It's interesting how what was once lambasted as "Constitution-shredding" under George Bush is now nothing more than:  Obama's "civil liberties record hasn’t been exactly what I would have wanted."  Also, the premise implicitly embedded in Matt's argument is the standard Beltway dogma that there would be serious political costs from reversing the Bush/Cheney abuses of the Constitution and civil liberties.  The success of Obama's campaign -- which emphatically and repeatedly vowed to do exactly that  -- ought to have permanently retired that excuse. 

Even more important, Matt seems to be implying that he knew all along that Obama never really intended to fulfill his multiple campaign promises to restore civil liberties and dismantle the Bush/Cheney war on the Constitution.  So all of those righteous speeches and commitments and campaign positions were nothing more than dishonest instruments for manipulating and placating  the people who supported his campaign?  I don't necessarily disagree with that assessment.  I neither believed nor disbelieved what Obama said during the campaign, but instead intended to wait for the evidence before deciding.  And particularly once I watched Obama -- once his party's nomination was secure -- flagrantly violate his pledge to filibuster any bill containing telecom immunity, I had no expectations that he'd feel at all compelled to adhere to his other promises.

But is it really that surprising that many people did believe that Obama actually meant what he said, given that the entire campaign was predicated on his self-proclaimed uniqueness as a candidate and his over-arching intent to rid our political culture of corroding cynicism and to restore hope and faith in the political process?  If Obama ran a campaign which purposely elevated the hopes of so many people -- particularly younger and new voters -- while secretly harboring the knowledge that he did not feel at all bound by what he was promising, isn't that a fairly serious indictment of his character, as well as a dangerous game to play for the Democratic Party?  And during the time he was vigorously supporting Obama's candidacy last year, did Matt ever point out that Obama didn't really mean what he was saying when he spoke about these matters -- a fairly significant point to make when commenting on the election?  If Obama had no intention of "reducing the power of the executive branch," why did he repeatedly proclaim that he would?

But what strikes me as the most significant aspect of Matt's commentary is that this mitigating analysis was rarely, if ever, applied to Bush.  I've been reading many arguments from Obama supporters over the last couple of weeks insisting that Obama can't possibly give civilian trials to all Terrorism suspects because having to free detainees whom they can't convict in court would be politically catastrophic; but doesn't that same reasoning justify Bush's decision to open Guantanamo and hold terrorist suspects without charges?  After all, how could Bush afford to risk acquittals any more than Obama?  

Similarly, if Matt's argument is true that it's natural and inevitable that Presidents will try to maximize their own power -- and that it's Congress' responsibility to check that --  doesn't that mean that Bush and Cheney got a bad rap all these years for their so-called "Constitution-shredding," and that the ultimate responsibility for their abuses lies not with Bush, Cheney David Addington and John Yoo, but rather with Tom Daschle, Bill Frist, Harry Reid, Denny Hastert and Nancy Pelosi?   If it's the responsibility of Congress to check presidential abuses -- since, as Matt argues, no rational person would ever expect the President to voluntarily impose or even accept limits on his own power -- then the real controversy should be about why Nancy Pelosi and company didn't do more to publicize Bush/Cheney extremism and impose limits on what they were doing.  Matt, however, seemed to argue the opposite in the past -- as he when he insisted that the controversy over what Pelosi knew about torture was irrelevant because she was just a "bit player" in the whole affair.  If complaints about Obama's civil liberties abuses are overheated because it's unreasonable to expect him to do anything different, shouldn't the same be said of Bush and Cheney?

I agree with Matt's explicit point that Congress has an important role to play in checking presidential abuses -- a role they've clearly abdicated no matter which party was in control.  He's also right that Presidents don't easily relinquish power.  But it's hardly unreasonable to object when someone runs for high political office based on clear and repeated promises that they have squarely violated.  Whatever else is true, watching Obama embrace extremist policies can still be "disappointing" even if one isn't surprised that he's doing it.  I could understand and accept a lot more easily this blithe acquiescence to Obama's record if it weren't for the fact that progressives and Democrats spent so many years screaming bloody murder over Bush's use of indefinite detention, military commissions, state secrets, renditions, and extreme secrecy -- policies Obama has largely and/or completely adopted as his own.  One can't help but wonder, at least in some cases, how genuine those objections were, as opposed to their just having been effective tools to discredit a Republican president for partisan and political gain.

Meyer said attitudes towards Iraq were influenced to an extent not appreciated by him at the time by the anthrax scare in the US soon after 9/11. US senators and others were sent anthrax spores in the post, a crime that led to the death of five people, prompting policymakers to claim links to Saddam Hussein. . . .

On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in "no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation" . . . It seemed that Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, argued for retaliation to include Iraq, Meyer said. . . .

But the anthrax scare had "steamed up" policy makers in Bush's administration and helped swing attitudes against Saddam, who the administration believed had been the last person to use anthrax.

I've written many times before about how the anthrax attack played at least as large of a role as the 9/11 attack itself, if not larger, in creating the general climate of fear that prevailed for years in the U.S. and specifically how the anthrax episode was exploited by leading media and political figures to gin up intense hostility towards Iraq (a few others have argued the same).  That's why it's so striking how we've collectively flushed this terrorist attack down the memory hole as though it doesn't exist.  When Dana Perino boasted this week on Fox News that "we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term," most of the resulting derision focused on the 9/11 attack while ignoring -- as always -- the anthrax attack.

What makes this particularly significant is that the anthrax attack is unresolved and uninvestigated.  The FBI claimed last year that it had identified the sole perpetrator, Bruce Ivins, but because Ivins is dead, they never had the opportunity -- or the obligation -- to prove their accusations in any meaningful tribunal.  The case against Ivins is so riddled with logical and evidentiary holes that it has generated extreme doubts not merely from typical government skeptics but from the most mainstream, establishment-revering, and ideologically disparate sources.  Just consider some of the outlets and individuals who have stated unequivocally that the FBI's case against Ivinis is unpersausive and requires a meaningful investigation:  The Washington Post Editorial Page; The New York Times Editorial Page; The Wall St. Journal Editorial Page; the science journal Nature; Senators Pat Leahy, Arlen Specter and Charles Grassley; physicist and Congressman Rush Holt, whose New Jersey district was where the anthrax letters were sent; Dr. Alan Pearson, Director of the Biological and Chemical Weapons Control Program at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation; and a vast array of scientific and legal experts in the field.

Here we have one of the most consequential political events of the last decade at least -- a lethal biological terrorist attack aimed at key U.S. Senators and media figures, which even the FBI claims originated from a U.S. military lab.  The then-British Ambassador to the U.S. is now testifying what has long been clear:  that this episode played a huge role in enabling the attack on Iraq.  Even our leading mainstream, establishment-serving media outlets -- and countless bio-weapons experts -- believe that we do not have real answers about who perpetrated this attack and how.  And there is little apparent interest in investigating in order to find out.  Evidently, this is just another one of those things that we'll relegate to "the irrelevant past," and therefore deem it unworthy of attention from our future-gazing, always-distracted minds.

 

UPDATE:  Marcy Wheeler notes that the FBI has become increasingly defiant towards requests that its claims be reviewed by an independent panel; of course, that couldn't happen unless the White House and Congress permitted it to.

Host Melanie Morgan: Given the nature and danger of bringing these terrorists to American soil, where do you think is the most safe place to be when they get here and this trial begins? Where would you put your family?

John Bolton: Well, not New York City, I'm afraid to say. This is part of the callousness and the really, lack of professionalism and judgment to put them on trial anywhere in the United States in civilian courts. 

The cowardice on display here is difficult to overstate -- and to behold without being ill.  I lived in Manhattan on 9/11 and for many years thereafter.  For weeks -- even months and years after that attack -- it was widely assumed that New York would be a likely target for another attack, but I never heard a single New Yorker -- not one -- talk about fleeing the city or hiding their family in some faraway place.  During the 2004 election, New Yorkers voted for the candidate who wanted to treat Terrorism like a law enforcement problem over the pseudo-tough-guy "war president" by a margin of 80-20.  The fears engulfing Bolton and which he's attempting to infect the country with are found almost exclusively among this species of war-mongers obsessed with flamboyant -- and very public -- rituals where they proclaim their own "strength" and "courage."

John Bolton and his comrades love to run around accusing anyone who doesn't want to wage more wars of being an "appeaser" and "surrendering" to Terrorists, but Bolton's cry here is the ultimate, definitive surrender:  I'm too scared of the Terrorists to go about my normal life.  I'm too petrified even to have my family in the same city as a terrorist trial.  We can't adhere to our normal political system because the Terrorists will kill us all.   Given Bolton's comments, this might be the most ironic and desperate book title in the history of publishing:

All over the world, countries have put terrorists on trial in their largest and most important cities -- London, Madrid, Mumbai, Denpasar (the capital of Bali).  That's because their countries weren't flooded by meek, frightened little men like John Bolton who want to send their fellow citizens to bomb and invade as many countries as they can find in order to conceal and compensate for the suffocating cowardice revealed by both his life and these comments.  It's a natural human instinct to try to prove to the world that one possesses exactly those characteristics which one most lacks -- which is why right-wing warriors of the type represented by John Bolton are so desperate to prove their Churchillian courage and resolve, always from the safest and most risk-free distances.

* * * * *

Quite related to all of this, Brad at Sadly, No examines what he calls American elites' "nationalist narcissism. They believe not only that America has the right and the duty to be the 'dominant' country in the world, but that every other country in the world should be talking forever about how wonderful we are."  It's not hard to understand the source of their need to constantly have affirmed what Newsweek's Howard Fineman this week calls "our special destiny" as he frets that Obama is failing to salvage it by not keeping the U.S. at the Center of the World.  It's the same need that makes John Bolton and his comrades endlessly try to prove to the world how tough and brave they are even as they hide from and cower before Terrorists.  There are many reasons why America is a country perpetually at war, but this warped and broken psychological state -- weak and frightened individuals cheering on faraway wars as a means of feeling tough and strong, all justified by our own Supreme Specialness -- is one of the leading causes.

 

UPDATE:  As he does on a virtually daily basis, Glenn Beck today perfectly illustrates this syndrome (h/t Atrios):

 

UPDATE II:  An email I received from Jesse Levine, counsel in New York City's Law Department:

All of your recent posts have been on the mark, albeit depressing. Today's Bolton post resonates most with me, because on 9/12 I started working in the Emergency Command Center as I did for the next several weeks. Apart from working on the supply logistics (I was in a different agency then), I attended incident command meetings, which included new rumors of threats and assessments. When the Law Department formed the World Trade Center Unit, I became Assistant Chief and besides my litigation responsibilities, I prepared witnesses for the 911 Commission and NIST investigations. I also supervised the evidence gathering team that was documenting the City's response to the disaster. Through all of that I marveled at the bravery of the unsung heros of the response and aftermath, and not just the uniformed forces. I also saw the bravery of thousands who flocked to the City from all over the country to help.  For a creep like Bolton to try to project his fears on the rest of us is disgusting.

That about sums it up.

Carter said he was resigning due to "personal issues," and -- like Greg Craig before him -- remained loyal to Obama by refraining, at least thus far, from publicly criticizing any administration policies.  I have no idea what actually motivated Carter's abrupt resignation, but here's what I do know:  so many of the detention and other "War on Terror" policies Obama has explicitly adopted were the very same ones which Carter (as well as Obama) repeatedly railed against during the Bush years, in Carter's case primarily in blogs he maintained both at The Washington Post and at Slate.  Whatever else is true, the policies Obama has adopted in the last six months in the very areas of Carter's responsibilities were ones Carter vehemently condemned when implemented by Bush.

Last week, the Obama DOJ announced that it would deny trials to several Guantanamo detainees and instead send them to military commissions.  In May, 2008, Carter condemned military commissions in general as "fundamentally and fatally flawed" and argued that "the rule of law will prevail only if they are perpetually blocked."  He cited a trial in a "civilian court" (his emphasis) of accused terrorists that had just been held by France -- "using a combination of open and sealed (i.e., classified) evidence to prove the defendants' guilt in a six-day trial" -- and argued the U.S. should copy that model:  exactly the "civilian court" model the Obama administration has decisively rejected for many, perhaps most, detainees.  

More notably, in a separate post from April, Carter harshly condemned the Bush administration's decision to use a military commission to try Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, accused of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania.  Carter suggested that trying detainees for "war crimes" for pre-2001 acts violates the Constitution's ban on ex post facto punishments (since the U.S. was not at war at that time), and independently, he objected to "the deliberate decision to take this case away from federal prosecutors," arguing that "our default choice for the prosecution of suspected terrorists should be federal court" because "the substantive and procedural due process granted by federal courts has strategic value -- it confers legitimacy on the outcome."  While the Obama administration commendably sent Ghailani to New York to be tried in a civilian court, it just announced two weeks ago that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, whose case originated as a criminal investigation with the FBI, would now be turned over to a military commission for prosecution in connection with the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole -- raising all of the serious objections Carter voiced to the Ghailani case.

Carter had also voiced serious concerns over the Bush DOJ's use of the "state secrets" privilege as a means of evading vital constitutional and other legal questions -- only to watch the Obama DOJ do the same thing.  He insisted upon a distinction between conventional wars of the past and the "War on Terror" when claiming presidential power -- pointing out that conventional wars have limits and come to an end and the "War on Terror" doesn't -- only to watch the Obama administration discard that distinction and instead adopt exactly the Bush/Cheney "war" theory as a means to detain people with no charges.  During the campaign, he expressed excitement over what appeared to be Obama's stated willingness to prosecute Bush officials for war crimes, only to watch Obama, once elected, quickly insist that we should Look Forward, not Backward.   Relatedly, Carter advocated real consequences for DOJ torture-approving lawyers such as John Yoo (specifically, his firing from Berkeley), only to watch the Obama administration take multiple steps to protects such officials from any legal consequences.  He applauded the Bush Pentagon's cancellation of a key appointment of Gen. Jay Hood to Pakistan on the ground that Hood had presided over Guantanamo and was thus "tainted by torture," only to watch Obama appoint the highly tainted Gen. McChyrstal as his commander in Afghanistan.

As I said, I have no idea whether any of this played a role in Carter's resignation, and it's certainly possible that loyalty to Obama would prevent him from voicing these complaints.  He's a thoughtful analyst who is not easily pigeon-holed and I don't want to attribute ideas to him he hasn't expressed [for instance, Carter supported the work I did on the Pentagon's military analyst program but also defended Obama's vote for telecom immunity, though on the ground that the Government should be held accountable for illegal spying (another position the Obama administration has undermined)].  But what is abundantly clear is that many of the Bush/Cheney policies which Carter found most offensive are ones which the new administration has explicitly adopted as its own.  Equally clear is that, following Greg Craig, this is now the second high-profile resignation of a relatively devoted civil libertarian in a short period of time.  Combine that with the still-missing-and-unconfirmed Dawn Johnsen, and all of this leaves those who are indifferent or hostile to civil liberties values -- people like John Brennan and Rahm Emanuel -- with even fewer counter-weights than before.

 

UPDATE:  James Joyner adds some thoughts about Carter's resignation, which I generally share (again, excluding speculation over why he resigned), but one his commenters claims I was wrong in what I wrote because Carter approved of both civilian trials and military courts-martial as a means of trying terrorists, and only disapproved of "special military tribunals created after 9/11."  The commenter correctly describes Carter's position, but I don't see how that makes what I wrote wrong.  Aside from the fact that Carter explicitly advocated that we follow France's example of trying terrorist suspects in "civilian courts," and separately wrote that "our default choice for the prosecution of suspected terrorists should be federal court" (links above), the military commissions used by Bush and now Obama are not military courts-martial and don't use the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  Instead, they are the very "special military tribunals created after 9/11" which the commenter indicates (correctly) Carter opposes.

On a different note, Wired's Noah Shachtman spoke to Carter today and came away convinced that his resignation was not due to policy differences with the administration, for what that's worth.  As I made clear from the start, far more interesting than Carter's real reasons for resigning is to examine the huge gap between the views of a very respected military and legal analyst who volunteered to help get Obama elected and the positions Obama has taken since becoming President.

The Barack Obama of that Philadelphia speech would not have let his attorney general, Eric Holder, announce the new policy for trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Sept. 11 defendants in criminal court, as if this were a mere departmental issue and not one of momentous policy. And the Barack Obama of the speech would have enunciated a principle of law and not an ad hoc system in which some alleged terrorists are tried in civilian courts and some before military tribunals. What is the principle in that: What works, works?  Try putting that one on the Liberty Bell.

I point to this because it highlights an extreme logical fallacy coming from some Obama supporters ever since Holder announced the Guantanamo policy -- a fallacy that is the inevitable by-product of the administration's incoherent positions.  In order to defend Obama, it's necessary simultaneously to embrace these self-negating premises:

(1) The Rule of Law and our core political values require that terrorist suspects like Khalid Shiekh Mohammed be given trials (as Morrill put it:  "the Attorney General announced that the United States follows the rule of law");

(2) Obama is explicitly denying trials to many -- probably most -- of the Guantanamo detainees (as well as the "rendered" ones at Bagram), instead putting them before military commissions or, worse, indefinite detention with no charges;

(3) Obama should be praised as a courageous and principled leader because he's following the Rule of Law, which -- see #1 -- requires trials for terrorism suspects.

Isn't the core inconsistency of these premises obvious?  Even Richard Cohen can see it.  The administration's actual position -- we'll give trials to a handful of people we know we can convict and will continue to imprison them even if they're acquitted, while affirmatively denying trials to the rest -- is about as far from a principled or even cogent position as it gets.  Worse, it's impossible to defend Holder's decision to give a trial to Mohammed by appealing to "the rule of law" given that many of the detainees are being denied trials.  If (as Obama defenders insist) the "rule of law" requires trials, doesn't that mean, by definition, that Obama and Holder -- by using military commissions and indefinite detention -- are trampling on "the rule of law," not upholding it? 

To understand what has been happening with Obama's actions on the civil liberties front in general -- and how he came to embrace two core Bush/Cheney policies in particular (indefinite detention and military commissions) -- it's very worthwhile to read this new Time article by Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf on how and why White House Counsel Greg Craig was pushed out of his position.  In essence, Craig was the voice inside the administration insisting that Obama adhere to his civil liberties campaign pledges and dismantle the Bush/Cheney apparatus that progressives (and Obama) long claimed to find so objectionable.  But once Obama decided a few months into his presidency that he would not do so, Craig became disfavored and then, finally, pushed out:

Interviews with two dozen current and former officials show that Obama's public decision to reverse himself and fight the release of the [torture] photographs signaled a behind-the-scenes turning point in his young presidency. Beginning in the first two weeks of May, Obama took harder lines on government secrecy, on the fate of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and on the prosecution of terrorists worldwide. The President was moving away from some promises he had made during the campaign and toward more moderate positions, some favored by George W. Bush.  At the same time, he quietly shifted responsibility for the legal framework for counterterrorism from Craig to political advisers overseen by Emanuel, who was more inclined to strike a balance between left and right.

Note how abandoning one's campaign promises and adopting Bush/Cheney detention and secrecy policies is now deemed "moderate" -- or, as the Time photo caption calls it, "pragmatic."  The White House began panicking as they were attacked by Dick Cheney and the Right for being "soft on terror," and the results were depressingly predictable:

Obama needed to regain control quickly, and he started by jettisoning liberal positions he had been prepared to accept -- and had even okayed -- just weeks earlier.  First to go was the release of the pictures of detainee abuse. Days later, Obama sided against Craig again, ending the suspension of Bush's extrajudicial military commissions.  The following week, Obama pre-empted an ongoing debate among his national-security team and embraced one of the most controversial of Bush's positions: the holding of detainees without charges or trial, something he had promised during the campaign to reject. . . . The unseen struggle took place in the spring, but the results are emerging now. On Nov. 13, Attorney General Eric Holder unveiled plans to try Guantánamo Bay detainees in federal courts, as preferred by liberals, but he also announced he would try other suspected terrorists using extrajudicial proceedings out of Bush's playbook.  The Administration is preparing to unveil its blueprint for closing the prison, but Obama will do so using some of the same Bush-era legal tools he once deplored.

None of this will be news to anyone following Obama's relentless and continuous embrace all year long of many of the "counter-terrorism" policies of the Bush administration -- ones which both he and progressives once claimed to find so intolerable.  But particularly striking is this on-the-record justification offered by a White House spokesman:

The White House says Obama hasn't changed, just adjusted. "He and the Administration have adapted as we have learned more and the issues have evolved, but there has not been an ideological shift," says spokesman Ben LaBolt.

By embracing and defending numerous Bush/Cheney policies he once deplored, "Obama hasn't changed, just adjusted."  He's learned secret things that he can't tell you about but which -- you should accept -- do justify his "adaptations."  Whenever Bush followers would run out of arguments to defend their leader's actions, that's the same rationale they'd resort to:   he knows secret things that you don't know and therefore we should trust him.   So Obama has "learned" things that caused him to abandon his vehement condemnations of indefinite detention, state secrets, military commissions and denial of habeas corpus as unjust and un-American travesties and come to embrace them as important and necessary policies?   Wow:  that must have been quite an education.  Don't he and his supporters owe George Bush and Dick Cheney a sincere apology for criticizing them all those years for these policies when, as it turns out, they were necessary and just all along?  And see this insightful argument that makes a related point.

So one of the very few pro-civil-liberties insiders with any power is now gone, replaced by a supremely partisan Washington insider with little apparent interest in those values.   One of Obama's most impressive and exciting appointments -- Dawn Johnsen to head the OLC -- has still not been confirmed despite a 60-seat Democratic Senate.  Instead, the former CIA official who defended so many of the Bush-era terrorism policies, John Brennan, remains as Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser.  And Rahm Emanuel -- he of the "build-power-by-increasing-Blue-Dogs" mentality and a driving force behind last year's Congressional enactment of telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping -- continues to consolidate power even in these supposedly non-political areas.  Given all of that -- and with the 2010 midterms approaching -- does anyone think these trends will improve rather than worsen?

Whether Obama has adopted every last radical Bush/Cheney terrorism policy -- he hasn't -- is not the point.  And the question of whether "Obama is as bad as Bush" -- he isn't -- is no more relevant than the excuse that Bush's torture program shouldn't be criticized because at least it never reached the level of Saddam's rape rooms and limb removals.  As even Time now recognizes, many of the policies once widely declared by Democrats to be a grave threat to the Constitution are now explicitly adopted by the Obama administration.  And it's flatly inconsistent to invoke "the rule of law" to defend Obama's decision to give trials to a few Guantanamo detainees without pointing out that he's violating that very same precept by denying trials to so many.

 

UPDATE:  The Nation's Jeremy Scahill reveals that the U.S. military is using Blackwater -- Blackwater -- as part of "a secret program in [Pakistan in] which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives."  McClatchy reports that Obama has made a decision to send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan which, if true, means, as Juan Cole says, that "Gen. Stanley McChrystal has won the struggle for policy decisively."  

So, to recap:  we have indefinite detention, military commissions, Blackwater assassination squads, escalation in Afghanistan, extreme secrecy to shield executive lawbreaking from judicial review, renditions, and denials of habeas corpus.  These are not policies Obama has failed yet to uproot; they are policies he has explicitly advocated and affirmatively embraced as his own.

And if you haven't seen or read Bill Moyers' amazing -- and obviously relevant -- examination this week of how and why President Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam, I can't recommend highly enough that you do so.

 

UPDATE II: Nick Baumann of Mother Jones examines other aspects of the Time article that he calls "troubling," and makes some important points about what all of this reflects about Obama and his civil liberties commitments.

 

UPDATE III:  This new 7-minute video from Brave New Films and Robert Greenwald (no relation) synthesizes many of these issues, as it features interviews with Afghan citizens who were imprisoned with no charges and abused by the U.S. at Bagram for years.  I realize it's far more important to know what Les Gelb and the Brookings Institution think about such things, but every now and then it's worth hearing from Afghans about their own country, too.  In this case, their commentary about the impact of our detention policies and occupation is well worth hearing: