John Brennan - Caricature

Why Holder’s letter carries little water

Last week, Senator Rand Paul (R-TX) forced a long overdue conversation in Washington about checks and balances on executive power. Yet few observers recognize the ultimate importance of his actions, or why the Senate’s confirmation of the new CIA director remained premature.

Prompted by Sen. Paul’s filibuster last Wednesday, Attorney General Holder wrote a letter the following day, acknowledging that our government lacks authority to execute Americans within the US without trial.

His concession is welcome, but must be taken with a grain of salt. It behooves observers to understand why, for several reasons, Holder’s statement may be less secure than we would ideally hope.

Accepting disclosure without investigation

Much of the controversy surrounding Brennan’s nomination concerned mere disclosure: whether the executive branch would let Congress read the administration’s legal analysis governing the targeted assassination program. President Obama apparently heard the message, admitting in his State of the Union address that more transparency is required.

The result proved underwhelming. One congressional committee received a single legal memo among several, which did not even purport to delineate the boundaries of the assassination program, but rather explored the use of deadly authority against a single target among several hundred who have been killed, including at least four US citizens.

Mere disclosure of some OLC memos to some Senators is insufficient.

Meaningful congressional oversight requires full access to all the legal memos, as well as active investigation of the underlying facts. It is not enough to simply read executive legal analyses paying lip service to constitutional values routinely violated on the ground.

The congressional intelligence committees, after all, were founded after robust investigations revealed widespread abuses by intelligence agencies, including the CIA, spanning decades and the terms of several presidents. Factual investigation has revealed more recent abuses, as well.

Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded a thorough investigation of torture, which produced a report recognizing torture as an international human rights abuse that ultimately undermined US national security by producing false intelligence, eroding pro American sentiment abroad, and helping our enemies recruit foot soldiers.

Yet, reflecting its pattern of embracing secrecy while claiming transparency, the Obama administration has refused to declassify the report. It is only because neither the press nor the public know the facts that irresponsible Hollywood fiction proved so problematic and controversial.

Forgotten in commentary on Brennan’s confirmation were some troubling details suggesting that, on both torture and drone strikes, transparency remains inadequate.

First, Senators had to fight tooth & nail to secure even the most minimal disclosure from the White House. Second, other congressional committees also sought access to the OLC assassination memos, but were denied.

Finally, beyond disclosure of the OLC’s legal memos are important questions about how the standards in them are applied to real facts. The Obama administration and CIA still refuse to answer congressional questions beyond the memos—such as, “How much evidence does the President need to determine that a particular American can be lawfully killed?” These questions are crucial, but Brennan’s confirmation could ensure that Congress receives few answers.

How the facts suggest elastic powers
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This article was originally published on the People’s Blog for the Constitution and is the first in a forthcoming series articulating specific civil liberties recommendations for the second Obama administration.

President Obama’s reelection has sparked an onslaught of analysis attempting to define the agenda for his second term. Will it reflect the vision of restoring liberty and security on which the president ran in 2008, or the disappointing passivity towards the national security state that characterized his first term?

More to the point, will President Obama’s legacy include emerging American authoritarianism, or instead the recovery of constitutional freedoms lost over the past decade? While machinations in Washington will of course influence the answer, We the People will play a crucial role, well beyond the 2012 election, in determining the outcome.

Obama’s legacy of constitutional violations

With the broad strokes that history affords the past, any president’s legacy usually shrinks within a decade to two or three elements. For instance, Clinton is remembered for presiding over the tech boom and resulting federal surplus, dismantling welfare and escalating mass incarceration, and surviving a partisan impeachment effort prompted by sophomoric sexual indiscretion.

George H. W. Bush’s legacy includes the first Iraq war, failing to energize the economy, and a premature pledge not to raise taxes. We remember Ronald Reagan for overcoming the Soviet Union and its satellites (even if his methods ensured the contemporary budget crisis, created al-Qaeda, and emboldened Iran), heralding “morning in America” to end a recession, and after surviving an assassination attempt, conveniently growing unable to recall more or less anything about compounding scandals that stained his second term.

In these broad strokes, President Obama’s legacy will likely include memories of the historic debate over healthcare policy in 2009, and the recurring budget crises that, combined with GOP intransigence, have periodically brought Washington to a standstill under his administration. The most enduring part of his legacy, however, will be the entrenchment of the national security state on his watch.

Beyond merely failing to reverse the trajectory of the Bush-Cheney administration, Obama’s first term extended it, pioneering new abuses while entrenching old ones.

Unlike Obama, Bush & Cheney never asserted the authority to kill US citizens based on their speech.

Unlike Obama, Bush & Cheney never signed into a law a statute granting the military the power to detain any American without evidence or proof of crime.

While Bush & Cheney violated international law by authorizing torture, it took the Obama administration to decide  that such criminal acts would go unpunished (or even investigated), ensuring their recurrence and nailing the coffin of international human rights.

The Obama administration’s prosecution of whistleblowers who sacrifice their jobs to defend the public interest has reached unprecedented levels, as have deportations of undocumented workers, their families, and occasionally, even US citizens. Rather than repudiate the Bush & Cheney paradigm, Obama has unfortunately perpetuated it.

A former President’s warning

50 years ago, a president with the deepest military roots among any who has held office since then–no mere General, but the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower — issued a disturbing warning about a threat to our democracy posed by “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” that, together, he described as “the military-industrial complex.” President Eisenhower said, in no uncertain terms, that:

“[W]e must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Ike observed the larval stages of a dynamic that has grown only more pernicious since he left office. In the decade since 9/11, under Presidents Bush and Obama alike, our military-industrial complex has initiated not only various military conflicts abroad, but also a domestic war on the constitutional rights of the American people.

Secret and increasingly immune to public accountability, if not above the law altogether, and insulated from accountability by elected leaders from each of the major political parties, an alphabet soup of federal agencies has emerged to pursue a duplicative, wasteful, and constitutionally abusive national security agenda.

Eisenhower proved prescient. True to his prediction, the contemporary national security racket offends all Americans, regardless of ideology.

Casualties of the national security state: transparency, accountability, and legitimacy

First, it has erected such pervasive secrecy that it threatens the basis for democratic accountability, subverting the consent of the governed on which democratic  legitimacy depends. For years, the NSA operated its dragnet warrantless wiretapping scheme in total secrecy, not only unauthorized by statute, but in direct violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) enacted by Congress in the 1970s to stop domestic spying.

Every federal court ever to review the program on the merits has struck it down as unconstitutional, yet it persists unabated. Congress bent over backward to rewrite the FISA law in 2008, and appellate courts have thrown out numerous lawsuits challenging it based on the perverse reasoning that, because the NSA’s program is secret, no plaintiffs can prove that they, in particular, have been monitored.

Officials have admitted to violating even the permissive new law. Members of Congress have asked tough questions and received only silence in response. Yet, reflecting a disturbing pattern of bipartisan abdication repeated over the past decade, the House recently voted to reauthorize the 2008 FISA amendments for another five years, even beyond the next administration.

Secret programs violating contrived statutes, especially with the blessing of (supposedly) independent courts, make a mockery of our claim to live in “a land of the free.”

Further installments in this series will examine the ideologically diverse social movements abused by misguided and constitutionally offensive domestic spying activities, as well as the contribution of those programs to the federal budget crisis. The series will conclude by suggesting not one, but two alternative national security agendas for President Obama’s second term.

Photo by leighblackall under Creative Commons license.

Both 2012 presidential campaigns advance the legacy of Dick Cheney

Among the most tragic casualties of the war on terror is the separation of powers that our Founders envisioned to help keep America free. Not only has executive power expanded to disturbing – and profoundly dangerous – proportions in the decade since the 9-11 attacks, but Presidents from both major parties have promoted this transformation.

Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) understands this well enough to have actively defended constitutional rights, introducing important legislation to restore due process after the latest defense authorization act allowed the indefinite domestic military detention of Americans without charge or trial. Yet in the Romney-Cheney Doctrine, he implies a contrast that is more imagined than real. He writes:

It’s no secret that Cheney was the driving force behind the Bush administration’s failed foreign policies…[O]f Romney’s 24 special advisors on foreign policy, 17 served in the Bush-Cheney administration….The last time they were in government, it was disastrous….

We can’t afford to go back to the failed policies of the past…America’s security depends on moving forward to confront the threats of the future.

While the foreign policy visions of the 2012 presidential candidates do indeed differ, the most striking element of Rep. Smith’s article is its silence on what could reasonably be called “the Obama-Cheney doctrine.”

Rep. Smith correctly notes that Mitt Romney has enthusiastically endorsed the views of many Bush-Cheney administration veterans. He does not mention the Obama administration’s alignment with its predecessor’s domestic security agenda: expanding surveillance, suppressing dissent, militarizing police and intelligence agencies, aggrandizing their powers, entrenching their leadership, prosecuting whistleblowers to reinforce secret government, and ignoring the rights of the millions of people impacted by this bipartisan assault on constitutional rights.
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