If This Is How He Treats Those Who Do The Things He Praises....

It is nothing new to note the fanaticism with which the Barack Obama administration classifies even the most innocuous pieces of information that might enlighten Americans as to the nature of things it is doing with their money and in their name.  Mr. Obama, once a zealous advocate for openness and transparency in government (when he was not in a position to do anything about it), has proved more sedulous in perpetuating government secrecy than was his predecessor.

The Espionage Act has rarely been used over the years for the scandalous purpose of punishing government "whistleblowers."  The reason is obvious to those who value openness and transparency in government.  Mr. Obama, only a few years ago, was an avowed member of this latter faction.  He once referred to the act of whistleblowing in glowing terms, calling it courageous and patriotic.  But as has often proved the case with this president, there is a great divide between sentiment and action.  Since ascending to office, he has used the Espionage Act to prosecute more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined.  What was once courageous and patriotic has apparently become so dangerous that it must be combated more aggressively than ever before. 

Barack Obama is no stranger to this kind of prevarication, demagogy, and misrepresentation.  One could accurately say he has made a career of it (more on this in the coming weeks).  But there are few issues with which he has demonstrated so clearly not just insouciant disregard for the truth, but actual scorn for it.  There are those who say one thing and do another.  Then there are those who say one thing and consistently do the exact opposite.  Our president fits nicely in the latter camp.

One of the hapless victims of Obama's whistleblower ambivalence is PFC Bradley Manning.  Motivated by disgust for what he had witnessed during the devastating U.S. occupation of Iraq, Manning aided Wikileaks in publishing the largest ever set of restricted documents to the public.  Among the material Manning dared expose was video footage of a 2007 U.S. airstrike in which U.S. occupation forces casually murdered several innocent Iraqis.  Audio recording of the soldiers carrying out the atrocity reveals a callous indifference to the value of human life as it is being destroyed.

Predictably, the footage was called into question by some dutiful apologist groups.  Fox News, ever the purveyor of jingoistic, authoritarian propaganda, reported that "[t]he problem, according to many who have viewed the video, is that WikiLeaks appears to have done selective editing that tells only half the story."  Just who are these "many who have viewed the video," whose qualms Fox faithfully recounts?  The answer to this question, like the journalistic integrity of the propagandists posing it (who audaciously call themselves a news organization), is nowhere to be found.  I will forgo further elaboration on this topic and instead merely ask that readers view the video for themselves.  That it depicts the casual murder of innocent people is simply beyond question.  If there is another "half of the story" one need not know it.

 Led by our cowardly president, the U.S. government claimed for itself the right to classify and restrict public access to the video, and to other information exposing the many prevarications and misrepresentations which it committed throughout the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  The Pentagon also rejected freedom of information requests by Reuters to gain access to the video footage.  Bradley Manning thought this intolerable, and risked his reputation--maybe even his life--to perpetrate an "act of courage and patriotism" by leaking this information to the American public.

Swift and terrible was President Obama's response.  Manning was apprehended and held in military custody for 917 days, under conditions of confinement which were deplorable in the extreme.  Among other horrors, he was held in a 6 ft 8 inch cell and subjected to daily "shakedowns," in which his guards would terrorize him mercilessly; he was isolated for 23 hours of every day; and he was forced to defecate in view of his guards.  The U.N. special rapporteur on torture accused the U.S. government of "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" of Mr. Manning, which is a clear violation of the spirit and purpose of the Convention Against Torture.  The ennui and isolation of his captivity apparently led Manning to suicidal contemplations, culminating in his fashioning a noose for himself.  This is the manner in which President Obama elected to treat a man whose only crime was to commit an act he once lavishly praised.

Manning has already admitted to his crime.  He will likely be convicted of "aiding the enemy,"

which carries the death penalty.  A more fascist-sounding crime could scarcely be conceived.  Manning's only hope now is that the American public will demonstrate sufficient outrage at this injustice that he might mount a successful legal defense or be pardoned.  Advocacy groups have formed which are trying to raise awareness to these ends.  

In conclusion, suffice it to state the obvious: the public should call on Barack Obama to act on his words and defend acts of "courage and patriotism."  Bradley Manning should be freed.

Pledge Not That We Be Not Pledged

Politicians are liars.  Who would dare dispute the essence of this sentiment (excluding those who merely take exception to the specious generality of it)?  This does not bode well for democratic governance, of course, which is predicated on the fealty of public servants to the interests of those who elect them.  And though the democratic formula is generally desirable, the well-established affinity for mendacity common to those who seek elected office can be counted as among its many flaws (democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others which have been tried, as Churchill famously said).  Where does a population, faced with a slew of prevaricating schmoozers jockeying to "represent" it, find a proper leash to keep them in line?

Enter the "pledge."  A growing movement in US democracy favors binding politicians to various commitments before they win office, often by means of a written pledge to do, or not to do specified things.  The hapless candidate-signatory voluntarily dons a "straitjacket," to use the term applied by Time magazine's Alex Altman (which not so subtly conveys the crooked image of American politicians).  Of late, political pledges are the subject of much partisan fulmination.  As the Nation approaches the "fiscal cliff," we hear thunderous condemnation of the "narrow-minded" conservative pledge not to raise taxes, and calumnious attacks against Grover Norquist, the conservative figure behind the decades-old anti-tax pledge, which has been adopted by the majority of Republicans in the House and Senate.

Such ire is misplaced.  Today, American democracy is built upon pledges.  American political campaigns are, in fact, little more than a series of pledges in which candidates advertise immodest promises to potential voters.  The voter is an ideological entrepreneur who makes a political investment in the candidate whose promises most closely align with the voter's personal preferences.  The voter-investor model does face a serious problem, however: what sort of cretinous investor bequeaths his trust to a chameleonic politician whose first--and sometimes only--allegiance is to his own quest for power?  Politicians "will say anything to get elected," as the saying goes. 

Think of the pledge in this context.  Nettled by the consistent misrepresentations of elected office, the voting public--or, if you prefer the Orwellian pejorative, "special interest groups"--devised the pledge as a means of reprimanding mendacious politicians, thus ensuring that the process of voting more closely resembles that of making sensible investments, where some safeguard is in place against the malfeasance of the chosen vehicle  The pledge is the voters' method of ensuring that the lofty guarantees of candidates are effectuated once in office. 

If we ask Time's Alex Altman, the problem with this is self-evident.  The "straitjacket" in which the pledge binds the politician militates against good governance.  The purchase price of fidelity is flexibility.  This sentiment is echoed by many others, who feel that there is an element of myopia in "tying the hands" of a politician before election.  These metaphors--"tying the hands," "straitjacket"--are merely cacophonistic representations of methods aimed at ensuring political accountability.  If voters don't want higher taxes, and they invest their votes in a candidate who pledges not to raise taxes, from what scorn for democracy is criticism of this pledge borne?  It seems this kind of pledge is merely the democratic process operating effectively.  Hostility for democracy is thus embedded in criticisms of the pledge itself.  More justifiable acrimony must target the root of the problem.

As STRATFOR's George Friedman wrote earlier this year, "[t]he American presidency is designed to disappoint."  Friedman was remarking on the wide gulf between the quixotic promises of candidates and what it is possible to achieve within the constraints of elected office.  Friedman's observation is true of American politics generally.  Candidates insist on promising the world to voters in order to secure office, knowing they can find lubricious ways to justify themselves when they inevitably fail to deliver.  President Obama's lamentation of the mess he "inherited" when confronted about his broken promises is a typical example of this.  In short: the root of the problem, out of which the pledge is borne, is a serious lack of accountability in American democracy. 

As voters, we partially inflict this problem on ourselves.  We appear unduly credulous when we receive, with great frisson, the lofty and unrealistic promises of political candidates.  We know, or we should know, that firm promises are stupid.  Ultimately, only circumstance will--and should--decide whether a politician can abide by his promises or not.  In some cases, it may be disastrous for a politician to rigidly adhere to his promises or pledges--the "fiscal cliff," for example.  If voters refused to tolerate heedless promise-making on the campaign trail, and repudiated candidates who engaged in it, we might attract more accountable, more responsible candidates.  We also might not see so many of the promises we place our faith in broken before our eyes.

Candidates, of course, also play their role in this sordid game of nonsense-peddling.  In order to reduce instances of pledge-making, and free their own hands, candidates should refuse to condescend to voters by offering firm commitments that may be unachievable.  Candidates should treat voters like adults by framing promises as goals, and by honestly informing them of the variables at play in determining whether those goals will be met.  Candidates should avoid empty slogans like "change we can believe in," which might win marketing awards but which do not amount to responsible democratic conduct.  If the problem is a race to the bottom, in which candidates fear their opponents will engage in this behavior if they opt-out, thus securing an advantage, the candidate should respond not by stooping to the level of prevarication and demagogy, but by illustrating the folly of the opponent's tactic.  In other words, treating voters like adults.

Criticizing the pledge in and of itself is anti-democratic and absurd.  What possible reason could there be, if one accepts the logic of democracy, to scorn measures aimed at ensuring the accountability of politicians to the voting public?  But pledges are dangerous when they produce inflexibility and rigid obstinacy.  The dangers of pledge-making should be confronted by reducing the influence of the root cause of it: a condescending electoral process.  If this shift occurs, fewer promises will be broken and voters will less often feel betrayed.  This is the proper way to root out "pledges" in politics.

Evaluating the Self-Defense Claim

As Israel considers escalating its latest siege of Gaza, it continues to justify the violence with a predictable "self-defense" mantra.   An evaluation of this claim is thus in order.

The talking points used by Israel and the US to justify the unjustifiable are by now well-established.  Invariably, Israel's violence is followed by official support from Washington, often couched in the fatuous phrase "Israel has a right to defend itself."  This latest conflict is no exception, as president Obama was quick to remind us of Israel's right of self-defense shortly after Israel's campaign in Gaza began.  No serious person, of course, denies in the abstract that Israel, or any other state for that matter, has a right to defend itself against attacks.  The president's remarks thus amount to a classic straw-man, refuting an argument no one has presented.  Obama's proffering of this axiomatic truism makes sense only as a form of propaganda.  Through subtle suggestion, Mr. Obama hopes to persuade us to accept the premise embedded in his words that Israel is in fact defending itself. 

Considered as propaganda, the president's words are ingenious.  Once uttered, anyone who dares to continue in dissent against  US support for Israeli policy is placed in the contemptible position of appearing to dispute the notion that Israel has the right to defend itself.  This person thus becomes easy to dismiss as "extremist," or "radical." 

The propaganda expertise of Israel and the US aside, Israel's use of the self-defense claim is transparently absurd.  Israel is presently conducting an occupation of Palestinian land that has persisted for decades.  It is baffling that this fact is absent from the media's vexatious analysis of Israeli violence, and from public exhortations by Israel's apologists in support of its periodic campaign of destruction in Gaza.  One wonders how it is that an occupying power can seriously be allowed to claim self-defense as it wreaks havoc upon the people it is occupying.  To my knowledge, no one has ever even attempted to answer this question in an analysis of Israeli self-defense claims. 

An occupation is a perpetual invasion.  Occupation is thus an offensive act for as long as it continues. It is ridiculous to suggest that in the midst of a perpetual invasion a right of violent self-defense against the invaded is retained by the invader.  Undoubtedly, Israel has a non-violent right to defend itself against the violence of Palestinians.  But it does not have a right of violent self-defense against them.  Imagine if a gunman removed a family from their home at gunpoint and claimed it for himself.  Would any serious person claim that the gunman retains a right to use violence in self-defense when the family fights him to reacquire their property?  The answer is too obvious to belabor  Most would agree, however, that the gunman could defend himself by leaving the family's property. 

Similarly, Israel's only legitimate recourse is to end its occupation of Palestinian land entirely, dismantle its illegal settlement enterprise in the West Bank, cede the Golan Heights back to its rightful Syrian owners, and cease the inhumane blockade of the Gaza Strip.  Until Israel agrees to do these things, who can seriously tell the Palestinian people, who are subjected to a brutal occupation, who have no sovereignty, many of whom are jobless, their children malnourished and hungry, that they do not have the right to resist Israeli oppression by force?  What morally serious person would say something so cruel as that the Palestinian people must sit idly by while their stolen land is settled by Israel daily, and while they are subjected to the suffocating effects of the land and naval blockade of Gaza?  I submit that the answer is no one.

Self-defense is a sacred concept in International Law, despite that in recent days, unseemly characters have attempted to distort its axiomatic definition by eliminating the distinction between offense and defense.  Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz, for example, has written that an Israeli pre-emptive strike against Iran would amount to self-defense.  In other words, offense is defense.  In making this argument Dershowitz and others carry the sordid torch of the Bush Administration, whose illegal invasion of Iraq, justified absurdly on self-defense grounds, caused a humanitarian catastrophe there.  George Bush thought offense was defense, too.  Ironically, self-defense was even a theme in Nazi propaganda supporting sadistic policies towards Jews.  The veracity of this latter claim is unworthy of serious analysis. 

No one should make the mistake of belittling the horrors endured by Israeli citizens as rockets reign down around them.  Though trivial compared to the plight of Palestinian families in Gaza, the insecurity of Israeli citizens must be alleviated--this is the obligation of the Israeli government.  But what is the way to go about doing this?  According to Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, "[t]he only way we can achieve peace and security is to create real deterrence via a crushing response that will make sure [Palestinians] don't try to test us again."  This policy of overwhelming response has been in use by Israel since its emergence as a state sixty years ago and has contributed nothing toward a peaceful resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  Sixty years later Palestinians are still resisting by firing rockets into Israel, and Israel is still issuing the "crushing responses" advocated by Lieberman.  Clearly, Israeli violence is not going to bring an end to this conflict.  This should be obvious by now.

A more reflective approach to protecting Israeli citizens counsels ruminating about the source of Palestinian hostility.  It doesn't take long to comprehend.  Hamas has made clear repeatedly in the present conflict that it wants an end to the blockade of Gaza as part of a cease-fire to end the current violence.  Hamas has also accepted a two-state solution to its conflict with Israel, which requires an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.  If the Israeli government cares about its citizens, why has it not accepted these offers?  Rather than end the blockade and agree to a cease-fire, Israel continues to bombard Gaza, racking up a large civilian death toll.  Rather than end the occupation of the West Bank, Israel continues its prolific settlement enterprise, which is an undisputed violation of International Law.  These Israeli policies are the source of the Gaza rocket attacks.  To bring security to Israelis, Israel must repudiate them.