Justin's Political Corner

President Obama said on Tuesday that his he still believes that the Guantánamo Bay prison does not serve American security interests and said that his administration will try again to close Gitmo.

“It is not a surprise to me that we’ve got problems in Guantánamo,” Obama said when asked during a White House press conference about the ongoing hunger strike crisis there. “I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantánamo is not necessary to keep America safe,” he added, pledging to take another shot at closing Gitmo:

OBAMA: It needs to be closed. Now Congress determined that they would not let us close it and despite the fact that there are a number of folks who are in Guantánamo who the courts have said could be returned to their country origin or potentially a third country. I’m going to go back at this. I’ve asked my team to review everything that’s currently being done in Guantánamo, everything that we can do administratively and I’m going to reengage with Congress to try to make the case that this is not something that’s in the best interests of the American people. And it’s not sustainable.

Obama signed an executive order in January 2009 vowing to close Gitmo within one year but largely because of congressional intransigence, the facility remains open today, housing 166 inmates, of whom 100 are currently on hunger strike. The State Department reassigned the special envoy for closing Gitmo in January and Obama did not reappoint anyone to fill the position.

However, the Obama administration does have some room to maneuver. Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) recently urged the White House to take steps to repatriate some of the 56 Yemeni detainees who are cleared for release. The U.S. halted the Yemeni process after it was learned that militants in the country trained the so-called underwear bomber in 2009; but new Yemeni President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s eagerness to take on al-Qaeda could calm recidivism fears.

Of the 100 Gitmo detainees on hunger strike, 21 are being force-fed, a process that the American Medical Association and a bipartisan detainee expert task force have condemned.

h/t: Ben Armbruster at Think Progress Security

On August 5, 2012, just before 10:30 in the morning, Wade Michael Page pulled up outside the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisc., took out his semi-automatic handgun and started killing worshipers. An Army veteran and an avid bass player in a neo-Nazi rock band, Page killed two Sikhs outside the house of worship and then made his way inside. There, he reloaded and killed four more, including the president of the temple who was shot while trying to tackle Page. Three more were critically wounded in the massacre.

When local police descended, Page opened fire and shot one officer nearly ten times. When the authorities returned fire and shot Page in the stomach, he took his 9mm pistol, pointed it at his own head, and pulled the trigger.

According to acquaintances, the 40-year-old killer hated blacks, Indians, Native Americans and Hispanics (he called non-whites “dirt people”), and was interested in joining the Ku Klux Klan. Immersed in the world of white power music, Page’s band rehearsed in front of a Nazi flag.

Note that back in August 2012, Fox News didn’t care very much about Wade Page and the wild gun shootout he unleashed in an act of domestic terror in the Milwaukee suburb, nor did Fox suggest the event was connected to a larger, more sinister terror trend. In fact, in the days that followed the gun massacre, there were just two passing references to Page during Fox’s primetime, one from Bill O’Reilly and one from Greta Van Susteren. No guests were asked to discuss the temple shooting, and after one day the story was completely forgotten.

In one rare occasion when the conversation did turn to Page’s motivations, Fox’s opinion hosts were quick to criticize the notion that he was a far-right extremist. (He clearly was.) On The Five, after co-host Bob Beckel referred to Page as “right-wing skinhead,” he was quickly shouted down by his colleagues. Co-host Andrea Tantaros stressed that the killing was an isolated event that didn’t have any larger implications. “How do you stop a lunatic?” she asked. “This is not a political issue.”

Fox’s guarded response to an extremist’s killing spree was striking, considering that in the wake of the Boston Marathon bomb attack Fox News has gone all in (again) with its war on Islam as the channel fights its latest bigoted chapter in the War on Terror. It’s striking as Fox tries to blame a larger community for the act of two madmen because it’s the same Fox News that often can’t find time to even comment, let alone report, on what’s become regular, and often deadly, right-wing extremist attacks in America.

From neo-Nazi killers like Page, to a string of abortion clinic bombings, as well as bloody assaults on law enforcement from anti-government insurrectionists, acts of right-wing extreme violence continue to terrorize victims in the U.S. (“Fifty-six percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. since 1995 have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists.”) But Fox News is not concerned. And Fox News does not try to affix collective blame.

It’s clear that Fox is only interested in covering and hyping a single part of the War on Terror; the part that targets Muslims and lets Fox wallow in stereotypes. The part that lets Fox accuse Obama of being “soft” on Islamic terrorists and perhaps sharing a radical allegiance. The part that lets Fox advocate for bugging mosques and eliminating other Constitutional rights, and lets it unleash a collection of anti-Islam crusaders onto the cable airwaves.

Most importantly, Fox covers a War on Terror that lets it uniformly blame Muslims.

Keep in mind though, there’s been no reported evidence that anyone in the Cambridge, Mass., Muslim community knew about, condoned or helped plan the bombing perpetrated by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In fact, it’s possible the bomber brothers told nobody of their plan because local Muslims would have reported them to the police, the way a local imam tipped off Canadian officials who made arrests this week and thwarted an alleged rail bombing plot. (And the way local Muslims in Virginia and New York have helped prevent terror plots.)

Fox’s ugly religious attacks represent a brazen display of bigotry and bullying. The hypocrisy is that Fox News routinely downplays acts of political, and religious, violence from far-right extremists, while making sure not to condemn those indirectly associated with them.

Such acts have been legion. During a robust period of political violence last decade, women’s health clinics were attacked in January, May, and September 2003, January and July 2004, January, May, and July 2005, as well as May and December 2007, according to the National Abortion Federation.

Then in 2009, five clinics in Florida were the target of acid attacks.

More recently, two antiabortion firebombings occurred in 2011. And last year a woman’s health clinic in Wisconsin was damaged when a homemade bomb was set off on the building’s windowsill.

Of course, in May 2009, antiabortion extremist Scott Roeder shot and killed Dr. George Tiller while he attended church in Wichita, Kan.

And then there are the right-wing hate extremists who have plotted attacks against the government and minorities. Below is a partial list of attacks, or planned attacks, unleashed by radicals in recent years. The descriptions are taken from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2012 report, “Terror From the Right: Plots, Conspiracies and Racist Rampages Since Oklahoma City.”

h/t: AlterNet

Chechnya is a region in the large isthmus between the Black and Caspian Seas north of the Georgia and Armenia in the North Caucuses Mountains. It can be said to stand on the gate between east and west, with Russia to the north and Iran and Turkey only several hundred miles south. Most ethnic Chechens, by far the largest ethnic group, adhere to Sunni Islam. Ethnic Russians, mostly of transplanted Cossack origin, are predominantly Orthodox Christians. The region is also home to other smaller populations of eastern Caucuses peoples. Chechnya was part of the Ottoman Empire and then the Persian Empire until the early 19th century when it was ceded to Russia following their victory in the Russo-Persian War in 1813.

Chechnya has been host to conflict for centuries because of its strategic position between Russia and far eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire and the Middle or Near East. It sits atop the natural barrier of the Caucuses Mountains between two seas. Chechnya has been the site of many instances of brutal ethnic and religious oppression by the Ottomans, Persians, Russian Empire, the USSR, and the Russian Republic, as well as by regional separatist or independence leaders, in an effort to control or keep hold of the region. As a result, inhabitants are quite divided between political, ethnic, and religious allegiances. Roughly speaking, Chechnya has a history similar to regions such as Bosnia and Kosovo, which are subject to much the same tensions.

As hunger strikes at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay increasingly become a human rights concern, a new exhaustive report from a group of bipartisan former officials, and medical and legal experts declares that U.S. treatment of detainees after September 11, 2001 constituted torture.

The 577-page report comes out of more than two years of research, interviews, investigation, and analysis. It was led by staunch Republican Asa Hutchinson, who told the New York Times, “This has not been an easy inquiry for me, because I know many of the players … But I just think we learn from history.”

The report issues a series of unanimous recommendations. However, there was one point on which they could not reach consensus: whether or not the detention center should be closed. They repeatedly lamented the lack of declassified government information, and suggested that more access might enable them to reach a conclusion on that question. Below are seven key findings from the report.

1. U.S. forces used interrogation techniques that constitute torture, and many more constituted “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” — both violations of international treaty obligations. Techniques included sleep deprivation, stress positions, nudity, sensory deprivation, and threatening detainees with dogs. During a press conference today, former Ambassador Thomas Pickering lamented: “I spent my life as a diplomat and spent a good part of that life trying to importune other governments to life up to the rule of law. I was chagrined, embarrassed and in many ways felt undermined.

2. The nation’s most senior officials bear responsibility for “allowing and contributing to the spread of illegal interrogation techniques.” The report explains: “The most important element may have been to declare that the Geneva Conventions, a venerable instrument for ensuring humane treatment in time of war, did not apply to Al Qaeda and Taliban captives in Afghanistan or Guantánamo. The administration never specified what rules would apply instead. The other major factor was President Bush’s authorization of brutal techniques by the CIA for selected detainees.” The CIA also created its own detention and interrogation facilities in several other locations.

3. There is no compelling evidence that illegal torture techniques were effective. In fact, it is likely that torture techniques are less effective, since they often compel false confessions, and distinguishing what is useful from what is misleading is difficult at best.

4. Lawyers in President Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel repeatedly gave wrong advice that authorized illegal and torturous interrogation techniques. In doing so, they willfully ignored the advice of those in other departments with substantial expertise and “ did not properly serve their clients: the president the American people.

5. The United States violated its international legal obligations in capturing individuals and transferring them to another country for interrogation without legal process. From the Report: “After September 11, 2001, the extraordinary rendition program consisted of individuals being captured in one part of the world and transferred extrajudicially to another location for the purpose of interrogation rather than legal process. The U.N. officials involved did not notify the detainees’ families of their whereabouts, or provide the detainees with legal representation in any locations operated by the CIA as ‘black sites’ or for proxy detention. What’s more, the commission found that U.S. officials committed torture at these black sites, and that suspects were more likely than not to be tortured in the detaining countries, in spite of diplomatic assurances to the contrary.

6. Forced feeding techniques used on hunger strikers are a form of torture and must end. While the commission sympathizes with the U.S. interest in preventing inmate suicides, it calls for physicians to oversee this invasive and painful process, and to determine the competence of the detainees — man of whom have now lost hope that they will ever see legal process — to make their own decisions.

7. The U.S. government should not invoke the state-secrets privilege to block lawsuits seeking internationally recognized relief for torture. The Convention Against Torture requires states to ensure that the legal system contains an adequate means for torture redress; ours does not when every lawsuit is blocked by government claims of immunity without an opportunity for the judge to review, in secret, the information the government claims must remain secret.

Although commissioners did not come to a consensus on how to handle prisoners indefinitely detained at Guantánamo,  those who called for the detention center’s closure said detainees should get a trial either in U.S. courts or in a military commission with equivalent rights to the U.S. system. In recent weeks, increasing signs have emerged that the legal process for detainees who are getting a trial is not even close to living up to American values, with defendants’ legal files disappearing, and new evidence that intelligence officials were spying on confidential lawyer-client conversations.

Perpetually fuming about President Obama, Sean Hannity widened his rant Wednesday night on Fox News and condemned the “lapdog, kiss ass media” that allegedly lets Obama have his way. Echoing the same attack, Karl Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week that ”Mr. Obama is a once-in-a-generation demagogue with a compliant press corps,” while the anti-Obama Daily Caller pushed the headline,  ”Lapdog Media Seeking Lap To Lie In.”

Complaining about the “liberal media,” has been a running, four-decade story for conservative activists. But what we’re hearing more of lately is the specific allegation that the press has purposefully laid down for the Democratic president, and that it’s all part of a master media plan to help Democrats foil Republicans.

The rolling accusation caught my attention since I wrote a book called Lapdogs, which documented the Beltway media’s chronic timidity during the previous Republican administration, and particularly with regards to the Iraq War. I found it curious that Hannity and friends are now trying to turn the rhetorical tables with a Democrat in the White House, and I was interested in what proof they had to lodge that accusation against today’s press.

It turns out the evidence is quite thin. For instance, onenever-ending partisan cry has been the press has “ignored” the terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last year; that they’re protecting Obama. Yet theNew York Times and Washington Post have published nearly 800 articles and columns mentioning Benghazi since last September, according to Nexis.  

What the lapdog allegation really seems to revolve around is the fact that conservatives are angry that Obama remains popular with the public. Rather than acknowledge that reality, partisans increasingly blame the press and insist if only reporters and pundits would tell ‘the truth’ about Obama, then voters would truly understand how he’s out to destroy liberty and freedom and capitalism.

Sorry, but that’s not what constitutes a lapdog press corps. And to confuse chronic partisan whining with authentic media criticism is a mistake. The Hannity-led claim also isn’t accurate. Studies have shown that during long stretches of his first term, Obama was  hammered with “unrelentingly negative” press coverage.

By contrast, the lapdog era of the Bush years represented nothing short of an institutional collapse of the American newsroom. And it was one that, given the media’s integral role in helping to sell the Iraq War, did grave damage to our democracy.

Looking back at his tenure as Washington Post ombudsman, Michael Getler wrote in 2005 that the mainstream media’s performance in 2002 and 2003 likely represented the industry’s worst failing in nearly half a century. “How did a country on the leading edge of the information age get this so wrong and express so little skepticism and challenge?” Getler asked.

Meanwhile, given its current primetime lineup, sometimes it’s hard to recall that in 2003 MSNBC was so nervous about employing a liberal host who opposed Bush’s ordered invasion that it fired Phil Donahue preemptively, just weeks before war began. An internal memo warned that Donahue presented “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” (He was MSNBC’s highest rated host at the time of his firing.)

Months worth of chronic timidity and newsroom bowing-down to the White House’s war culture clearly helped pave the way to war.  

Laying out the reasons for an unprecedented invasion during his final, pre-war invasion press conference on March 6, 2003, Bush mentioned al-Qaida and the terrorist attacks of September 11 thirteen times in less than an hour. Not a single journalist that night challenged the presumed connection Bush was making between al-Qaida and Iraq, despite the fact that intelligence sources had publicly questioned any such association.

The egregious, look-the-other-way coverage continued long after the invasion. The U.S. media’s collective disinterest in Britain’s Downing Street Memo represented a perfect example of dogged lapdog behavior.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration says it might leave no troops in Afghanistan after December 2014, an option that defies the Pentagon’s view that thousands of troops may be needed to contain al-Qaida and to strengthen Afghan forces.

“We wouldn’t rule out any option,” including zero troops, Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser, said Tuesday.

“The U.S. does not have an inherent objective of ‘X’ number of troops in Afghanistan,” Rhodes said. “We have an objective of making sure there is no safe haven for al-Qaida in Afghanistan and making sure that the Afghan government has a security force that is sufficient to ensure the stability of the Afghan government.”

The U.S. now has 66,000 troops in Afghanistan, down from a peak of about 100,000 as recently as 2010. The U.S. and its NATO allies agreed in November 2010 that they would withdraw all their combat troops by the end of 2014, but they have yet to decide what future missions will be necessary and how many troops they would require.

At stake is the risk of Afghanistan’s collapse and a return to the chaos of the 1990s that enabled the Taliban to seize power and provide a haven for Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network. Fewer than 100 al-Qaida fighters are believed to remain in Afghanistan, although a larger number are just across the border in Pakistani sanctuaries.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said he foresees a need for a U.S. counterterrorism force in Afghanistan beyond 2014, plus a contingent to train Afghan forces. He is believed to favor an option that would keep about 9,000 troops in the country.

His statement could be interpreted as part of an administration negotiating strategy. On Friday Afghan President Hamid Karzai is scheduled to meet President Barack Obama at the White House to discuss ways of framing an enduring partnership beyond 2014.

The two are at odds on numerous issues, including a U.S. demand that any American troops who would remain in Afghanistan after the combat mission ends be granted immunity from prosecution under Afghan law. Karzai has resisted, while emphasizing his need for large-scale U.S. support to maintain an effective security force after 2014.

In announcing last month in Kabul that he had accepted Obama’s invitation to visit this week, Karzai made plain his objectives.

“Give us a good army, a good air force and a capability to project Afghan interests in the region,” Karzai said, and he would gladly reciprocate by easing the path to legal immunity for U.S. troops.

Karzai is scheduled to meet Thursday with Panetta at the Pentagon and with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the State Department.

Without explicitly mentioning immunity for U.S. troops, Obama’s top White House military adviser on Afghanistan, Doug Lute, told reporters Tuesday that the Afghans will have to give the U.S. certain “authorities” if it wants U.S. troops to remain.

Rhodes said Obama remains committed to further reducing the U.S. military presence this year, although the pace of that withdrawal will not be decided for a few months.

h/t: AP.org

U.S. military planners have begun to help organize a multinational proxy force to intervene next year in Mali, the famine-stricken, coup-wracked African country that has become a magnet for Islamist extremists, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

The international force would be led on the ground by several thousand Malian and West African troops but would receive extensive support from the Pentagon and the State Department, which would help train, equip and transport the troops, Obama administration officials said.

U.S. officials said the Pentagon’s planning efforts are contingent on the U.N. Security Council’s endorsement of the African-led force. U.N. officials and diplomats from other countries have said that U.N. approval is likely and that the military operation could begin next year.

The disclosure that U.S. military planners have started to prepare for the intervention was made by officials from the State Department and Pentagon at a Senate hearing Wednesday. It was the clearest sign yet that the administration has decided to take a more aggressive stance against al-Qaeda’s growing affiliate in North Africa and to try to restore order in Mali, a Saharan country on the verge of collapse.

A military operation in Mali, however, will inevitably be messy and unpredictable. The chronic instability in the country, one of the world’s poorest and riven by tribal divisions and corruption, has rapidly worsened since Islamist extremists took control of northern Mali — a chunk of territory the size of Texas — this year.

Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Africa, called northern Mali “the largest territory controlled by Islamic extremists in the world.”

Other U.S. officials said al-Qaeda’s North African affiliate, which for years attracted limited global attention, poses an increasing threat. 

U.S. law restricts the United States from providing direct military assistance to Mali because its democratically elected president was ousted in a coup in March. The coup was led by disaffected military officers who said the president, Amadou Toumani Toure, had not dealt effectively with the Islamist rebellion in the north.

The Pentagon had to withdraw Special Forces troops and other trainers and cut off military aid. The coup leader, Capt. Amadou Sanogo, had received training in the United States as part of a program to professionalize Mali’s tiny and ill-equipped army.

Administration officials said they want the remnants of Mali’s army to lead the international force. But because of U.S. law, the Pentagon must funnel equipment and other aid through West African nations, the European Union and other countries.

h/t: Craig Whitlock at Washington Post

Matt Steinglass makes a point about the whole Benghazi “coverup” narrative that I didn’t have space to make in my post yesterday. He agrees that Susan Rice did nothing wrong, but says there’s more to it:

This is absolutely right as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. At the most fundamental level, the reason it is absurd to suspect the existence of a “cover-up” over the Benghazi attack is that such a cover-up could not have had any conceivable goal. Back to the beginning: the underlying accusation about Benghazi is that the Obama administration deliberately mischaracterised the terrorist attack there as having grown out of a spontaneous demonstration because that would be less politically damaging. Such a cover-up would have made no sense because the attack would not have been less politically damaging had it grown out of a spontaneous demonstration. The attack on the Benghazi compound would not have been any less politically difficult for the administration if it had grown out of a riot, nor would any normal voter have expected it to be less politically damaging, nor would any normal campaign strategist have expected any normal voter to have expected it to be less politically damaging.

As best I can tell, the suggestion from the right has been that Obama didn’t want to admit that Benghazi was a terrorist attack because….well, I’m not sure, exactly. Something about how this would blow a hole in his claim to be decimating al-Qaeda via drone attacks. Or maybe it would remove some of the luster from being the killer of Osama bin Laden. Or something. But one way or another, the story is that Obama was deeply afraid of admitting that terrorists are still out there and want to do us harm.

This has never made a lick of sense. If anything, the continuing existence of terrorists justifies his drone attacks. And it certainly wouldn’t do him any harm in an election. The American public routinely rallies around a president responding to a terrorist attack.

Actually, there’s considerable evidence that on September 15, when Rice taped her appearances, the CIA told her there had been protests in Benghazi earlier in the day. The CIA turned out to be wrong about that, but it simply makes no sense for them to have made this up. If it does anything at all, it only makes their response look worse. This whole thing is a conspiracy theory with no conceivable motive. It’s  a wild, scattershot attack hoping to take down someone, somewhere, just to claim a scalp. It’s disgusting.

h/t: Kevin Drum at Mother Jones