Get ‘Mo Gitmo

by digby

Following up on dday’s earlier post about Elizabeth Bumiller’s sleight of hand, I happened to catch John Harwood and Norah O’Donnell chat with the former Bush Head Cheerleader in a different segment about the political dimensions of the Guantanamo debate. Harwood, one of the dullest, robotic villagers out there, actually makes Bumiller look reasonable by comparison when he reflexively defines Obama’s political challenges in terms of punching the hippies:

Harwood: Elizabeth, this is going to be a huge problem when he tries to site these prisoners. Does that mean that the president didn’t make progress yesterday, politically speaking, in terms of laying out this case? Is it simply too early to judge that?

Bumiller: I think he’s getting a lot of push back, from, not only from, well he’s getting hit from both sides, from the left and from the right. He’s getting hit from the right, of course, from people like Cheney and from the congressional districts, and from the left because he’s now saying that there are some of these detainees who cannot be tried because of lack of evidence or because of tainted evidence.

Harwood: I suspect he doesn’t mind getting hit from the left as much as he does from the right.

Of course not. Getting hit from people who have a 20% approval rating and who have absolutely no credibility with the American people is far more frightening than getting hit for continuing the policies of that 20%. That’s not even a question. It’s political suicide for any Democrat to fight Republicans when it comes to a male appendage measuring contest, everybody know that.

Harwood is one of the worst and his automatic assumption that Obama would far rather battle those who actually believe the nice words that Obama himself speaks about American values than to battle those who think everything he says is silly and naive says it all. That’s your village — cynical, twisted and incoherent as usual.

The good news is that the other side is actually being heard, which is a bit of a surprise and does signal that somebody, whether it’s ACLU press releases or the conduit of Greenwald to Maddow, is getting through to a few people in the MSM:

Bumiller: But, the ACLU, the civil liberties groups and human rights groups are frankly, appalled,that they’re hearing this from this president who they thought was just going to turn around on these Bush Cheney policies.

O’Donnell: Well this idea, which I think many people noticed it on the left, this preventative detention, that Obama has come to accept, which is this argument made by the Bush administration, embraced by Cheney, that some people you might not be able to set them free and you might not be able to try them because of national security reasons. And now, president Obama seems to acknowledge that there might be this preventative detention, which I know some people have made fun of as some sort of like the “Minority Report” sort of like that movie with Tom Cruise, that you would keep people, trying to prevent …

Bumiller: Yeah, yeah… without charges. And you know the left is saying that this is a repackaging of Guantanamo. Now what Obama is saying, we don’t have any details yet, he is trying to come up with a legal framework to make this part of our law. As you know, what Bush did was just declare these people were enemy combatants, and that’s, of course, being challenged in the courts right now. And I am certain that whatever Obama comes up with in terms of a legal framework will also be challenged so this will be in the courts for a long time.

If we can get the quivering, pantswetting congress to pass a law to make indefinite detention legal, I guess that makes all the difference. The fact that it goes against both the letter and the spirit of the constitution will work itself out eventually. (Or not — remember what kind of majority we have on the supreme court these days.)

The Minority Report allusion is a good one except that as far as I know, the government isn’t even close to having a super-duper computer system that can see into the future to find out who might be a danger. We don’t even know if these people we’ve locked up for years and years already in our GWOT gulag did something in the past. In fact, our civilian justice system often convicts innocent people even with all the safeguards we have in place. The idea that the government just “knows” who’s dangerous and who isn’t is absurd. That’s why we have a judicial system in the first place.

Update: The village weighs in on Goldilocks, flip flopping and campaign promises:

MSNBC:

Helene Cooper, Washington Post: I think Vice President Cheney did president Obama a great favor yesterday by allowing him to take a middle ground. You have people on the left, you know the ACLU, saying that Obama hasn’t hasn’t been going far enough and you have Cheney on the right saying this, and Obama is able to appear that he’s rising above all of this. And he’s sounding the voice of reason.

[later in the show]

Harwood: how big a problem do you think the flip-flop issue is for Obama?

Cooper: I think it’s always an issue. The reality is that you say a lot of things when you’re running for president and then you become elected and you start to see the intelligence. This has long been the Republican argument. You start to see the intelligence and things look a lot different when you’re getting that …

CNN:

Carville: I think he’s starting to make some changes and just because President Bush did it, doesn’t mean everything he did had to be necessarily wrong and you have to evaluate each thing on its merits.

John Roberts: But is it true or untrue that during the campaign, the president spoke out quite strongly against these military tribunals and then has said in the last 24 hours, where prudent, he will try people through a military commission system.

Carville: Right. I also think that what he said was that he wanted to have more safeguards in there. But you know, a campaign promise is one thing.

But he said he wanted to close Guantanamo and he’s going to do that. And we’ve got people there, obviously the president was saying when he was with Steve Scully [on C-Span] we’ve got people there who probably never should have been there in the first place who may not have liked us when they got there but they sure in the heck don’t like us now and I don’t have a good answer for what to do with those people. That’s why opening the thing in the first place was not the smartest idea ever.

Bill Bennett: Yeah, it wasn’t the smartest idea I ever heard of to make this promise when he can’t keep it and James is one of the best campaign strategists around and this tells you why the American people are cynical about the campaign business. As you say it’s only a campaign promise.

Well fine. But the president does seem to be learning on the job. The critical question about the Obama presidency is the education of the president. He is figuring out some things on the job and that’s a good thing because he’s getting a recognition of reality. Those daily briefings are a lot different that what he was given on the campaign bus every morning.

What in the world can these briefings possibly be telling him about prisoners we have locked up for six years? In fact, if the intelligence is so shocking that the mere idea of putting a suspected terrorist on trial puts the whole country in danger, I think we all have a right to know what it is.

This is utter nonsense. Obama’s problem is political, pure and simple. They are afraid of the shitstorm the Republicans are stirring up. There are many dangerous terrorists or would-be terrorists running around free today, including one by the name of Osama bin Laden. Showing the world that we believe in the rule of law will go a lot farther to make this country safe than any other thing he does. He knows it, he’s just made a political calculation that it will be too distracting or politically risky to do the right thing. Fine. But let’s not kid ourselves.

Charlie Savage, who has been a great reporter on these issues, said this on MSNBC:

Charlie Savage: Don’t believe the hype. There is very little daylight between what the Obama administration is doing and what the Bush administration is doing, especially in its last four years in power. Both Obama and Cheney seem to be setting up situations that there’s this vast gulf between them and it’s just not true. On military commissions, on indefinite detentions without trial, on predator drone strikes, on CIAs extraordinary rendition program, on warrantless wiretapping, the key elements of the Bush counter terrorism policy have now been embraced, with some tweaks, by the Obama administration.

The exceptions are, the Obama administration has shut down CIA prisons where the red cross was not allowed to visit and he has said we are not going to have this regime of coercive interrogations, which seems to be the thing which vice president Cheney is most upset about. But really .

Harwood: but Charlie, you are saying that 130 million voters were fooled by our choice last November?

Savage: Well, to finish the thought on the interrogations, the Bush administration dropped the coercive interrogation program around 2004, 2005. They didn’t waterboard anyone after March of ’03, so the sense that now Obama has changed something that put us at risk makes little sense in light of that history.

But that doesn’t mean that there is not a big difference between Obama and Cheney. It’s just not the one that they’re talking about. The big difference is that Vice President Cheney has a big investment in a vast conception of the president’s theoretical power as commander in chief to bypass laws and treaties at his discretion to protect national security. And Obama does not seem to have that ideological stake. Obama thinks the congress can pass laws that the president has to obey. But once congress has done that, Obama seems perfectly willing to exercise these same sorts of programs with these same powers.

The interesting thing about that is that the Bush OLC believed that the congress had granted the president the power to do anything he felt he needed to with the AUMF, but that he didn’t really need that under the powers of the Commander in Chief. They always had a fallback.

This just amounts to changing process and getting cover on specificity. As we’ve seen just this week, when it comes to national security all the hawks have to do is look sideways and the Democrats will crawl all over each other to see who can look the “toughest.” Obama’s position is better, obviously, because a president seizing dictatorial powers is outrageous unto itself. But as far as national security policy, it’s a difference without a distinction.

But then, we’re told by villager after villager that it’s totally naive to ever think a politician will uphold his campaign promises, so the whole thing is silly. And I agree. Campaign promises are often worthless because the media takes this attitude whenever it suits them. But projections of a candidate’s “intent” based upon wishful thinking is even less than worthless. The only thing to do is get very explicit promises and show that you will hold politicians to them.

And as to the torture regime and whether or not Cheney is correct in saying that Obama has “reserved for himself” the right to torture despite his promises, you be the judge:

Note: I transcribed these excerpts. And as a general rule, if there is no link, that will be the case.

I’m sure full transcripts will be available at the web sites for CNN and MSNBC in due course.

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