over again in our political discourse, and as you've shown in many of your articles, it has consequences, very serious consequences.

GG: If you go back to - and the title of your dissertation indicates that your beginning year that you're looking at is 1945 - over the next several decades after World War II, you can find generalized instances of presidents declaring whoever happened to be the enemy of the day to be terrorists, in kind of like a name-calling, demonizing way.

But when did the term really start to take on international prominence, meaning when did we start struggling to come up with definitions of the term as though there was some kind of hardened scientific meaning that we could ascribe to it?

RB: There was one first attempt at getting to an international definition of terrorism when the League of Nations produced a convention in order to fight terrorism in '37, but it failed. Then after that, basically the term is not used in the US political discourse at all, until the '70s, more or less. The president, we know that today because it is very easy to research, because we have access to the papers of the president and they're digitized and we can use search engines; we could not do that ten years ago. So we know for a fact that presidents until Carter never really used the term terrorism, and Carter used it mostly in '79 and 1980, and it was in reference to the hostage crisis in Iran.

Even then, even when Carter used it, and he used it in, I don't know, 120 speeches or so, even he was not using the term terrorism as a discourse, meaning that the term was used once or twice to refer specifically to that one act of terrorism, namely the hostage crisis. But he did not turn this into a discourse. The term terrorism is not suddenly supposed to explain everything, to tell us who the enemy was, and did not draw a line between those who were the terrorists and those who were not. It was just about that one incident. So there was no discourse. The real discourse appears with Reagan administration in 1981.

In my research, I tried to determine where it's coming from, and I found that there are possibly two origins, two explanations for where the discourse comes from. One is from Latin America, and the other is from Israel.

GG: With regard to Latin America, as you just said, that began in 1981 with the Reagan administration, the various wars that it waged there in terms of who was a terrorist, who wasn't, were we funding the terrorists, like with the Contras, who were trying to overthrow the government, or were we fighting against terrorists, and those terms got confused. But when you say that one potential origin was Israel, talk about how Israel began using the term and what relevance that has to the international activity in attempts to come up with an international definition.

RB: Israel started using the term to explain or to characterize its struggle, its conflicts with Palestinians and with the Arab states in general, since early on, in the '60s and '70s. In fact, if you study the debates at the UN, which is something I looked at, you can see that there's a very different way of talking about terrorism on the Israeli side, and on the American side, throughout the '70s, all the way up until the '80s. For Israel, right away, in the '70s, in the early '70s, there is a war against terrorism. The Arab states are terrorist states, and they are at war with Israel. There are parallels with the threat of terrorism and the threat posed by the Nazis. Those are terms that are used over and over and over again by the Israeli representatives at the UN General Assembly and at the UN Security Council in the '70s. And Israel was the only state to say that about terrorism.

But that changed in the '80s, and one thing I looked at is, there were a couple of conferences, one in '79 and one in '84, that were both organized by an organization, an institute, called the Jonathan Institute. It's called the Jonathan Institute after the name of Benjamin Netanyahu's brother, Jonathan Netanyahu, and he was killed in the raid in Entebbe in '76. Basically, this conference was organized in '79, and I can read to you what the official objective was.

GG: So in other words, basically the first conference that was designed to define or come up with a consensus definition of terrorism, was already cast in Middle East terms because the conference was named after Benjamin Netanyahu's brother, who had tried to rescue the hostages from Uganda?

RB: Absolutely.

GG: And... go ahead.

RB: The objective, the official objective is - I have the transcripts of the conference - it says that the objective is "to focus public attention on the real nature of international terrorism, on the threat that it poses to all democratic societies, and on the measures necessary for defeating the forces of terror." And everything in the book is about the fact that terrorism is not something that, is not a threat that Israel only is facing, but it's a threat to all democracies, the whole Western world.

Then there's this idea that terrorism and totalitarianism, meaning the Soviet Union and its allies, are linked, that the terrorists are also the totalitarians. And then there is the focus on state support or state sponsoring of international terrorism, which are issues that were absolutely not in the American discourse on terrorism until then, but at the conference, you look at the list of the people invited, and you have George Bush, the father of W. Bush, who was the ambassador, the American ambassador at the UN in the '70s.

You have Jack Kemp, Republican from New York. You have George Will, you have Norman Podhoretz, you have Henry Jackson, famous senator, you have Richard Pipes, a right-wing ideologue. You have Menachem Begin who is there, you have Shimon Peres, you have Netanyahu, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu who is now prime minister, and so you have a clear link between the American discourse, suddenly, and the Israeli discourse, and from that moment on, in America, people are going to be starting to talk about terrorism in ways similar to how Israel had been talking about it for 10 or 15 years.

GG: In light of that objective, to sort of internationalize the idea of terrorism from what it had been, which was a way of talking about Israel's various enemies, into this concept that the whole Western democratic world ought to recognize as a universal problem, was there an actual definition agreed upon between the members of that conference?

RB: Well, yes. Actually, it's interesting, because they did come up with a definition which is more or less similar to one that you mentioned earlier in one of your pieces, meaning the one from the State Department, and it's a very basic definition - I'm trying to find it here, yeah, it's right here - "terrorism is the deliberate systematic murder, maiming and menacing of innocents to inspire fear in order to gain political ends." So there is nothing that is controversial about that definition; it is very broad. It is nonspecific.

But what is interesting is when you look at the presentations, the speeches during the conference, you have one of the issues of the definition of terrorism is whether there is a difference between terrorism and struggles for national determination, or whether there is a difference between terrorism and freedom fighters. And you have an article here, a speech given on the issue of freedom fighters versus terrorists by Menachem Begin, and of course Menachem Begin was a member of the Irgun, which was according to the British in the '40s, a terrorist organization.

GG: What did it do? What kind of things did it do that warranted that label in the eyes of the British?

RB: They are famous - and that aspect is interesting in itself - they are famous mostly because of the bombing of the King David Hotel in the '40s, and basically it was where the British forces were headquartered. They put a huge bomb in the basement, and there happened to be many many civilians in the building, the building collapsed, and this was front page news around the world. The New York Times called that an act of terrorism at the time. The British called that an act of terrorism. And in fact Begin mentions that incident in his speech, and he says that in fact the Irgun had called in advance, it wasn't really an act of terrorism, but he said that in any case this is a unique case and then says that the method of the Irgun was "to never hurt a civilian or a man, woman or child whether Jew, Arab or British."

So he is very clear as what would be terrorism. The problem is that of course historically, it is absolutely not true that the Irgun "never killed a single civilian, Arab, Jew or British." There were literally dozens of cases of bombs being put in marketplaces, in theaters, in Palestinian quarters throughout the '30s and then in the '40s, and those clearly were acts of terrorism. The way they deal with this during this conference with the definition is basically by not mentioning those acts that would actually qualify under their own definition of terrorism as acts of terrorism. So that way Begin can say that the Irgun were freedom fighters and not terrorists, by simply ignoring the historical record.

GG: As you indicated a little bit earlier, the use of the word terrorism within American political discourse really began to intensify in the 1980s, and not necessarily in connection with a lot of the attacks from Middle Easterners, which we think of as terrorism today, but really with regard to what we were doing in Central America.

Talk about that development, and also related to it, the question of whether or not these definitions of terrorism allow for states, for actual governments, to engage in terrorism, or whether it has to be nongovernment actors.

RB: Yes, that's the other big question when it comes to the definition of terrorism. As I mentioned earlier, the first question is whether there is a difference between a struggle for national liberation and terrorism, and the other question is whether states can be engaging in terrorism, whether the concept of state terrorism exists or not.

In '81, we had indeed the birth of a discourse on terrorism in the US political discourse, and it focuses nearly completely on Latin America and Central America. Reagan when he talks about terrorism in the '80s, very very rarely mentions the Middle East, even rarely mentions Khaddafi, which is surprising to most people probably. He mentions all the time the situation in El Salvador and in Nicaragua, and when he is talking about Nicaragua and El Salvador, he is basically saying that military aid to El Salvador is justified because they're fighting the terrorists, meaning the FMLN in El Salvador, and aid to the Contras is also justified because they're fighting against the Sandinistas, and the Sandinistas are a state sponsoring terrorism.

This is where the question of whether a state can be involved in terrorism comes into play. It is obvious in the American political discourse, in the presidential discourse in the '80s, that a state can be involved indirectly, meaning as a sponsor of terrorism. During the '80s you have very harsh debates in Congress between Republicans and Democrats, because they completely disagree on who are the terrorists. The Democrats throughout the '80s say over and over again that the Contras are terrorists, and they state specifically that they are terrorist because of the methods that they use, and they quote many, many studies by Amnesty International, by Human Rights Watch and others, and they said the same thing about El Salvador. In El Salvador the Democrats say that because of the methods that they use, the death squads in El Salvador are guilty of terrorism, and because of the links between the death squads and the government of El Salvador, the government is also guilty of state terrorism, and therefore the US should not be sending military aid to the government.

GG: In fact, if that argument were true, and it's hard to dispute it if you settle on a clear definition of terrorism, but if it's true that the Contras in Nicaragua and the death squads in El Salvador were themselves terrorist organization, then it would necessarily follow, wouldn't it, that the United States, which was funding and supporting those organizations, was itself a state sponsor of terrorism?

RB: Absolutely, and in fact the Democrats, many, many Democrats in the '80s say that, in the House and in the Senate, they say specifically that if we give aid and support to the Contras or military aid to El Salvador, this will go to the commission of terrorist acts, we know it, and therefore the US will be involved in state sponsoring of terrorism. For that one reason you have an amendment that was proposed by Senator Dodd, Chris Dodd, in '84, and he proposed it twice, in April and then in October of '84, and basically the Senate had just voted in favor of military aid to the Contras, he had voted against, and after having been defeated, he said, well, maybe what we could do at least is add a little amendment saying that no funds that we just voted for, no funds should go to the commission of acts of terrorism. Very clear, simple,...

GG: It was basically an amendment providing that the United States shall be banned from funding terrorist groups?

RB: Funding terrorism and terrorist acts, literally and explicitly that.

GG: What was the vote on that amendment?

RB: The vote was, in both cases, in April and October, every single Democrat senator voted in favor of this, and every single Republican voted against it. So they had a very slight majority, and so the amendment was never passed. What's interesting here, aside from the debates, which were fantastic, which were fascinating, because they had to deal with the definition of terrorism, and Dodd did actually what you did in one of your pieces, where he used one specific definition of terrorism, and then you applied it to specific cases.

That's what Dodd did: he said, I'm using here the definition of the State Department, and according to the State Department's definition, what the Contras do is undoubtedly terrorism. So we should put an end to that. And the Republicans, the very few who actually agreed to take part in the debate - Specter did, Stevens did - their arguments were just striking, and basically they were that the Contras were freedom fighters, they were not terrorists, and that the US could not vote for an amendment like this because doing so would be admitting that the US had been involved in state sponsoring of terrorism, and that's just not something that the US does.

GG: Right. Inherently.

RB: We do not do terrorism, therefore we shouldn't admit that we did, because that would send the wrong signal. That's the level of the arguments that were used by the Republicans, and Dodd points when Stevens used the argument of the freedom fighters, that this is the arguments that the PLO used in the '70s, saying that we're not terrorists, we're freedom fighters. We cannot possibly be terrorists because our ends are good. Of course that's an argument that we refuse when the PLO uses it. But that's the only argument that the Republicans put forward against the amendment.

Of course, another aspect of it that's interesting is that this amendment doesn't exist if you look at the media. It was just never reported in the US media.

GG: You mean the debate over the Dodd amendment to ban the funding of terrorism and the vote that took place?

RB: Yes, exactly. Meaning that you have an amendment on one of major issues of US foreign policy in the '80s, most big-name senators talk about it on the floor, Kennedy talked about it, Dodd talked for, like, half an hour. You have a very clear-cut vote on a central issue of the time, which is international terrorism, and yet in The New York Times the only mention of it is in a column by Anthony Lewis a few months later - because obviously Anthony Lewis was on the left on the political spectrum in the opinion pages of The New York Times, personally knew senators, so he was aware that the debates had happened and that the amendment had been voted on. But it was never reported, not once in the news pages of The New York Times.

GG: Okay. Let me ask you this. The United States for a long time, for several decades now, since this concept arose of state sponsor of terrorism, has maintained a list, as a result of congressional legislation, of the so-called state sponsors of terrorism. Talk a little bit about the history of that list - how and why countries like Iraq or Iran have made their way on the list, and then off the list, and how that has worked.

RB: The list comes from an amendment in '79; it's called the Fenwick amendment, this is Millicent Fenwick, a representative from New Jersey, and what's interesting is that there were previous attempts to come up with a list of states that sponsored terrorism. These attempts were basically led by senators Ribicoff and Javits, and what they wanted to do in the late '70s was to have Congress come up with a list of terrorist states, or state sponsors of terrorism, and then the executive would have to impose sanctions on it.

And as soon as they started to try to figure out how to legislate on this, they of course bumped into the difficult question of the definition of terrorism, and they realized that they couldn't agree on a definition. Basically one among many issues, one problem was for example that in the Middle East, if suddenly you realize that Saudi Arabia is giving aid and support to the PLO, then you have to put Saudi Arabia on the list, and that means sanctions, and of course you don't want to put Saudi Arabia on the list, you only want to put Syria on list, or Iran, enemies basically, but not Saudi Arabia. So basically they couldn't agree on a definition and therefore it didn't go anywhere, and the only reason that the list came into being was because Mrs. Fenwick proposed an amendment and put it as a rider on a larger bill, and it was not discussed - there was no discussion, so it passed, and that's how we got the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

From the very beginning on the list you had South Yemen, you had Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and Cuba. Cuba is fascinating, because it's there from the beginning, from '82, and it's still on the list. Basically there are only two states that have been taken off the list. You have South Yemen, because South Yemen doesn't exist, now it's Yemen, so they're off the list, and you had Iraq, and Iraq of course is interesting because Iraq was on the list from the very beginning, and then in '82 it's taken off the list, and for reasons that have nothing to do with Iraqi sponsoring of terrorism going down, but because the US wanted to be able to sell weapons or dual use technology to Iraq because it was taking the side of Iraq in the Iraq-Iran War and so in order to sell those weapons or dual-use technologies, the US had to take Iraq out of the list. So it was out of the list until 1990, when Iraq invades Kuwait, and then suddenly it's back on the list.

GG: Right.

RB: Obviously that has nothing to do with terrorism. I mean, it's a crime, it's a crime of aggression, but it's not terrorism. But it's an enemy again, so it's back on the list. And Cuba is there - of course today there's absolutely no clear reason why Cuba should be on the list, and that's a whole different subject.

GG: Right. Just a couple last questions. With regard to Iran: at the time that the Reagan administration was selling highly sophisticated weapons to the Iranian regime, was Iran on the list of terrorist states?

RB: Iran was, yeah, yeah, yeah, Iran was on the list, absolutely. That was one big part of the problem with the Iran-Contra scandal, right? One side was that the United States was selling weapons against policy, first, the US had always said and Reagan had always said that the United States did not negotiate with terrorists or terrorist states, and of course that's what was happening. The weapons were sent because the US was negotiating to free the hostages, and also the problem was that it was illegal under US law; the US was not allowed to sell weapons to a state that was on the list of the terrorist states.

GG: Right. And then the money that was generated from the sale of those weapons was then used to fund the Contras, a group in Nicaragua that met every definition on terrorism as well, so there was really dealing with terrorism on both sides of the equation, basically.

RB: Absolutely.

GG: Okay. Yeah - go ahead.

RB: One aspect of that that's interesting is that clearly if you have a fair definition of terrorism you apply it to all sides. When you look at Iran-Contra, terrorism is on the Iran side and on the Contra side. It is not only on the Iran side. What's interesting is when you look at how the media covered the Iran-Contra Affair, and especially in the case of my research, The New York Times, what you find is that suddenly, as the Iran-Contra scandal bursts onto the scene, The New York Times, indeed the editors of The New York Times, they forget that they called the Contras terrorists, and so for them the Iran-Contra scandal is problematic because of terrorism issues only because of the weapons sold to Iran, but not anymore because of the weapons and the training and the money we sent to the Contras.

Of course it is very significant that the editors of The New York Times took that stance, because we were talking impeachment, possible impeachment, of Reagan, and the charge that the US was not only selling weapons to free hostages, but also using the funds to fund terrorists in Nicaragua would have been immensely stronger than just focusing on the hostages.

GG: Right. Now, let me ask you this, and this will be the last question, but, you referred earlier to the fact that there is no agreed-upon definition on terrorism, even to this day, in terms of any international efforts or even on the part of the US government. What are the difficulties that have prevented those definitions from being agreed upon, and what's been the history of that effort to try and get a definition agreed upon at the UN?

RB: As I said, the two basic difficulties are, the specific questions are, if there is a difference between terrorism and fighting for national liberation, on one hand, and then whether the concept of state terrorism is a valid one, whether it exists or not. At the UN, basically, the debates started in '72, following the terrorist incident at the Munich Olympic Games, you've had a very clear-cut distinction into two groups, essentially, to over-simplify : you had the unaligned states and the Soviet Union on the one side, and then you had the Western world on the other side. And basically for the unaligned states and the Soviet Union, the terrorists are Israel, South Africa, Portugal (because of its remaining colonies) and the US in Vietnam.

Those are the terrorists, and in fact the resolutions that were passed in the '70s - in '72, '73, '76, '79 - they have one paragraph, the fourth one, which is the only paragraph that actually condemns terrorism, and what it says is that it condemns "terrorist acts by racist, alien, and colonial regimes," meaning South Africa, Portugal, and Israel, but it doesn't condemn the "terrorism" quote-unquote of "groups of national liberation movements". And on the other side, on the Western side, there is a rejection of the concept of state terrorism and there is rejection of the idea that the goodness of the cause, for example national liberation, justifies any method use justifies terrorism. So that's the position on the Western side.

But it's not a clear position and very importantly, and that's something I found at the UN that really surprised me, the US position is completely unique at the UN, and it's absolutely not the same one as, for example, Israel. Starting in 1981 the US at the UN said that, if a state is involved directly or indirectly in an act, it's not terrorism because it's already covered by international law. And when the US says that, very clearly the US says that state terrorism doesn't exist but more importantly that state sponsored terrorism doesn't exist. And that position, again, the US is the only state to have ever taken that position.

And that position contradicts everything else that the US says on terrorism outside of the UN. It contradicts the existence of a list of states sponsors or terrorism, obviously, because according to the US at the UN, states cannot be involved in terrorism. It contradicts everything that Reagan has ever said about state sponsored terrorism. It contradicts the idea that the Soviet Union is behind terrorism or that Cuba is behind terrorism, because a state cannot be behind terrorism. If it's a state and it's involved in an act of terrorism, it's not terrorism. That's the US position, and the US has been the only country to make that case, and legally it's very sound reasoning, right? The idea is that if a state is involved, whether directly or indirectly, we already have international law instruments to deal with it. It's already a crime. So we don't need the concept of terrorism.

In that sense, then, that reasoning is immensely clearer and I think legally much more sound that the position of the rest of the Western world. The rest of the Western world at the UN is silent, always, on the issue of state terrorism. State terrorism is something that the rest of the world always talks about; for them it's the real kind of terrorism. And yet the Western world is silent on the issue; it doesn't say if it exists or not, but by voting it clearly shows that it rejects the concept itself.

The problem with that is that, at the same time that they reject the concept of state terrorism, they use the concept of state sponsored terrorism. So basically they separate state terrorism and state sponsored terrorism, and there is no argument for that. There is no legal argument for that. If you decide that state terrorism doesn't exist, and you claim it doesn't exist because it's already covered by international law, then the same argument leads you to the obvious conclusion that state sponsored terrorism doesn't exist either. So you have to either reject both, state terrorism and state sponsored terrorism, or accept both. But you cannot separate the two.

And that's why the West has always been completely silent on the issue at the UN, and again the US, and I think to its merit, has been the only state to actually make this very clear legal case about this provision, but what's fascinating is that no-one knows that, meaning that that position that the US has declared at the UN, it doesn't exist. It has never been reported ever, and by ever I do mean ever, in any US media, by any wire service. It's not mentioned in a single article on terrorism that I've read, a single book on terrorism that I've read. That position, again, legally I think it makes sense, but it contradicts everything else that the US has ever said on terrorism. But that position doesn't exist. It's one of those cases where... and the US repeated it: that position was repeated by the US in '81, in '83, in '85... the last time the US makes that case is in 2000, December 2000, a year before 9-11.

GG: I think the most amazing and striking part of all of this is it's incredible that there's a word that plays such a central role in so many of our policy disputes, our government actions and our sense of moral right and wrong, and that's been that way for several decades and yet there's literally no definition of that term. And not only is there no formal adopted definition, there's no de facto definition either because it's been applied so self-servingly and inconsistently, and it's just amazing to really see the history.

Well, this has been really fascinating and I know... Go ahead.

RB: Just a little thing. Since '87 there has been a proposal at the UN to convene an international conference to define terrorism and differentiate terrorism from struggles of national liberation. That's the wording of it, and it's been proposed by Syria. Every other year it's voted on; every other year the rest of the world, meaning the unaligned states, votes, the majority of member states votes in favor of it, and every other year, the Western world, every single Western state votes against it. So there is a clear decision on the Western side, that we don't want a definition, and it's interesting because as I said, even within the Western world, there is no agreement, right?

Where the US takes that one position and is the only one to take that position, one that's very different from the Israeli position for example. The Western world doesn't want to have a conference, and the excuse is that we're not going to get to an agreement. That is the only argument that they use is that it's not going to lead to an agreement, so we shouldn't have a conference. But the rest of the world they want to have a conference, and that tells you a lot about how power is wielded in the world, and of course for those countries that are not powerful, the UN is the one place where they have a voice, where they feel like they have some power, so of course they do want the definition. We don't, because it serves our interests to not have the definition.

GG: Absolutely, it definitely serves our interests in lots of ways to have that term be undefined and malleable, to put that mildly.

Again, thanks so much for taking the time; I find this a topic very fascinating, and I know there's a lot more to your research than what we just talked about, that we really have been just skimming the surface, and I'm sure I will talk to you again and have you back, and we can delve into it a little further.

RB: Alright.

GG: Thanks so much.

RB: Thank you so much for having me, Glenn.

[Transcript courtesy of Thames Valley Transcribe]

But Graham's latest offer should still be taken seriously by Obama's White House, which needs a way to recover from its self-inflicted wounds over Gitmo. Obama goofed twice, missing his deadline for closing the prison and then making the ruinous choice to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a criminal trial in New York.

This took an eight-year-old dispute to a new level of rage. On one side, there's now Liz Cheney's absurd accusation that Justice Department lawyers are al-Qaeda sympathizers. On the other side is the ACLU, which, in demanding civilian trials for 9/11 conspirators, ran an ad morphing Obama's face into George W. Bush's. . . . [T]the ideological purists on both sides need to compromise.

Liz Cheney advocates torture and indefinite detention with no charges, and just launched a repulsive McCarthyite smear campaign equating all detainee lawyers with Al Qaeda.  The ACLU has steadfastly opposed Bush's torture policies as early as anyone, advocates due process for all, and ran a newspaper advertisement pointing out the indisputable fact that military commissions and indefinite detention were the crux of the Bush/Cheney Terrorism template and urging Obama not to embrace it.   But they're on opposite sides of these issues and thus are equivalent:  they're the extremists and purists who need to be rejected by those in the Glorious Middle (embodied by Lindsey Graham).  As long both of them are against what you're doing, it means you're right.  Could a false equivalency be any more trite or vapid than that? 

Far worse is the specific, Graham-endorsed policy which Milbank endorses -- not by making any substantive arguments in its favor, but simply by declaring it to be in between Liz Cheney and the ACLU, at the center of the two "purist" extremes (which, in Washington, means, by definition, that it's superior regardless of content):

Graham has provided Obama a way out of this standoff: Send KSM to a military tribunal in exchange for Congress abandoning legislation that would deny funding to close Gitmo. Next, the administration would work with Congress to create a "national security court," which would govern how other current and future terrorism suspects can be held in preventive detention.

This is the so-called "centrist compromise" -- the one Graham (along with the Brookings Institution) is pushing, Milbank is endorsing, and the administration may be heading towards adopting.  But just think about what it actually is.  According to its advocates, there is and will continue to be a group of people whom we deem Too Dangerous to allow to be free, yet who have committed no crime and/or against whom there is no evidence of actual wrongdoing.  Therefore, we want to imprison them even though we can't prove they did anything wrong.  Thus, we're going to create new, special courts -- and christen them with the Orwellian title "National Security Courts" -- and empower them to approve the President's decision to imprison human beings in cages even though they've committed no crime (not even the extremely broad criminal offense of "providing material support to Terrorist organizations," of which anyone who even gets near an actual Terrorist group is easily convicted). 

This new judicial system will be devoted to imprisoning people "preventively" -- for being Dangerous.  In other words, we're dispensing with the idea that the Government can only imprison those who we can prove have committed crimes, and are instead creating by statute a new category of human beings -- people who have committed no crimes but belong in prison anyway -- along with courts to keep them imprisoned (this idea was unveiled in Barack Obama's "civil liberties" speech last May when he described the so-called "fifth category" of people, and I wrote about everything wrong with that proposal here).  But why stop with accused Terrorists?  Why not dispense with this "due process" annoyance entirely, and imprison all people who we know deep down are guilty of something really bad, or at least will be in the future -- such as those we know murdered someone or raped children but can't find the evidence to prove it (or those we believe likely will in the future)?   What decent person would possibly allow such monsters to go free just because we can't convict them in court?

That's the "centrist compromise" which Graham and Milbank advocate, and which the ACLU -- by virtue of its opposition -- is deemed by Milbank guilty of being the "purist" equivalent of Liz Cheney.  Aside from how radical such a proposal is on its face, it's actually a more extreme version of what George Bush and Dick Cheney did.  As a result of the Supreme Court's Boumediene ruling, detainees imprisoned by Bush/Cheney with no charges are now are entitled to habeas review by federal courts, and the vast majority have won their cases and been ordered released on the ground of insufficient evidence.  Notably, it was the "centrist" Graham, to his eternal disgrace, who led the way in trying to deny those innocent detainees the right of habeas review -- and thus tried to keep innocent people imprisoned indefinitely with no judicial review -- by sponsoring the habeas-denying section of the Military Commissions Act which the Boumediene Court invalidated as unconstitutional. 

Now, Graham (echoing Obama's May speech) wants to statutorily institutionalize this power of indefinite detention -- making it a permanent fixture of our political system and solidifying it as the bipartisan policy of all three branches.  As demonstrated by the truly dangerous, extremist bill just introduced by John McCain and Joe Lieberman (the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010") -- which, among other atrocities, would allow the President to indefinitely imprison even American citizens arrested on U.S. soil -- it's almost certain that having this fear-mongering Congress write an indefinite detention bill would result in a much broader and farther-reaching detention scheme than even what we've had under Bush/Cheney and now Obama.  But hey:  Liz Cheney and the ACLU (with whom I consult) are both against it (Cheney's opposition is due only to the fact that the "compromise" would lead to the re-location of Guantanamo to Illinois) -- and one can find some Democrats and some Republicans who favor it -- and, therefore, it is, by definition, the sensible "centrist" solution which all non-purist-extremists favor.  That's the warped, childish, substance-free definition of "centrism" which Washington media drones like Dana Milbank constantly embrace, and nothing has led to more damaging policies than that.

* * * * *

The Washington Post Op-Ed page deserves some credit for publishing this excellent Op-Ed yesterday by Georgetown Professor Gary Solis, who points out that, under international law, CIA agents who operate lethal drone attacks are every bit as much "unlawful combatants" as the Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters we have imprisoned, rendered, tortured and killed, because "they are fighters without uniforms or insignia, directly participating in hostilities, employing armed force contrary to the laws and customs of war."  He also points out that CIA officials involved in such activities are legitimate military targets of the enemy.  The same is true, of course, for the vast number of private mercenaries the U.S. uses to engage in war-fighting and related activities.  By the warped reasoning that has prevailed in our country, it would be perfectly legal and proper for these unlawful American combatants to be imprisoned indefinitely with no charges and even tortured.  If you advocate and practice lawlessness, it's only a matter of time before you're subjected to your own deranged standards.

 

UPDATE:  Just to clarify the rules of Washington centrism:  if you believe in this and insist on its adherence, then you're a purist-extremist who is the equivalent of Liz Cheney:

"I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, 1789. ME 7:408, Papers 15:269.

You're also a non-centrist extremist who must be rejected if you believe in this and don't want to "compromise" on it:

No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . . . In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense. -- Fifth and Sixth Amendments, U.S. Constitution.

I hope those purity rules are clear, because in Washington they definitely are.

But all those claims were put to the test -- all those bluffs were called -- once the White House decided that it had to use reconciliation to pass a final health care reform bill.  That meant that any changes to the Senate bill (which had passed with 60 votes) -- including the addition of the public option -- would only require 50 votes, which Democrats assured progressives all year long that they had.  Great news for the public option, right?  Wrong.  As soon as it actually became possible to pass it, the 50 votes magically vanished.  Senate Democrats (and the White House) were willing to pretend they supported a public option only as long as it was impossible to pass it.  Once reconciliation gave them the opportunity they claimed all year long they needed -- a "majority rule" system -- they began concocting ways to ensure that it lacked 50 votes.

All of that was bad enough, but now the scam is getting even more extreme, more transparent.  Faced with the dilemma of how they could possibly justify their year-long claimed support for the public option only now to fail to enact it, more and more Democratic Senators were pressured into signing a letter supporting the enactment of the public option through reconciliation; that number is now above 40, and is rapidly approaching 50.  In other words, there is a serious possibility that the Senate might enact a public option if there is a vote on it, because it's very difficult for these Senators to vote "No" after pretending all year long -- on the record -- that they supported it.  In fact, The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim yesterday wrote:  "the votes appear to exist to include a public option. It's only a matter of will."

The one last hope for Senate Democratic leaders was to avoid a vote altogether on the public option, thereby relieving Senators of having to take a position and being exposed.  But that trick would require the cooperation of all Senators -- any one Senator can introduce a public option amendment during the reconciliation and force a vote -- and it now seems that Bernie Sanders, to his great credit, is refusing to go along with the Democrats' sham and will do exactly that:  ignore the wishes of the Senate leadership and force a roll call vote on the public option.

So now what is to be done?  They only need 50 votes, so they can't use the filibuster excuse.  They don't seem able to prevent a vote, as they tried to do, because Sanders will force one.  And it seems there aren't enough Senate Democrats willing to vote against the public option after publicly saying all year long they supported it, which means it might get 50 votes if a roll call vote is held.  So what is the Senate Democratic leadership now doing?  They're whipping against the public option, which they pretended all year along to so vigorously support:

Senate Democratic leaders are concerned about the amount of mischief their own Members could create if or when a health care reconciliation bill comes up for debate. And sources said some supporters of creating a public insurance option are privately worried that they will be asked to vote against the idea during debate on the bill, which could occur before March 26.

Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) acknowledged Wednesday that liberals may be asked to oppose any amendment, including one creating a public option, to ensure a smooth ride for the bill. "We have to tell people, 'You just have to swallow hard' and say that putting an amendment on this is either going to stop it or slow it down, and we just can’t let it happen," Durbin, who supports a public option, told reporters.

If -- as they claimed all year long -- a majority of Congressional Democrats and the White House all support a public option, why would they possibly whip against it, and ensure its rejection, at exactly the moment when it finally became possible to pass it?   If majorities of the House and Senate support it, as does the White House, how could the inclusion of a public option possibly jeopardize passage of the bill?

I've argued since August that the evidence was clear that the White House had privately negotiated away the public option and didn't want it, even as the President claimed publicly (and repeatedly) that he did.  And while I support the concept of "filibuster reform" in theory, it's long seemed clear that it would actually accomplish little, because the 60-vote rule does not actually impede anything.  Rather, it is the excuse Democrats fraudulently invoke, using what I called the Rotating Villain tactic (it's now Durbin's turn), to refuse to pass what they claim they support but are politically afraid to pass, or which they actually oppose (sorry, we'd so love to do this, but gosh darn it, we just can't get 60 votes).  If only 50 votes were required, they'd just find ways to ensure they lacked 50.  Both of those are merely theories insusceptible to conclusive proof, but if I had the power to create the most compelling evidence for those theories that I could dream up, it would be hard to surpass what Democrats are doing now with regard to the public option.  They're actually whipping against the public option.  Could this sham be any more transparent?

 

UPDATE: One related point:  when I was on Morning Joe several weeks ago, I argued this point -- why aren't Democrats including the public option in the reconciliation package given that they have the 50 votes in favor of the public option? -- and, in response, Chuck Todd recited White House spin and DC conventional wisdom (needless to say) by insisting that they do not have the votes to pass the public option.  If that's true -- if they lack the votes to pass the public option through reconciliation -- why is Dick Durbin now whipping against it, telling Senators -- in his own words -- "You just have to swallow hard' and say that putting an amendment on this is either going to stop it or slow it down, and we just can’t let it happen"?

No discussion of the public option is complete without noting how much the private health insurance industry despises it; the last thing they want, of course, is the beginning of real competition and choice.

 

UPDATE II: Here's Chris Hayes, Friday night with Rachel Maddow, explaining who really killed the public option (while pretending, vociferously, to favor it): 

As I've noted before, the column I've written which has produced the highest level of hate mail over the past year (in terms of volume and intensity) was when I compiled the evidence back in August that the White House was working to ensure there'd be no public option in the final bill at exactly the same time Obama was publicly insisting he favored it. The very idea that the President might be saying one thing in public and doing the opposite in private was outrageous and conspiratorial; a politician (or, at least, Barack Obama) would never do such a thing.  Yet all along, that's exactly what the White House was doing, and it continues to do exactly that even though there is, at least, a significant chance that there are sufficient votes to enact the public option.  That's the reason their explanations and excuses make no sense:  because the real reason there's no public option -- they don't want one -- is the one they can't or won't admit.