War is over.

Those with an interest in perpetuating continued conflict, and in inflating the power of our enemies, are going to be frustrated by President Obama's speech at the National Defense University today. And those who want to dismantle the war machine even faster are going to complain also. The rest of us are probably going to be pleased with this new direction.

Here's the quote that justifies the title above:

"The AUMF is now nearly 12 years old.  The Afghan war is coming to an end.  Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self.  Groups like AQAP must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States.  Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. 

So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate.  And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further.  Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue.  But this war, like all wars, must end.  That’s what history advises.  That’s what our democracy demands."

It seems to me that some of the coverage of this speech so far, which has focused on changes in drone policy and similar shifts in direction, is missing the big picture. The big picture is that we are moving away from an open-ended, ill-defined "war on terror" in which our enemies are everywhere, and almost anything is justifiable in its name, to a much more focused effort directed at clearly defined threats.

The problem with the "global war on terror," as defined by the Bush administration (or perhaps the beauty of the war on terror in some people's eyes) was that it fed the permanent war economy and the national security state. In other words, it served the same purpose as the Cold War. It's not that the threats behind either the Cold War or the War on Terror were imaginary. It is more that the scope of these wars was so vague that they caused us to become bogged down in places like Vietnam and Iraq, where our mission was unclear, and that these lengthy, poorly-defined conflicts were used to justify encroachments on the freedom of American citizens that were probably not worth the benefit. Unless we want to live in a permanent state of hostility and fear, that kind of war must come to an end.

 (full text here)

The case for impeachment, part 4

I heard journalist James Fallows interviewed on the radio yesterday about the patterns that seem to have emerged in every modern second term presidency, It seems we have been down this road so many times before that the public and the media are almost following a script. As Fallows describes it,

"I think what has evolved in the generation plus since the Watergate hearings in the mid-1970s is sort of an industry of scandal investigation. The press has its ways of looking for us to advance a story day-by-day."

In other words, these things seem to take on a life of their own. The investigative machinery drags on, because the opposition party has an interest in hobbling the president. And the media keeps up the drumbeat of coverage, because the public is interested in stories about scandal.

But what made my ears perk up in Fallows's description of this phenomenon, was his use of the term "genuine scandal" in reference to prior investigations such as the Watergate or the Lewinsky matters. If those were genuine scandals, it follows that the present scandals are fake scandals. What that means is that even if there might still be legitimate matters to be investigated in the Benghazi affair, the IRS/Tea Party affair, and the AP affair, there is no indication that any of these matters touch the White House. We are rolling out the investigative machinery, and its associated press coverage, which in the past has always been associated with tearing down a presidency, even though objective observers have no reason to think the president is going to be tainted by these accusations.

The question is, can the machinery of fake scandal be driven far enough so that it gives off the whiff of a real scandal? And will that ultimately hurt the president? The history of the Clinton impeachment trial suggests that a fairly minor scandal can be taken pretty far, but it also shows that if no serious accusations of wrongdoing can be proven against the president, the president will ultimately emerge stronger from the crisis than his accusers. Clinton might have been distracted by the impeachment trial, but it was Newt Gingrich who ended up being forced to resign from office. In the case of the fake Obama scandals, signs are already emerging that public interest in these affairs is much lower than in previous versions, and the president's popularity is still ticking up, not down, despite the latest media frenzy.

All signs therefore show that the machinery of fake scandal is only going to hurt the Republicans in Congress, not President Obama. And yet, partly for the reasons Fallows suggested, and partly because the angry GOP base demands it, that machine will grind forward.

The case for impeachment, part 3

If we leave out Eisenhower, every single president in my lifetime who was elected to a second term has gotten into serious trouble in their second term. Nixon was impeached for obstruction of justice and abuse of power and resigned as soon as it became apparent that he did not have the votes in the Senate even from his own party to escape conviction. Reagan faced a significant scandal with Iran-Contra but was probably saved from any serious calls for impeachment by his approaching Alzheimer's. Clinton was impeached over a real but petty scandal, and tried unsuccessfully in the Senate. And George W. Bush ran into major problems with Hurricane Katrina and the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, crises that made him extremely unpopular but were mostly not judged to be impeachable offenses.

With a pattern like that, going back more than 40 years, it's no wonder that the political opposition to President Obama evidently thinks it must be about time for the current administration to stumble and fall. Only one problem. They are lacking a critical element, something the chairman of the Republican Party had to remind his constituents was missing. Reince Preibus  said yesterday that: "You don't call for impeachment until you have evidence." What a concept. Evidence.


The chairman of the Republican Party says they don't have any evidence yet. In other words, if you ask the chairman of the Republican Party about the case for impeaching the president, his answer is "we don't have a case."

Does this mean President Obama will be the first president in history that the opposition tries to hound out of office without any evidence that he has done anything wrong? Or will cooler heads in the Republican Party finally prevail and end all this loose talk?

The case for impeachment, part 2

I want to call this whole IRS scandal a tempest in a teapot. After all, it seems confined to a few agents in one regional IRS office. And their investigations of the bona fides of some 501(c)(4) organizations serve an entirely legitimate purpose, which is to find out whether those organizations are legally entitled to claim tax exempt status. The acting IRS commissioner who resigned over this incident says that these were simply “foolish mistakes . . . made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection.” In other words, they took some shortcuts because they thought they would be more likely to find abuse among Tea Party-affiliated groups than other types of organizations. At worst, these IRS employees deliberately acted in a politically biased way, but there is nothing so unusual about that. The IRS scandal doesn't seem to compare to the outright politicization of the Justice Department that occurred under President Bush, or the deliberate targeting of political enemies by President Nixon--scandals that reached all the way up to the White House. This problem, by contrast, seems unlikely to involve any officials outside of the IRS itself.

This matter will of course be investigated to the hilt, until all but the most paranoid of the radical right are satisfied that the Obama administration was not misusing government agencies for political purposes. But that is not why we have to take this scandal seriously. The reason that have to take this IRS scandal seriously is because it represents another battle in the ongoing war between the powerful interests seeking to hide the corrupting influence of money in politics, and the rest of us. The way this scandal gets resolved will help determine who wins that battle. In that battle, Tea Party sympathizers are to some extent being used by business interests who want to weaken regulation and lower the costs to business of employee wages and benefits. The right wing fringe and these business interests share a fear of government: in the first case a fear that government will impose liberal values on them, take away their guns, and shower the undeserving poor with benefits; in the second case a fear that government might make industry pay for what economists call the negative externalities of their operations.

It is well documented that business interests, most notoriously the Koch brothers, have financed and fomented the popular uprisings of Tea Party groups, most visibly as a means of opposing health insurance reform. These interests would prefer to conceal their involvement. And that is why it is important to them that organizations that are at least partially performing a political function not be required to disclose their donors. Here's where the tax code comes in. As explained in more detail in places that the people who are stirring up this mini-tempest are probably not reading (e.g., the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the New Yorker), in articles with variations on the title the "real IRS scandal," the tax code allows groups that are primarily social welfare organizations, with religious, educational or cultural purposes, to claim tax exempt status, which also allows them to keep their donors secret. Due to lax enforcement, many organizations are able to claim the benefits of 501(c)(4) status even though they are primarily engaged in political activities.

Politicians of all stripes are not doing enough to combat the corrupting influence of money in politics. Their campaigns depend on that money. And these covert political organizations serve causes that politicians favor.  Combine that with the concerted effort on the part Congressional Republicans to reduce the IRS budget and you have a recipe for undue political influence and abuse of the tax laws.

As this investigation plays out, it will be important to keep the focus on the abuse of the tax laws by organizations that are not entitled to tax-exempt treatment. That way, the efforts by the right to use this scandal to attack President Obama and weaken the IRS could even backfire. Yes, we should demand even-handed treatment of all political action groups, left, right and center. No organizations should be targeted because of their political bent. But ALL political organizations that are abusing the privileges of the tax code should be targeted. We should demand stricter enforcement of the requirements of section 501(c)(4) to expose the influence of every moneyed interest on our political system. If this scandal results in such exposure, that would not only be a delicious irony, but would actually serve a useful and important purpose.

The case for impeachment, part 1

Representative Darrell Issa is now leading the charge in Congressional hearings into the Benghazi affair, which one Republican senator recently called the most egregious cover-up in American history. What exactly is being covered up, however, we still do not know.

AP photo

What Congressman Issa has now made clear is exactly the scope of the president's responsibility, faulting him for describing the Benghazi attacks as an "act of terror," as opposed to a "terrorist attack." Seriously, this is the big point Issa was making at the hearing. Ridicule fails me at the moment, so I'll try to give this undeserving congressman the benefit of the doubt and take the distinction he is making seriously.

The difference Issa was drawing between an "act of terror" and a "terrorist attack" reminded me of the efforts of Secretary of State Warren Christopher to minimize the killings in Rwanda in the 1990's by calling them "acts of genocide" instead of just plain genocide. This may have been done to minimize the level of criminality involved. Calling those killings genocide arguably would have triggered at least a moral, and perhaps a legal obligation, for our country to do something to stop the killings, and there was some hesitation about getting involved more deeply in the Rwandan situation. On the other hand, a State Department spokesman back then eventually admitted that there was no difference between "acts" of genocide, and actual genocide. So it turned out to be a distinction without a difference. But still, in hindsight, maybe a reprehensible effort to downplay the significance of horrendous events taking place in Rwanda. And perhaps done for a questionable reason, to avoid using a label that might have obligated the U.S. to contemplate stronger action.

Is that the example Congressman Issa was thinking of? Was President Obama trying to downplay the level of criminality of those who struck our consulate, by calling the attack an act of terror instead of a terrorist attack? Is there a difference? In this case, unlike the case of using the word "genocide," there doesn't seem to be a real moral or legal distinction between using the term "act of terror," as opposed to "terrorist attack." In either case, there is no clear trigger for action. The report linked above notes that President Bush called the September 11 attacks an "act of terror," and he doesn't seem to have been faulted for that language, nor did that usage limit our ability to retaliate. And while President Reagan used strong language in response to the 1983 bombing of a marine barracks in Lebanon, which killed more than 200 soldiers and sailors, calling it a "despicable act," he took no serious action in retaliation, instead turning tail and pulling out of Lebanon.  Anyway, even if President Obama's terminology was done in an effort to delay a stronger response, and there is no evidence that is the case, is that an impeachable offense? Evidently some of the president's most ardent political enemies think so.

From the evidence we have seen so far, it seems you could almost make the opposite accusation. By calling the Libya attack an "act of terror," President Obama might have been jumping to conclusions a bit, based on what was known at the time. For in the immediate aftermath of the attack, it wasn't entirely clear, according to our own intelligence agencies, whether we were dealing with an assassination, or a riot, or a terrorist attack, or something else. Using any kind of label might even be thought uncharacteristically hasty for a president who is generally so cautious about jumping to conclusions.

I realize that Congressional zealots are interested in setting the bar for this president impossibly high. Whatever he says must be wrong. But this pack of wolves might give a thought to the standards they are setting for future presidents. In the midst of any future crisis, must the president get every nuance perfectly correct, to the satisfaction of every possible critic from every direction, or risk these kinds of ridiculous threats of criminal prosecution?

Benghazi: no there there

Austin

Ohio State

Mexico

Miranda

Here's another example showing that no matter what you do as president, you are always wrong. Namely, the flap over the questioning of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Some liberals are criticizing the administration for delaying 16 hours before advising Tsarnaev of his right to remain silent, allowing the FBI to question him extensively. (Legally speaking, the Justice Department was relying on the public safety exception to the Miranda rule in delaying in advising the suspect of his rights.)  Conservatives are angry that Tsarnaev was advised of his rights at all, and are calling for the administration to strip this suspect of any constitutional rights he has and try him as an enemy combatant in a military tribunal (even though civilian courts seem to have as good or better a record of dispensing justice to terrorism suspects than military courts).

Let's remember that the rule in Miranda is mainly a rule of evidence. What the Supreme Court held in Miranda was that if the police fail to advise a suspect entitled to such treatment of his right to remain silent and his right to counsel, prosecutors may not introduce any subsequent statements by that suspect into evidence. It's a way of enforcing the Fifth Amendment guarantee against self-incrimination. In practice, the rule serves as a powerful reminder of constitutional rights that every criminal suspect already has, whether he is advised of those rights or not.  But it's not a magic wand that makes suspects stop talking, even thought that appears to have happened in this particular case. In many cases, criminal suspects refuse to talk to the police even before they have been advised of their rights. In many other cases, criminal suspects continue making self-incriminating statements even after they have been told that they have the right to remain silent. In this case, it doesn't seem particularly important to obtaining the conviction of this individual that the prosecutor have the ability to introduce his own statements. There is an abundance of physical evidence that will likely suffice to convict him.

So what is the importance of the timing of reading Tsarvaev his rights? It's an opportunity to score political points, of course. Those who want to fault the Obama administration for continued harsh treatment of detainees have been quick to criticize the 16 hour delay. And those who are trying to make the case that the Obama administration is in league with the terrorists will be satisfied with nothing less than stripping this citizen of all of his constitutional rights, and handing him to a lynch mob, or a torture chamber, or at least to a military tribunal.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were a few more people willing to cut the FBI and Justice Department some slack? What about recognizing the hard and efficient work of these trained investigators who cornered these suspects in seemingly record time? Dare I suggest that they struck the balance just right, between recognizing the constitutional rights of a criminal suspect, and protecting the public from potential danger?

Freedom

Richie Havens (January 21, 1941 – April 22, 2013)

Senate fail

Peace

This is eight year old Martin Richard, who has achieved immortality as an international symbol of peace. Martin was killed on Monday for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His mother also suffered a brain injury and his sister lost her leg, when a bomb exploded near to where the family was standing while they were watching the finish of the Boston Marathon.

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