Obama's evil secrecy

By Frank Moraes 

Glenn Greenwald is one of the most important liberal journalists we have. And of course that means he works for a British newspaper. On Friday, he wrote, "Obama Officials Refuse to Say if Assassination Power Extends to US Soil." This is the kind of stuff that liberals would be all over if the president were a Republican. But a lot of liberals claim that they "trust" Obama to use these powers wisely. Even apart from the absurdity of the claim that anyone with Obama's power can be trusted, isn't it clear that Obama will not always be president? Isn't it clear that these precedents will be used by very bad men in the future? Isn't it obvious that a few generations down the line the president will use the exact same justifications to assassinate troublesome journalists on the streets of New York? It's obvious to me, anyway.

Both CIA head nominee John Brennan and President Obama himself have been asked the same question, "Could the administration carry out drone strikes inside the United States?" In both cases, the answer is, "We aren't doing that and we don't plan to." This is a problem. This implicitly opens the door to a future statement that, "We changed our minds!" It almost screams, "Yes, we can!"

The administration has secret legal documents that justify targeted assassinations of American citizens outside the country. Most of these documents the administration won't even show to the Senate. If this all sounds kind of familiar, it is because this is just like the Bush administration.

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Annals of shark-jumping

By Mustang Bobby

Via TPM, the latest from the fevered minds of the conspiracy labs: CIA nominee John Brennan is a Muslim.

“Mr. Brennan did convert to Islam when he served in an official capacity on the behalf of the United States in Saudi Arabia,” [ex-FBI agent John] Guandolo told interviewer and radio host Tom Trento.

“That fact alone is not what is most disturbing,” Guandolo continued. “His conversion to Islam was the culmination of a counterintelligence operation against him to recruit him. The fact that foreign intelligence service operatives recruited Mr. Brennan when he was in a very sensitive and senior U.S. government position in a foreign country means that he either a traitor … [or] he has the inability to discern and understand how to walk in those kinds of environments, which makes him completely unfit to the be the director of Central Intelligence.”

Brennan did indeed serve as CIA station chief in Riyadh in the 1990s and today holds the official title of Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. On Jan. 7, Obama nominated Brennan as the next director of the CIA, though he has yet to be confirmed.

If he converted in the 1990′s, that means he was a Muslim when he worked for the Bush administration, which means they were in on it, which means that George W. Bush was probably a secret Muslim, too. See how deep this goes?

The bats are really in the belfry.

(Crtoss-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Breeding distrust

By Mustang Bobby

John Brennan will go to Capitol Hill today for his confirmation hearing as the next director of the CIA. Thanks to the news about the memo on drones, it should be an interesting hearing.

Whether or not you think killing people — Americans or not — by remote control is a good or a bad idea, or whether you think the level of secrecy around it insulates us as a people from the harsh things our government does in our name, the part that gets to a lot of people — myself included — is that the attitude of the people who knew about it turns out to be “Trust us.” As anyone who has grown up beyond the age of ten knows, when you have to tell someone to trust you, you shouldn’t.

I don’t buy into all the conspiracy nutsery (see below), but I also believe trust is binary: you either have it or you don’t, and winning it back is not just a matter of “Well, we mislead you on this, but the next time, trust us.” It becomes a loop.

Charlie Pierce gets to it.

It is now beyond cliche to observe that government secrecy “breeds distrust” in our institutions. What is never mentioned is that, if you breed enough distrust in the institutions — or, more to the point, if the activities of the institutions breed distrust in themselves — the trust people once placed in them has to gosomewhere. And, generally, it goes into dreams and schemes and circus clowns that the people dream up themselves. The very real use of drones, and the very real possibility that they will be in general use in domestic law-enforcement before very long, because we’re more than already halfway there now, already have combined to set the paranoid imagination fully a’bloom. Government secrecy and deception blurs the line between genuine fears over the decline of civil liberties, and the wild-assed fantasies of the black-helicopter crowd. If you want to see the true destructive power of Droneworld in this country, look deeply into the Id of the democratic political imagination. There are angry, feral creatures in there, stalking the ruins, howling for blood.

There are those who will never trust the government or any elected official. They fully believe that once someone becomes a public servant they are secretly led into the cabal and become “one of them.” They’re the ones who start looking for pods in the basement. It’s when the rest of us start thinking that there might be something to it that we get into real trouble.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Dr. Jekyll and President Hyde

By Frank Moraes

My friend Andrea gets mad at me when I rag on the president too much. To her, Obama is so much better than Bush that we should just be grateful that we don't have a complete fucking idiot in the White House. But here's the thing: I am grateful. I usually defend myself by saying, "I think Obama is the best president we could ever expect to have!" But this is more a statement of my terrifying level of cynicism than it is of my opinion of Obama.

Let me pull back for a moment. If I were in the Senate and I got to question John Brennan today, I would have only one question for him, "Do you want to be head of the CIA?" I assume his answer would be, "Yes." And that would tell me everything I needed to know. "Then I'm afraid, Mr. Brennan, that you are not qualified to run the CIA. I'm very sorry. I hope you will spend the rest of your life volunteering at a local homeless shelter. The second to last place we can afford to put a power hungry asshole in charge is at the CIA."

The very last place we can afford to put a power-hungry asshole in charge is the presidency of the United States. I suspect that when Obama was a community organizer, he was a great guy. He was the kind of guy who should be the President of the United States. But once he started to be noticed as a member of the Illinois State Senate? And certainly, by the time he became a United States Senator? He'd been corrupted.

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The problem with John Brennan

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The focus yesterday was on Chuck Hagel, whom President Obama tapped for defense secretary, but the president's nominee for post-Petraeus CIA director, White House insider and key Obama advisor John Brennan, deserves some attention as well, because it says a lot -- a lot that isn't good -- about Obama's national security values and priorities.

While I continue to object to Hagel's nomination, I don't object to Hagel himself. He's a conservative Republican, but his record on U.S. militarism over the past decade has been extremely good, turning on the Iraq War when it was rather unpopular to do so, particularly for a Republican, and proving to be an admirable realist in his approach to the military. (As something of a liberal interventionist, I find his realism admirable but hardly sufficient. But I'll take his realism over the right-wing militarism you find among the neocons. That's an easy call.)

Indeed, my problem with the nomination is not so much that it's going to Hagel but that it's going to a Republican when there are strong Democratic alternatives, including especially Michèle Flournoy, who would be just as good, if not better. As Jon Chait pointed out yesterday, the only thing that really sets Hagel apart is the fact that he's been the target of a vicious smear campaign led by neocon Bill Kristol. Although, to be fair, he does have other things going for him as well, including the fact that he's a vet and that he has a strong relationship with both Obama and Vice President Biden. 

Anyway, my point is that whatever my concerns I can accept Hagel at the Pentagon. He'll be fine. Far more troubling is Brennan's appointment, which suggests once more that the president's objective is not just to continue the Bush-Cheney national security state but to extend and expand it (even if on at least one key issue, torture, he has pulled back).

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