Roundup: Media's Take <http://hnn.us/roundup/12.html>
Mehdi Hasan: Barack W Bush ... Change we can't believe in
Source: /New Statesman (UK)/
<http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2009/10/mehdi-hasan-bush-administration-oba>
(10-8-09)
[Mehdi Hasan is senior editor (politics) of the New Statesman.]
On a cold February morning, less than three weeks after Barack Obama's
inauguration as the 44th president of the United States, a lawyer from
the department of justice stood up in a San Francisco courtroom to
defend the government from accusations of torture. Five detainees,
including the British resident Binyam Mohamed, had filed a suit against
Jeppesen Dataplan Inc, a subsidiary of Boeing, for its alleged role in
"extraordinary rendition", in which terrorism suspects are sent to third
countries for detention, interrogation and - the plaintiffs claim - torture.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly criticised the
Bush administration's treatment of detainees, its rendition policy and
the use of the "state secrets" privilege to prevent classified
information from being discussed in court. Writing in Foreign Affairs
magazine in 2007, he had argued that building a "better, freer world . .
. means ending the practices of shipping away prisoners in the dead of
night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands
without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to
jail people beyond the reach of the law".
But on that February morning, the government lawyer Douglas N Letter
made the same "state secrets" argument for dismissing the case as the
Bush administration had used in previous months. The legal position he
was advancing on behalf of the government, Letter said, had been
"thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new
administration", and this was the "authorised" position.
As the prominent liberal blogger and lawyer Glenn Greenwald pointed out
at the time, this was "the first real test of the authenticity of
Obama's commitment to reverse the abuses of executive power over the
last eight years". But Obama failed the test - and he did so not only in
this instance, but in a number of similar court cases. Together, these
cases suggest that his administration has no immediate or concrete plans
to realise the hopes and dreams of liberals at home and abroad by
rolling back the imperial overreach of the Bush era. On the contrary, in
the field of counter-terrorism and on the issue of executive power as a
whole, Obama has distressingly begun to resemble George W Bush.
Another San Francisco court case in February this year involved the
al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a charity that the Bush administration
accused in 2004 of supporting terrorism. The plaintiffs claimed that
federal authorities had illegally listened in on their lawyers' phone
calls. In 2007, Obama described Bush's warrantless wiretapping programme
as "unlawful and unconstitutional", but two years later the Obama
justice department again followed in the footsteps of Bush and tried to
have the case dismissed on grounds of national security and protecting
"state secrets".
"Obama has stepped into the shoes of President Bush," Jon Eisenberg, a
lawyer for the plaintiffs, told me. "He continues to assert the state
secrets privilege to resist holdover lawsuits from the Bush era . . . in
an attempt to prevent the judiciary from adjudicating on the legality of
the warrantless wiretapping programme, and addressing the larger
presidential power issues that the case presents." He added: "Change we
can believe in? Nope."
The distance between Obama and Bush on a host of policies is not as
great as many people might hope or have expected - and it appears to get
narrower by the day. This should not, perhaps, come as a huge surprise.
One reason for continuity between US presidents - even those who are, on
the surface, as different as Bush and Obama - is the nature of the
modern imperial presidency, at the apex of a bloated national-security
state. As the historian Garry Wills pointed out recently in the New York
Review of Books, the president "is greatly pressured to keep all the
empire's secrets . . . he becomes the prisoner of his own power . . . a
self-entangling giant".
Then there is the pattern of presidential candidates railing against the
incumbent's record, only to find themselves sympathising with their
predecessor's predicament and policies once they have taken his place.
In 1952, as a candidate, Dwight Eisenhower denounced President Truman's
policy of containment towards the Soviet Union, yet embraced it within
six months of entering the White House. In 2000, Bush derided President
Clinton's attempts at nation-building in Somalia and Bosnia, only to
spend two terms trying to build new political structures in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
During his inauguration, Obama, it is said, told Bush that he hoped to
call on him for advice - and he has since spoken to his predecessor at
least once. But there are those who would argue that it is absurd to
compare the liberal Democrat Obama with the ultra-conservative
Republican George Bush. And some would say it is unfair to hold Obama to
account only nine months into his presidency. Others would point to the
range of policies on which Obama has marked out new terrain: proposing
health-care reform, taking climate change seriously, standing up to Wall
Street and announcing an end to torture and the closure of Guantanamo
Bay. On these and many other issues, his army of fans would argue, the
president has shown the world his liberalism, his radicalism, his
enthusiasm for change - that he is, in the words of the writer Michael
Tomasky, "the anti-Bush".
But let us consider each of these in turn. Now is, in fact, an ideal
time to pass an interim verdict on Obama's presidency, with the one-year
anniversary of his election fast approaching. Previous presidencies,
from FDR on, have been judged on their first 100 days in office: Obama
has had more than 250, representing a fifth of his first - possibly only
- presidential term...
--
Linda
*http://freedetainees.org <http://freedetainees.org/>
"If we shadows have offended, Think but this,
and all is mended, That you have but slumber'd
here While these visions did appear..."
- William Shakespeare
*
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