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8 a.m. ET: President Obama may be on vacation this week but he'll get no respite from the past. From new details of controversial interrogation tactics to the "deteriorating" situation in Afghanistan, this weekend brought fresh reminders that Obama still has a host of thorny problems left to sort through from the Bush administration.
Seven months into his presidency, Obama has yet to determine whether to prosecute alleged detainee abuses, where to move prisoners from Guantanamo Bay and how to reverse decreasing U.S. public support and increasing pressure from the enemy in the Afghanistan war. Revelations in the last few days have made none of those questions any easier to answer.
A long-awaited report from the CIA's inspector general on the agency's interrogation practices is due to be unveiled today, and the administration appears eager to get out in front of its findings. "Obama has approved the creation of an elite team of interrogators to question key terrorism suspects," reports the Washington Post, with the new "High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group" to be staffed by several different agencies and housed at the FBI. As for the IG report, the goriest details seem already to have been leaked, including that at least one prisoner was threatened with a gun and a power drill and that CIA interrogators staged mock executions. At the same time, according to the New York Times, "The Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended reversing the Bush administration and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases," encouraging Eric Holder to consider prosecuting CIA officials. But Jeffrey Smith, the former CIA general counsel, today provides "six reasons prosecutions are not in the nation's best interests."
In Afghanistan, the situation is "serious and deteriorating," Mike Mullen said Sunday. Allied military commanders are reportedly asking for more troops to deal with problems along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Now that the commanders' desire for more troops has been made public, can Obama really deny their requests? John McCain claimed Sunday that "people around" the president are pressuring the military to reduce its estimates for how many troops it needs to reverse the tide in Afghanistan.
As for the debate Obama actually wants to have -- on health care -- the Los Angeles Times reports that "the insurance industry nevertheless rallied its lobbying and grass-roots resources so successfully in the early stages of the healthcare overhaul deliberations that it is poised to reap a financial windfall." Why? Because "the half-dozen leading overhaul proposals circulating in Congress would require all citizens to have health insurance, which would guarantee insurers tens of millions of new customers -- many of whom would get government subsidies to help pay the companies' premiums." That windfall is dependent on the final reform package not including a public insurance option. Chuck Schumer said Sunday such an option was "essential," and the NYT repeats the storyline that Senate Democrats are seriously considering using reconciliation to get such a plan through. We'll believe it when we see it.
Jonathan Cohn writes that Obama made a big mistake by "focusing so heavily on how reform would reduce the cost of medicine" instead of emphasizing the "security from financial ruin and medical catastrophe" that reform could provide. Politico judges that Obama has bitten off more than he can chew, as his "Big Bang" approach of trying to reform health care, energy and the financial system all at once simply isn't working. But Matthew Yglesias argues that Obama's failure so far, particularly on health care, isn't so much indicative of mistakes on the president's part but simply more evidence that "for better or for worse, our system makes big changes difficult to implement." And in a move that will further endear him to liberals, Joe Lieberman called Sunday for Obama to slow down the pace of reform and put off a lot of major changes until the economy improves.
By
Ben Pershing
|
August 24, 2009; 8:00 AM ET
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Posted by: scrivener50 | August 24, 2009 9:01 AM
Correction and amplification:
In "scrivener" post, below, the phrase was typed as "the rule of law" and came out garbled.
No, the author is not dyslexic. Maybe THIS explains it:
http://nowpublic.com/world/govt-fusion-center-spying-pretext-harass-and-censor
Posted by: scrivener50 | August 24, 2009 9:13 AM
The incompetent dimwit has to keep criticism of the previous administration alive, because without it, he has nothing to show. No accomplishments for our nation, except that friends and foes alike are playing the dunce like a drum.
What an embarrassing joke this numbnuts is.
Posted by: LarryG62 | August 24, 2009 9:49 AM
And who is going to prosecute the OBAMA administration officials for the civilians, elderly, pregnant women, and children killed and maimed in the CIA's predator attacks in N. Pakistan and elsewhere!
Isn't the media focus on the threat of physical harm, i.e. terrorism; simple a straw man to divert our attention to actual physical harm and outright murder that is occurring on an almost daily basis?
Exculpate the Media, when their moral compass is spinning like a break dancer? never.
Posted by: Common_Cents1 | August 24, 2009 12:01 PM
TO: "Common_Cents1" @ 12:01 p.m.
Yes, the mainstream media is complicit -- perhaps because over a period of decades, climaxing with the Bush Reign of Terror and the continuing silent coup d'etat of its "leave-behinds," the media has been PURGED by powerful, secretive agencies and their corporate contractors:
http://groups.poynter.org/members/blog_view.asp?id=190108&post=76137
Posted by: scrivener50 | August 24, 2009 12:27 PM
Weaving fraud on a vast bureaucratic loom and call it high value. They'll be detaining the American people next. You'll be sent to GM Camp and forced to build Corvettes for their rich donors next. Maybe we'll be sent to Mexico to build Chrysler Fiat 500 for their fraud Italian friends too. What a pile of crap in Washington and the pile is certain to grow. They're setting up some sort of gestapo, calling it justice and the loss will keep growing. They're holding up empty banks and rolling in dough. Plastic people led by plastic Jesus. Build more plastic cars and call it progressive.
Posted by: Dermitt | August 24, 2009 2:32 PM
This policy on torture is just the tip of the iceberg on the gross abuse of human rights by Bush and Cheney. Think of Guantanamo and Abu Graib, the non-discriminate murder of innocent women and children by drones and bombers (they call it collateral damage). It makes all these lectures to other countries by the US government and Congress just a huge nasty joke.
This stinking hypocrisy is so obvious.
Think which term the American mass media applies when they are on their side:
Brave freedom fighters or stinking terrorists..
Collateral damage or indiscriminate carnage...
Enhanced interrogation or hedious torture..
Protection of jobs or devious unfair manipulation of subsidies...
Posted by: mapleleaf3 | August 25, 2009 2:03 AM
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LATEST CIA TORTURE MEMO RELEASE:
ANOTHER WHITEWASH TO COVER UP MICROWAVE / LASER RADIATION WEAPONS TORTURE -- AT GITMO, IN IRAQ, AND AT HOME?
• When will President Obama wake up and smell the police state that threatens democracy, makes a mockery of the law of rule -- and subverts his agenda?
Today's the day the Justice Department is supposed to release more redacted CIA torture memos.
So far, the big "revelation" is that a power drill was held to a prisoner's head.
Now quite as dramatic as the likely truth:
That microwave and laser radiation "directed energy weapons" have been used to -- in the words of a recent Senate Armed Services Commmitee report -- "induce" weakness, fatigue, exhaustion, mood changes and confusion...
The same sort of ELECTROMAGNETIC TORTURE widely reported by victims of a what is reputed to be a "multi-agency coordinated action program" of DOMESTIC extrajudicial targeting and punishment aimed at U.S. citizens deemed to be "dissidents" and "undesirables."
Is THIS what today's torture memo redactions are trying to whitewash?
http://nowpublic.com/world/gestapo-usa-govt-funded-vigilante-network-terrorizes-america
OR (if link is corrupted / disabled):
http://NowPublic.com/scrivener RE: "GESTAPO USA"