Dave Lindorff

In reversing himself and declaring that the U.S. government will not release further photos in its possession of torture being practiced on captives held by the U.S. military and the CIA, President Obama is sounding increasingly like the Bush/Cheney administration before him.

It may well be that, as Obama says, release of those photos could lead to anger in the Islamic world and perhaps to recruitment gains among groups such as Al Qaeda that are attacking American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, but this is only true because at the same time, the Obama Administration is opposing the taking of any legal action against the people who authorized and promoted that torture.

If the Obama Administration were to open a full-scale legal investigation into torture, with an independent prosecutor assigned to go after anyone who violated the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Criminal Code outlawing torture and the authorization, condoning, or covering-up of torture, quite the opposite would happen: people in the Islamic world would see that this nation was coming to terms with those who abused the law.

As things stand, we have a only few people at the very bottom of the chain of command who are doing jail time or suffering administrative punishments for committing acts of torture and abuse that they believed had been ordered and authorized by leaders in the military, the Secretary of Defense's office, and the White House, but not one of those in authority who set the torture of captives in motion has been called to justice. Obama has endorsed that situation by again referring to the torture as just the actions of "a few people."

We're been here before, many times.

The U.S. causes massive civilian deaths through its indiscriminate use of heavy air power, and then tries to claim it's the enemy's fault for "hiding" among the civilians and "using them as shields."

In Vietnam, where the U.S. was fighting against a local revolutionary movement that was seeking to overthrow the puppet regime backed by America, American planes routinely bombed and napalmed villages, claiming that the Viet Cong were hiding amongst the peasants. Women, old men, and children would die in droves -- several million of them by the time that war was over -- and we'd be told it was all the fault of the Communists, who, we were told, had no regard for innocent life.

In Iraq, we took a city of 300,000, Fallujah, and effectively leveled it. Anyone who died there was presumed to be an insurgent, though the truth was, the Marines encircling the city before the onslaught only allowed fleeing women, girls, and male children who were under the age 12 to flee, sending older boys and men seeking to get out back into the city to meet their fate.

Just this week, the brave Marines in Iraq blew away a 12-year-old boy after someone tossed a grenade their way. Local people said the grenade had been tossed by an older man standing near the boy, who fled. The unlucky boy, who was just a kid who sold gum for a living, had not done anything, local people said.

What a joke the Obama Administration is becoming, as it keeps trying to prop up failing industry after failing industry.

First we had the president becoming First Car Salesman, offering federal guarantees for GM and Chrysler car warrantees so that potential car customers wouldn't turn away from those two companies' showrooms fearing that the manufacturers would go bust and leave them holding the bag. Then he started touting the cars themselves, saying they were "great products" and that people should go out and buy them.

Now we have the White House and Treasury Department assuring us that all 19 of the country's biggest banks are going to survive the credit crisis and the economic slump, and that they are all basically sound. Okay, so some of them, such as Bank of America that has to come up with $35 billion in new capital, need cash infusions or need their books juggled -- a total of $100 billion for all 19 banks -- but as Fed Chairman and Chief of Rehabilitation and Promotion (that's CRAP) for the banking industry Ben Bernanke, is assuring us, "All the banks in the stress tests are solvent."

Really. Forget about all those troubled assets folks. They are solvent. Honest.

In December 2001, an appellate judicial panel in New York state ruled that Yonkers City Court Judge Edmund G. Fitzgerald had to step down from his bench and leave his position following his disbarment for allegedly "misusing" $9,000 in a client's account prior to his election as a judge. In 2007, the North Carolina courts faced something of a dilemma when state judge James Ethridge, who had been disbarred the prior October by the North Carolina State Bar for "swindling an older woman of her house and savings" as an attorney six years earlier, refused to quit his judicial position. Under state law in North Carolina, judges are required to be licensed lawyers, so Judge Ethridge was barred from holding court or signing court orders, but he continued to collect his salary. Only the state's Judicial Standards Commission, or the state legislature, through an impeachment, could remove him from his job.

Judge Bybee, who sits on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Nevada, could eventually present the federal judicial system with a similar dilemma. Bybee, prior to his short tenure as an appellate judge that began in 2003, was assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, where he wrote a lengthy memo for the White House justifying the use of torture techniques such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, body slamming, and other measures on captives in the Bush/Cheney so-called "War" on Terror.

by Dave Lindorff

For almost a generation, the Democrats in Congress have been able to pretend to be the party of ordinary working people, the party of progressives, and the inheritor of the mantel of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, all the while doing little of substance and catering primarily to the interests of Wall Street and the nation's corporate interests.

The Democrats managed this sleight of hand for so long by claiming that while they had the best of intentions, really. Their inability to pass legislation, even when they were in the majority in both houses of Congress, was, they claimed, simply caused by the threat of bills being filibustered to death by a Republican minority.

That excuse has continued to be paraded out to this day, with the party currently having 58 seats in the Senate.

But the excuse is vanishing. It appears likely that Al Franken has won his tight race defeating former Sen. Norm Coleman in Minnesota, with the contest all over but the shouting. (A 3-judge state panel already found Franken to be ahead by 312 votes, with no outstanding issues in the count, and public opinion in the state widely favors Coleman finally conceding.)

President Obama deserves credit for breaking the half-century-long taboo in American politics of dealing with Cuba, and meeting with Raul Castro, Cuba's current leader. He also deserves credit for dealing in a friendly manner with Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

But what is this crap about "talking with" our enemies or with countries that have been "hostile" towards us?

It is certainly true that America doesn't like Communism, and doesn't like having properties owned by its citizens taken over, which happened in the wake of the Cuban revolution, but nationalization is a right that many sovereign nations have exercised in their national interest, and besides that, what has Cuba ever done that would show it to be an enemy of the U.S.?

If the day comes that Congress finally does its duty and begins an impeachment effort against 9th Circuit Federal Appeals Judge Jay Bybee, the former Bush assistant attorney general who in 2002 authored a key memo justifying the use of torture against captives in the Afghanistan invasion and the so-called "War on Terror," it would be fitting punishment to watch him squirm as his own words as a judge were played back to him.

It was as Appeals Court Judge Bybee, sitting on a case being heard in 2006 by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that he wrote the following words:

"The only thing we have to enforce our judgements (sic) is the power of our words. When these words lose their ordinary meaning -- when they become so elastic that they may mean the opposite of what they appear to mean -- we cede our own right to be taken seriously." (Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1309 v. Laidlaw Transit Services, Inc.).

Yet causing words to become "so elastic that they may mean the opposite of what they appear to mean" was precisely the goal of the 48-page memo, just released by the Obama Administration, which Bybee wrote for the Bush/Cheney White House authorizing the use of what any ordinary person, and indeed the U.S. Criminal Code, would define as torture against captives held in Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere.