The enduring scandal at Guantanamo

Yes, and don’t you know that not voting for Obama will mean a Republican will get in and things will be even worse? What’s wrong with you, anyway?

Well given that even left liberals have by now embarked on their quadrennial circling of the Democratic wagons there sadly won’t be much public outrage at the US kidnapping and detention regime any time soon.

Far too many Democrats stopped caring seriously about this issue long ago, when it became clear that Obama was unwilling to spend real political capital on it. His unfulfilled promise to close Gitmo no doubt helped him win that Nobel Prize, but it’s accomplished little else. These wagons are pretty permanently circled. Like most Republican voters’ commitment to budget balancing, most Democratic voters’ commitment to questioning the operations of the national security state tends to go on hiatus as soon as a member of their party wins the White House.

There is a mean streak in the American national character that is greatly underestimated. It is exacerbated during the paranoia and war fever outbreaks that mar our history at regular intervals. It wasn’t US citizens who were interned in camps in WWII; it was “Japs,” demonized by wartime propaganda. Similarly, the unfortunates in Guantanamo were represented as the demons who caused the 9/11 attacks, the “worst of the worst.” But to let innocent men go free means to let go of the deeply satisfying revenge myth.

What kind of people jail and torture innocent men and prolong their abuse even after their innocence is known? A wicked people who deserve to be punished. Our punishment is the impoverishment of our economy by feckless wars and predatory plutocrats, which will be felt even by those Americans who remain proudly indifferent to our humiliation before the world.

If the online community includes law blogs, especially international law blogs like Opinio Juris, IntLawGrrls, and EJIL Talk!, there’s been a fair amount of coverage of Boumediene v. Bush (2008) as well as the topic of detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.* Unfortunately, as far as I can asecertain, these blogs are not read by a significant number of “non-law” folks. I urge readers to have a look at them. There are also a few other blogs (you can check out the links at the aforementioned), like the Constitutional Law Prof Blog, that cover this subject matter as well, I urge CT readers to regularly visit them, especially but not exclusively for the legal take on things.

* See, for instance, this: http://www.intlawgrrls.com/2011/01/guantanamo-9-years-on.html

8:Well, Chris, that’s because you live in a freer country. The last 10-30 years have pretty much put the American left into a state of psychic shock and near accepted abjection. There are still those who pretend the system can work, but they aren’t clapping very hard. The rest of us hit the voting booth and make our rotted cultish offerings to that absent and irrelevant deity, like the zombies in the shopping mall. OWS is nought but a nostalgic ritual, even should it reach ten million in the Mall.

We are ruled not ruling, and apparently we like it that way.

For what it’s worth…

“Indeed Rich, I’ve not said a word …..”

What?

Here’s what you wrote in your post:
“Whilst it is good to see this issue getting more coverage in the mainstream media in the UK and the US, it is depressing how little uptake there has been among politicians and, indeed, the online community. The long-term detention, mistreatment and probable torture of people who have never been convicted of anything, ought to be a matter uniting people across the political spectrum who care about human rights. Unfortunately, outside of a small coterie of activists, the best you get is indifference or even active hostility”

So when people start to discuss why this is, you deplore the tendency that Americans have to make it all about their general election. All right, let’s make it about the UK then. What’s the reason for the silence of people from the UK that you yourself refer to?

(@17) I agree Bruce. That’s why I said: it’s about congressional .

If the online community includes law blogs, especially international law blogs like Opinio Juris, IntLawGrrls, and EJIL Talk!, there’s been a fair amount of coverage of Boumediene v. Bush (2008) as well as the topic of detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

I’m sure lots of blogs have given at least intermittent attention to these issues, not just the international law blogs. See, just for one instance, here.

There are tens of thousands of active blogs that at least occasionally deal with current political issues (aren’t there? maybe hundreds of thousands) and no one can possibly keep up with more than a tiny, tiny fraction of them. I would therefore be very wary of making or accepting confident assertions about what “the online community” is or isn’t paying attention to. For that matter, iirc, JQ right here at CT had a post not too long ago which generated a long comment thread that dealt in part with these issues.

Our best chance, though a weak one, is for the Supreme Court to shift on some of these heartbreaking issues.

In order for that to happen, ever, Obama needs to be re-elected.

Why is it so difficult for otherwise highly intelligent people to grasp that, under Obama, there is a steady rightward pull in the movement of US government policy towards authoritarian rule? It is no accident that Obama has exceeded Bush in attacks on whistle-blowers, and it is no fault of Congress that Obama asserts a power to assassinate US citizens. He has now signed into law a bill that allows indefinite detention of US citizens – without due process. These are conscious decisions made to aggrandize the power of the national security state at a time when the Al Qaeda threat is fading away to nothing. Our government, formerly a republic, is now a presidential dictatorship in which anyone can be arrested and executed, extra-legally, if accused of “terrorism” by the President.

Obama is governing in a manner that directly contradicts his campaign promises, and this is a fundamental betrayal of the trust of the electorate. That is just a hard, cold fact, and no rationalization will alter it.

Agreed, the media indifference (including that of the blogosphere) on this stuff is appalling and shameful. Though Glenn Greenwald irritates me, I admire him for being the one consistent public voice on this stuff; unfortunately, his consistency also makes him easy to dismiss (“oh there he goes again”).

I have a legal acquaintance who has been working quietly on this stuff for years now. I can’t remember if he actually represents someone at Guantanamo or if his involvement is more general, but it is ongoing. I wonder if I could get him to consent to an interview….

@8: The comments here get completely hijacked by fringe extremists Chris. It is at the point to where political discussions here are frankly useless. Every single thread is filled with people shouting about how Obama Is Evil (literally and repeatedly claimed by multiple people in multiple threads here).

The factual claims being made about what Obama has done are sweeping. Alternate explanations of what he has done are summarily dismissed with nasty propaganda and insults. The atmosphere on this topic and on this blog stinks. It’s toxic, extreme, and anyone who disagrees with the ranters is subject to abuse. Are the writers here happy with what political discussions on CT have become?

I imagine “Marc” is a send-up? As for “making it all about US general elections”, I was under the impression that the nation detaining people at Guantanamo, Bagram, in Mogadishu and who knows where is the US so the silence of people in that country on that issue seems particularly troubling to me. And that silence is largely motivated by party politics, aptly demonstrated by “Marc” here. If Chris had written about torture perpetrated by the UK and not sufficiently discussed I wouldn’t have dreamed of bringing up the US elections. Either way apologies, I certainly didn’t intend to derail anything.

From the eastern side of the pond, the continuing detention of Shaker Aamer, who is clearly innocent, on account of the US Congress having arranged that the US Secretary of Defense “would be personally reponsible for any future criminal actions by the released inmate” seems clearly lunatic. If he’s innocent, what reason is there to suppose he would commit any criminal actions, having so far committed none?

But that is not to say he should not have been detained before his innocence became clear (I don’t know when this was apparent). Detention without trial is not necessarily indefensible. Detention in wartime of enemy combatants as PoWs is obviously right. Defining what is a war, and who is an enemy combatant, is less obvious. Consider the detention, even execution, of anti-Treaty forces in the Irish Civil War (hello, P O’Neill, it’s your answer I’m looking for).

Consider also, for the internment of civilians, an admittedly extreme case. Suppose you are the relevant authority in London, early summer 1940, in a situation dangerous beyond anything in recent American history (possibly delete “recent”). You have among you a politician of very considerable courage, experience, intelligence, and talent: good war record, former Cabinet Minister in a Labour government, one whose proposals for dealing with the Depression were highly regarded (and will, though you don’t know it, be praised by some historians). He is an extremely gifted public speaker, with many devoted followers. Unfortunately he has also become a Fascist, and a supporter of Mussolini and Hitler. Attempts to prosecute him under the law have uniformly failed (did I mention he is highly intelligent?)

So, do you intern Sir Oswald Mosley without trial?

J. Otto Pohl, internment of enemy aliens has always been carried out in wartime. The Germans interned P.G. Woodhouse as well. Also, you and Chris seem to be missing the legal authority of the detentions is coming taking POWs. I really can’t complain about the existence of POW camps: they are a great deal preferable to the alternative of slaughtering prisoners. The issues around Guantanamo are about overreach of the POW authority and its use as an alternative to civilian courts, not about the existence of POW camps.

Watson Ladd: Many of those interned were not aliens they were US citizens. They were legally entitled to the protections of the US constitution and other laws. Instead they were interned without charge or due process. Why was it okay to do with US citizens born in Germany or Austria, but wrong to do to Japanese residents (Issei) who were not citizens? My feeling is the difference is due to leftist anti-German racism. The same factor that led to Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans and the post-WII expulsion of the Sudeten Germans.

People lump the Issei (non-citizens) and Nissei (citizens) together all the time. So why is interning permanent resident Germans (green card holders) during WWII okay, but doing so to permanent resident Japanese wrong? The US government condemned it, apologized to the internees, and provided token reparations under Reagan. Liberals had long condemned it. In contrast neither the government or any liberals ever said a negative word about the similar treatment of Germans including those that were naturalized US citizens. I really would like somebody to justify this differential treatment. Because it appears on the face of it to be motivated by racism.

Chris, drop the ban-hammer on some of these guys. You know who they are, and you knew before you posted.

The general election in the U.S. is irrelevant to that?

Yes. Given “how little uptake there has been among politicians,” as Chris said, it’s pretty safe to assume that no prominent political figures from either party are going to expend any political capital on this issue. There is a solid bipartisan consensus on this — again, in practice if not in rhetoric — and by definition, that renders the election irrelevant.

“There is a solid bipartisan consensus on this—again, in practice if not in rhetoric—and by definition, that renders the election irrelevant.”

No, it doesn’t. Part of the question was why there was so little uptake among the online community. If there wasn’t a general election going on, people like Marc would not show up and write things like:

“The factual claims being made about what Obama has done are sweeping. Alternate explanations of what he has done are summarily dismissed with nasty propaganda and insults. The atmosphere on this topic and on this blog stinks. It’s toxic, extreme, and anyone who disagrees with the ranters is subject to abuse. Are the writers here happy with what political discussions on CT have become?”

Bandwagonism like this does affect a good number of people who would otherwise speak out against policies associated with Obama.

And it affects politicians too. Why have so few politicians taken it up? Because it is widely understood at this point that asking why people are still in Guantanimo means criticizing Obama, and politicians in the left-to-center don’t want to be seen doing this — probably on either side of the Atlantic.

The factual claims being made about what Obama has done are sweeping.

Obama’s severe human-rights failure re Gitmo, and in general his enthusiastic embrace and expansion of some of the worst aspects of the national security state, are indeed factual. The things that are sweeping are your self-willed ignorance of matters about which you could easily inform yourself if you cared to, and the fatuity of your comment.

One thing I’ve wondered about is if the location of the prison makes any difference in the way we think about it. It’s almost as if the placement of gitmo in a foreign and communist country removes the obligations of due process and legal defense. It would be easier to point out if gitmo were across the street from say, San Quentin prison, that one population has been convicted of various crimes whereas the other population has essentially been kidnapped and abused for life.

Nice montage Obama: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8USRg3h4AdE

Gitmo prisoners are too scary to be put in only a medium security prison: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,523278,00.html

@35 Many large prisons have their own zip codes.

grismcthorn

People in this thread have stated, as obvious fact, that the US is still torturing people in the same way that this was done under Bush. Back it up.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten about Bagram.

More than a dozen former detainees claimed they were menaced and held for weeks at the Joint Special Operations Command site last year, forced to strip naked, then kept in solitary confinement in windowless, often cold cells with lights on 24 hours a day, according to Daphne Eviatar of the group Human Rights First, which interviewed them in Afghanistan.

A man called Sher Agha, who spent six days in the prison in autumn 2009, told the BBC, “They call it the Black Hole,” adding, “When they released us they told us we should not tell our stories to outsiders because that will harm us.” Like all the men interviewed by the BBC, he also explained that the cells were “very cold.” Describing the process of sleep deprivation, another former prisoner, Mirwais, who said he was held for 24 days in the secret prison, stated, “I could not sleep, nobody could sleep because there was a machine that was making noise. There was a small camera in my cell, and if you were sleeping they’d come in and disturb you.”

Tedra @26: unfortunately, his consistency also makes him easy to dismiss (“oh there he goes again”)

Yes, a lot of people do say this about Greenwald; also about Chomsky, Krugman, Nader et al. I don’t get it. Why is unpredictability more interesting? I have a hard time predicting exactly what David Brooks, Michiko Kakutani, Michael Kinsley, Andrew Sullivan, or Leon Wieseltier will say about anything in particular, except that I’m fairly sure it will be of no interest.

“These cases are just one tiny part of that.”

Indeed, see Jonathan Hafetz, Habeas Corpus after 9/11: Confronting America’s New Global Detention System. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

@Geo a lot of people do say this about Greenwald; also about Chomsky, Krugman, Nader et al. I don’t get it. Why is unpredictability more interesting?

Well, knowing that Mr. X. is going to always say X makes one feel one doesn’t have to really read the details, often. I’m not saying it’s a laudable reaction, and particularly when one is playing the Cassandra role, of course one is going to end up repeating oneself a lot. But it does have a certain “preaching to the choir” effect, which is really unfortunate. I don’t know what it is about human nature that causes this, I just think it happens a lot.

Clarification: a fed. court ordered them to be released.

And the point is not that Obama is “worse” than Bush. Of course he’s not worse. The point is that Bush created and implemented a bureaucratic structure and legal regime that permits, encourages, and legitimates torture, abduction, disappearances, and indefinite detention without trial, up to and including murder, and Obama has done nothing to dismantle this apparatus or to prosecute the criminals who devised and made use of it. It’s all still in place, just waiting for the next fascist president who wants to make use of it.

@31: Bush set up a system that used torture extensively. You’re claiming that “well-spoken minority President enacts an even more reprehensible program of suppression of liberties”?

Back it up.

The facts remain stubborn. Obama is indeed worse than Bush with regard to the claimed right to execute US citizens abroad without due process of law. Obama is indeed worse than Bush with regard to the harassment and prosecution of government whistle-blowers. Obama is indeed worse than Bush in being the first President since the Red Scare to sign a law permitting indefinite detention of US citizens.

As far as torture goes, Obama’s refusal to prosecute any torturers shows the depth of his opposition to this practice. The lesson to US government torturers is plain: you will not be punished. Obama’s decision to “end” torture by Presidential order allows any successor to resume it by the same executive whim.

Obama the candidate represented himself as a man of principle who would defend the Constitution. Once in office, he behaved as a cynical politician willing to further shred the Constitution to preserve and expand the powers of the Presidency.

for anyone who believes in the power of activism, and finds Guantanamo a disgrace — here’s what just came into my Twitter Timeline:

http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=6oJCLQPAJiJUG&b=6645049&aid=517021

Straightwood @24: “Why is it so difficult for otherwise highly intelligent people to grasp that, under Obama, there is a steady rightward pull in the movement of US government policy towards authoritarian rule?”

It is a point of cleavage, and it clearly has something to do with the alignment of partisan politics with ideological divisions regarding both cultural politics and economic politics. It inspires a lot of passion, too, which is kind of interesting.

There are a number of blog-prominent voices, that follow a line not far from that represented on this thread by Marc — Scott Lemieux, Mark Kleiman, Brad DeLong, come to mind. It is an insiders’ argument, based on the continued efficacy and legitimacy of partisan politics, on a faith in incrementalism and a preservationist instinct. And, it covers much broader territory than the civil liberties and law of war issues raised by Guantanamo.

My own views are those of an “outsider”. Though a life-long liberal Democrat, I won’t vote for Obama. I think Obama is evil. He’s acting to prevent electoral politics from having any effect, preventing the partisan left from opposing normalizing of the authoritarian state and the corporate plutocracy, which it serves. Failing to prosecute banksters is a bigger deal than failing to prosecute torturers, imho, but Guantanamo remains a useful litmus test for the true corrosive acidity of Obama’s thinly-disguised right-wing politics.

Obama is not personally responsible, though, for the shallow, near-sighted popular politics of the mass of the People. He just caters to it, as a politician must. The nearly blind faith in incrementalism and preservationism may be philosophical for some bloggers, but for most people, it is just the result of shallow thinking, cultivated by a corporate Media propaganda operation, feeding off false debates between neo-cons and neo-liberals.

Bush through nearly all the years of his malfeasances, grew unpopular in almost exact proportion to changes in the price of gas. The American People — or a very large and angry part of them — want to preserve a gated, Suburban (or ex-urban) Dream, built on cheap gas. They really do not want to be bothered with the details. Guantanamo and civil liberties are such details; they are outside the gates.

Bertram is offended by the emphasis on the protection of “citizens” in such rhetoric. I suppose the reference to “citizens” is a forlorn attempt to arouse some sense of solidarity in that gated suburbia. It’s silly, really. A country, which would countenance going to war in Iraq, with no provocation and no plan for occupation and reconstruction, isn’t going to be troubled by high principle in this relatively trivial, individual cases. For those few of us paying attention, though, they remain revealing, about the quality of leadership in the twilight of empire.

I cannot say my own views have much to recommend them. I feel powerless, and deeply pessimistic. Of course, I am powerless. But, sometimes, I wish I had taken the blue pill.

68: “twilight of empire?”

I am apparently even more pessimistic.

Otherwise great, as usual.

I have been hoping since 2003 that some other nation, or community of nations might help the US out by arresting and trying Bush/Obama/henchlings for their war crimes and other crimes against humanity. Yes, this would inspire broad talk of total war, but that might be what liberals need to take responsibility for their country and politics. My expectation, or at least hope, is that those circumstances would finally devolve to the domestic disorder and civil war we obviously require. I certainly don’t wish those overseas to suffer for America’s total corruption than they already have.

Unfortunately, the decent left would probably either sign on for war with Brussels and wave their hands and say the law limits their options. So I have no answers either.

Trying not to be totally despairing about this, I observe that there were 146 House votes against this abomination (Dems split 93-93, Reps 190-43). Is there some way of campaigning to ensure that the removal of these appalling powers gets debated each year when the Authorization Act is renewed? That might help to start a broader reversal.

Reading this, it sounds pretty lame, but are there any better ideas?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/100236334

There isn’t time. The reserve army of the unemployed suitable for drafting has been created, the laws and precedents written for domestic control, the officers and non-coms experienced and hardened in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Mukden Incident or Invasion of Poland is probably months away (Gulf of Tonkin would not create enough complicity.)

It is a new and interesting variety, but an aggressive totalitarian imperialism is exactly what it is, and I think most of the world will put on the dog collars of their free choice after the next few million dead and the US uses nukes again.

It was too late ten years ago.

Let me just say again, tiresome though it must be, that a lot of discussion about the NDAA seems way overwrought. It’s not a Suspension. If the executive tries to act like it is a Suspension, it’ll get whacked. It is, rather, a codification of the holding in Hamdi, and the point upon which so many words are being spilled is the least controversial part of the Hamdi decision: a person who is both (a) a member of the enemy force and (b) a citizen of the US, can be held as a POW under the laws of war. Being a citizen does not get you out of being held.

I’m as mad at Obama as the next guy, but compared to appealing Bihani and Latif, signing the NDAA is pretty small potatoes.

(Correction: should be’litigating Bihani [rather than simply releasing him] and appealing Latif.’)

a person who is both (a) a member of the enemy force and (b) a citizen of the US, can be held as a POW under the laws of war. Being a citizen does not get you out of being held.

You know more about this than I do, but surely you don’t mean held ‘as a POW’. POW’s have to be well treated, can’t be questioned, all the Geneva Convention nine yards. The problem with how we’re holding detainees is that we’re holding them as something other than POWs. (And of course the other problem is that there’s no necessary process for determining whether a person is “a member of the enemy force”.)

There isn’t time. The reserve army of the unemployed suitable for drafting has been created, the laws and precedents written for domestic control, the officers and non-coms experienced and hardened in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Mukden Incident or Invasion of Poland is probably months away (Gulf of Tonkin would not create enough complicity.)

It is a new and interesting variety, but an aggressive totalitarian imperialism is exactly what it is, and I think most of the world will put on the dog collars of their free choice after the next few million dead and the US uses nukes again.

This comment, the whole thing but especially the parts about ‘another invasion of Poland’ and use of nukes, is truly bizarre (this is the mildest word I can think of), as are some of b. mcmanus’s earlier ones — for various reasons which I’ve decided, having written and erased them, that it would be a waste of time to enumerate.

Meredith @67 — habeas corpus has to do with being able to challenge one’s detention as unlawful; it’s not a right not to be detained. (If a cop burst into your house and arrested you for no reason, s/he would have violated your rights, but not habeas corpus.)

To add to Uncle Kvetch at 14, Ingrid at 66, and JQ at 72: If you feel moved to do more than comment on a blog, one thing you can do is give money to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which continues to be a voice in the wilderness litigating against these issues. Or, if you’re in Britain (or an American able to make a foreign-currency donation), Reprieve.

LB, as you might know, Congress already struck your right to complain that your conditions violate Geneva — section 5 of the MCA (but the government argues that you couldn’t anyway, under footnote 14 of Eisentrager. Funny how that footnote is such a big deal and footnote 15 of Rasul is ‘just a footnote.’) [I think MCA section 5 as asserted by the government is a Suspension, and am waiting for a ruling.]

CB, civil liberties are very different from financial statutes and regulations. They derive from the Constitution but only really exist when enforceable by a court. So many people want to talk about WOT civil liberties, and pretend like the courts don’t exist or are irrelevant. In addition to being incorrect, and leading to faulty analysis — surely NDAA secyion 1021(e) should mean something to the hyperventilators — it leads to a serious misunderstanding of the politics. To have a Congress or a President who can/will implement, say, my, vision of how this ought to go, you have to look way out over the horizon: a President more sensitive to liberties and less interested in pandering to fear and ignorance than any in my lifetime. (Carter is a possible exception). Or a Congress that is utterly alien to anything. For a Supreme Court that recognizes that we’ve had the ‘unraveling’ foreshadowed in Justice O’Connor’s plurality opinion, though, a couple of Souters would be fine. That is, one or two net gains from the Democratic mainstream will be sufficient. Replacing Judges Randolph and Ginsburg on the DC Circuit from that same mainstream will balance Judges Brown and Kavanaugh. Re-election of Obama isn’t a hopelessly futile gesture, but is possibly, and even likely, sufficient to roll back the worst excesses. Not because he will stop pandering to fear and ignorance, but because a Judge Brown is so far out of the stream occupied by such as Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury (his Bagram habeas case is not conceivable from the current line up at the Circuit).

Sorry, CB above should be JQ. You all look alike to me . . .

There was a great liberal champion who passed Medicare and mangled arms to get the Civil Right Act passed. That didn’t stop us. We still chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

And we were right to do so.

Re: circling the wagons…

Take it as read that I am upset and disappointed about several aspects of the Obama Presidency — these human/civil rights issues are paramount among them. But I will work just as hard as in 2008 to reelect the man.

Electoral politics is not about my feelings of disappointment or regret — it’s not about me at all. My votes are not expressions of my personality, like so many rock band t-shirts. Elections are not opportunities for ‘authentic’ human action. Elections are about choosing people to do jobs. Sadly, the United States has a two-party system and one of the major parties has totally abdicated any interest in actually governing the country (cf. debt ceiling, etc.), which leaves us at this sorry impasse. The Democratic primary is the Presidential Election these days, and it looks like there isn’t one scheduled until 2016. We thought we had the right guy, and now we’re stuck with him.

(No one asked, but I predict Obama will win in a walk. Incumbent U.S. Presidents are very difficult to defeat, even relatively unpopular ones. George HW Bush would have held on if Perot hadn’t gotten involved, and Clinton was a much better candidate than anyone the GOP has right now.)

All of that said, covering up wrongdoing just because it’s the wrongdoing of the candidate I’ll vote for is pathetic and unprincipled, I agree, and when the Dem left does it, it can get pretty nauseating. But our political culture has made proper accountability so extremely costly that we can’t really afford it right now: ideally, we would be in a position where we could vote out a President over this sort of issue, but, well, we need to hold the White House in case of Supreme Court vacancies — who are actually the people tasked with taking care of this sort of issue; if someone is botching the job, it’s them (in other words, I agree with Shelley @22).

Charley, I’m willing to bet you know several tons more about this than I do…

What are the odds that Obama will actually nominate judges who could be counted upon to rule in moral, constitutional ways, and that Congress will confirm them if he does?

I’d love to have reasons to believe I am currently unduly pessimistic about this kind of thing.

Keith@75:
With respect to British detention in 1939 -45 , it is important to note that very few Germans in the UK were “locked up at once”, only after 22nd May 1940. You may think that an “irrational act of unthinking discrimination”, but I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate, given the circumstances (including what was believed to be true, even if it may not have been). The Germans had overrun Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France with astonishing speed, and this was widely thought to be due in part to assistance from German sympathisers in those countries. In Norway, that really happened, through Quisling and his followers (in Belgium and France, any assistance was most likely due to the local Communists).

So, if there were an invasion of the UK it was rational to suppose that German sympathisers would help it; and equally rational to intern such sympathisers before they could give any help. In the case of UK fascists, internment under 18B was quite selective, because the British authorities knew a great deal about them.

In the case of German citizens living in the UK, all liable to internment under normal international law, they did not know so much, and could rationally doubt their ability to distinguish at once between harmless Germans who had no intention of helping Hitler, or Nazi sympathisers who had come for exactly that reason (and what better cover for such than as political refugees?), or Communist sympathisers who like their French and Belgian colleagues would favour the Germans in an anti-imperialist war.

Therefore, it was not necessarily unthinking discrimination, at a time of desperate peril, to intern all Germans of military age, refugee or otherwise, and sort them out later. Most of them were released within six months, after being sorted out by rational tribunals.

Italians, of course, were not interned at all till after Mussolini declared war in June 1940: similar considerations applied.

Guantanamo’s different of course, very different.

Mosley? Yes, I do intern him. I let him live in a house, with his wife, in his own country. I don’t torture him, and I release him when Berlin falls, no later. And this is during a war for survival.

In reality, Mosley was released in 1943.

“civil liberties are very different from financial statutes and regulations. They derive from the Constitution but only really exist when enforceable by a court. So many people want to talk about WOT civil liberties, and pretend like the courts don’t exist or are irrelevant. In addition to being incorrect, and leading to faulty analysis—surely NDAA secyion 1021(e) should mean something to the hyperventilators—it leads to a serious misunderstanding of the politics. To have a Congress or a President who can/will implement, say, my, vision of how this ought to go, you have to look way out over the horizon: a President more sensitive to liberties and less interested in pandering to fear and ignorance than any in my lifetime.”

I’ve heard this theory from CharleyCarp a few times, and while it would be good for it to work, I’m skeptical about it. This is the rise of the technocrats all over again, essentially, except that this time it’s judges as technocrats.

It’s an analysis that accepts that judges are political actors — that the politics of the U.S. will in practice depend on how judges rule, and that their decisions about whether we will have civil liberties or not are essentially unconstrained by the Constitution or any other written source, because what matters is whether they decide to enforce. Yet there is no political pressure on the upper-level judges. At the highest level, they are appointed for life. And there is no widely held political theory, as such, that would encourage them to do what we think is right, since the politicians involved range roughly from Obama to Bush.

So the judges are the ECB, and the main guidance they follow is what the rich people who they talk to expect. That being the case, we’re in for a prolonged period of austerity in civil rights.

Mods: correct that paren c thing. I didn’t realize the blog would play games with section numbers.

@8 Chris, really, if you don’t know that this is about politics, sheesh, what do you think it’s about? Ultimately, all politics is about the next election, whether it be 1 month or 3 years away. It isn’t one year in four: This became a non-issue a few femtoseconds after the last presidential election because partisans are like that. Yes, even partisans that you may usually agree with. Just because you haven’t noticed this until we’re almost into a new election is hardly the fault of United Statesians. (NB: “Americans” is not the correct term)

@28 Only if “fringe extremist” means everyone who isn’t in the 20% of voters who fall into the Yellow Dog Democrat camp. He doesn’t have to be evil, just afraid of the blowback when one understandably upset ex-detainee decides (and probably quite rightly) to do something about the NATO powers parked in his native country. But I wouldn’t blame the media blackout on this on Obama: I blame it on the media and the rest of the country. Obama has probably thought about this problem more than most people in this country, but the media, and especially the left punditry, dropped it as an issue because it was no longer useful as a club to wield against Bush. If only the public would have a memory that lasted longer than 4-8 years so that people would remember and consider, “Hey, wait, wasn’t this a bad thing when the other guy was doing it? So why is it okay now?” and “Hey, wait, wasn’t this an acceptable thing when our guy was doing it? So why is it bad now?”

If the US public needs to stop doing anything, we need to stop thinking of the president as someone who can create actual sea change in policy. They are figureheads at the head of large organizations whose players are mostly interchangeable. Sure, they have a certain amount of power, but they can only tweak around the fringes, and they have a constituency to play to. Bush was not a lot different than Clinton, Obama is not a lot different than Bush. The only two people in Congress who are markedly different than their peers are Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders; they will never be elected President.

That being the case, we’re in for a prolonged period of austerity in civil rights.

There’s certainly a lot of evidence favoring hopelessness, but surely this is too bleak. Obama and the Democrats lack anything resembling political courage, but they still appoint middlin’ decent judges. To the extent that Republicans can be kept out of the presidency when key appointments are made, we’ll get a non-radical court.

Does anybody know what “substantially support” means? Watch for this phrase to appear in neo-Fascist bills introduced in Congress, such as HR 3166, the “Enemy Expatriation Act.” This fine piece of proposed legislation lets the government strip an American of citizenship and deport him to some black hole if he substantially supports hostilities against the USA. Is there any doubt that Obama would sign this legislation?

Please wake me when the nightmare is over.

Define “affiliate.” Not me. Try Watson.

Ask Judge Brown. Henderson or Randolph can undoubtedly give you answers as well.

In discussing the treatment of the Issei during internment it should be remembered that under the law of the time the US did not grant citizenship to Asian immigrants. They were foreign nationals because we didn’t give them a choice.

I agree with Watson Lad that the root of the current problem is the declaration of war against al Qaeda. Indefinite detention is fine when you have POWs from a uniformed enemy, but it’s pretty problematic (an understatement!) when dealing with a non-traditional combatant like al Qaeda and even the Taliban. Ditto the drone strikes. Obama is at least making horrible policy based on a plausible reading of the law, as opposed to the previous administration where they would just pull stuff out of their ass., which is my damning with faint praise of the current president.

Henri Vieuxtemps may be more right than he thinks in saying that Guantanamo is just a symptom of a bigger problem. The treatment of prisoners there (short of waterboarding), and that of Bradley Manning, are pretty common in the US prison system. Heck, if transferring Guantanamo detainees to a civilian prison meant that they were to be housed in a Special Housing Unit they’d be better off staying in Cuba.

The most I’ll qualify that statement is to say that a transfer to a SHU would not improve their treatment. They are pretty goddamn bad, to the point of driving prisoners to insanity and suicide:

http://www.aclu.org/blog/prisoners-rights/supermax-prisons-cruel-inhuman-and-degrading

Some important news on Parwan (Bagram) which is worse than Guantanamo Bay in every way, including number of detainees (1700) and rights accorded them (none). Karzai has just demanded the prison be turned over to Afghan control. I’m surprised this isn’t a bigger story. I happened on it in the Wikipedia article which linked to WaPo.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/war-zones/karzai-demands-transfer-of-us-military-prison-to-afghan-control/2012/01/05/gIQAm5b9cP_story.html

if Panetta decides against release, the inmate has standing to challenge

Interesting idea. What sort of forum do you suppose might hear this challenge?

116: I’m surprised this isn’t a bigger story.

That is interesting, but not really newsworthy (in the U.S. at least) because:

1 – Karzai doesn’t likely have much influence in the matter and
2 – Nobody in the U.S. cares about Bagram.

There’s a vibrant controversy in the U.S. as to whether fetuses should be accorded full human rights. There’s no such controversy about Bagram detainees.

“I think we dealt with this some weeks ago. IMO, making a point of making that point marks the person making it as an irredeemable idiot who I needn’t bother taking seriously in the future.”

Wow, you “dealt with it” and call them irredeemable idiots? Well, we call them Mexicans, Brazilians, Argentines, etc. I guess that’s one of those language divisions? I can see now why the level of discourse on this blog has taken a dive.

It’s important to remember that many of those held at Bagram/Parwan (no one knows how many, AFAICT) were kidnapped outside Afghanistan and taken there. Presumably, if they are still there when/if the Afghans take over, many of them will be released. That means, I think, that the US Admin will want to transfer them somewhere else before that happens, and at this stage, Gitmo is the obvious option. Similarly, for people seized after that Obama will have to either send them to Gitmo (abandoning the idea of gradually shutting it down) or find some new black site.

On a broader point, the fact that Obama has had a free pass on Bagram is striking – as I say, it’s worse than Gitmo in every way. The point I think is that (although it existed under Bush) it can’t be passed off as an inherited problem. Obama has greatly expanded it, resisted any legal or political oversight etc.

There is a mean streak in the American national character that is greatly underestimated.
biped, ungrateful

Given the way the US treats all of its other prisoners the apathetic response to Guantanamo is unsurprising. When I said before that special housing units aka supermaxes drive people to madness and suicide I was not exaggerating. If you find Bradley Manning’s treatment to be outrageous, his conditions are pretty much the same as in a supermax. The main difference is that in a supermax the prisoner gets clothes, and instead of being inspected every five minutes they have no direct human contact at all. The comparison is also apt in that domestic terrorists are held at ADX Florence, the federal supermax. For more detail here’s a New Yorker article on the effects of long-term solitary confinement:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande

but good gods, where has leftist acquiescence gotten us over the years?

Al Gore’s biggest accomplishment as president would have been the non-invasion of Iraq, but he never would have gotten any credit for it. Obama’s biggest achievement is the non-invasion of Iran.

@politicalfootball 130

You have to admit, that sounds a bit like the tiger repelling rock.

I would like some positive achievements too.

Obama’s biggest achievement is the non-invasion of Iran.

What an amusing observation! But you neglect Obama’s lesser foreign policy achievements, such as incipient wars in Yemen, Somalia, and other countries, where special operations units have been unleashed to make sure the WAR ON TERROR never ends. As the over-cooked mess in Iraq comes off the front burner, the heat will be turned up on another simmering conflict where America is gravely threatened by the terrorist menace. Permanent war is what Obama was selected to perpetuate: it is his gift to the Military-Industrial Complex that keeps on giving.

Since it seems to me (a non-American who has never lived in the US) that things have now gone too far for reversal to be possible without some devastating social disaster, does that imply that US liberals are rather dumb?

No. Just in despair. We’re well aware that it’s over and the bad guys won. It’s just that no one has any idea what to do about it.

CB @99,

The recidivism restriction can be waived; the Secretary of Defense need only state that doing so is in the interests of national security.

In response to a blog post about Corey Doctorow’s _Little Brother_ (here) and its posited public horror at a “Gitmo by the Bay”, spyder pointed out “I thought California already had its own Gitmo by the Bay: Pelican Bay State Prison. The SVU unit is a pathological nightmare, without heat, and 22.5 hours of solitary each day, when the prisoners aren’t tortured.” People in the U.S. see their neighbors carried off to prison and immured for arbitrarily long sentences every day.

I was really wrong about one thing in that post, I see looking back at it. I thought that wikileaks was admirable but would change nothing. And I was right, in the U.S. But wikileaks was reportedly one of the factors that helped to spark the Arab Spring, when people found out what their own politicians were saying. Basically, the action is going to be outside the U.S. from now on. We’re locked into our decaying empire, and until that crashes, people are going to have to look for any kind of healthy politics somewhere else.

I never can understand those who still think voting in a two-party election is about anything other than the lesser evil. What country have they been living in? Not the U.S., surely.

Someone will be elected president in 2012. That someone will nominate judges who will be on the bench for the next 30 to 40 years.

Vote GOP – asshole judges. Vote Obama – less obnoxious judges.

Vote Nader, don’t vote, write in Binky the Clown – exactly what policy goal are you advancing?

Or is it just about you?

I never can understand those who still think voting in a two-party election is about anything other than the lesser evil. … Or is it just about you?

I don’t want to speak for anyone else (especially for a position with which I disagree), but I think the answer for many is that yes, it is just about them and their conscience. There are political positions, this argument goes, that necessarily disqualify a candidate from receiving the support of decent people.

On the other hand, for people who take our position, I think we’re hampered by “lesser evil” language (though I agree it’s entirely accurate). I prefer to talk in terms of building majority coalitions, both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Any democratic political movement has to have, at its heart, an idea about building a coalition of people with disparate views, and that’s necessarily going to involve some huge compromises. In the U.S., which has many of the attributes of a democracy, you can’t assemble a 51% segment of the population that doesn’t believe in some pretty repugnant things. This has always been true, and will continue to be true in any conceivable future. If I won’t be part of a coalition that supports some awful stuff, then I’m declaring myself too virtuous for our democracy.

Note that this has nothing to do with a two-party system. If you want to support Nick Clegg based on some high principle (whatever that might be), you’re still only subcontracting the task of selling out. Clegg still has to be part of a majority if actual governance is the goal.

For rightwing nutcases, I think there’s a decent, though not decisive, case for voting for Romney, even in the primaries. I think Romney could plausibly be elected, and he’d do a lot to advance rightwing nuttery. I do think, however, that Santorum has the stronger case for wingnuts in the primaries, because Santorum is probably nuttier and he has a clear plan to build a national coalition that will get him elected. As a wingnut, I can always vote for Romney later if Santorum stumbles.

What I’d never do is vote for Santorum if he ran as a third-party candidate. Romney clearly shares enough of the wingnut agenda that I’d much rather have him in office than Obama. And since Santorum would lock up the hardcore haters if he ran as a third-party candidate, his candidacy would force Romney further to the center, where the available votes are.

But mostly I think that scolding people who make a conscience-driven decision not to vote by telling them that they are only thinking of themselves is a way for the scolder to comfort themselves

If a vote doesn’t make a difference it becomes difficult to see the decision not to vote as “conscience-driven” and would probably provide that same level of self-comfort.

Among some liberals, there’s a failure of imagination as to exactly how bad Obama is.

Look, if, as a(n American) liberal, your support for Obama has been whittled down to the hope of somewhat less insanely authoritarian federal judges, you are grasping a very thin reed indeed. You are betting that Obama — the actual Obama — facing a Republican Senate, is going to hold back the judiciary from a Federalist Society apocaplypse? Fat chance. You are betting that a plutocrat’s economy of increasing predation and increasing impoverishment and increasing debt peonage is going to somehow preserve some semblance of liberal values?

If you step back from partisanship for a moment, take a deep breath, and simply contemplate Obama’s conduct in office, his political leadership, you have to accept that he has been enacting a right-wing agenda. Not opposing a right-wing agenda with tragic ineffectualness, but actually enacting it. The noisy political theatre of alleged Republican obstructionism has become the lever by which Obama enacts right-wing policy, now that the arcana of filibuster excuses has been rendered obsolete.
Maybe, if your judgements are very generous, you can argue that he is a somewhat competent (read: technocratic) Whig, in place of Bush’s incompetent Tory. Where the Whigs and Tories were the tweedle dee and tweedle dum of landed aristocracy, the Democrats and Republicans have become something similar, for corporate plutocracy.

If you step back from partisanship, and just look at what Obama is doing across the full front of political and economic issues — how he uses his office to set the agenda and to legitimate rhetoric — it seems (from a perspective of American liberal values), a complete horror show. At the core is the banksters’ coup. Having brought the global economy to the brink of self-destruction through predatory financial practices, banksters now rule the White House, and millions sink into poverty, to pay the bankster bonuses, losing their jobs, their homes, their pensions, their children’s hope of a college education without debt peonage, and the White House searches for ways to let them steal Social Security. The much touted ACA, its major provisions in aid of “affordable health insurance” a 2014 mirage, has resulted in a record rate of inflation in the cost of health insurance now.

Guantanamo is not one anomalous issue among a broad array of favorable trends. This is not FDR and the New Deal, against the Japanese internment amid war hysteria and racist panic in California. This is not settling for half-a-loaf. This is not holding your idealistic upper-middle-class nose, while a Clinton or Gore makes populist appeals to conservative white southerners or working-class union members. This is building an authoritarian state in support of the domination of everything by ruthless corporate business interests.

I think it highly unlikely Obama will fail of re-election. He’s been way too good to the plutocracy, and he delivers something Romney cannot offer them: the absence of an effective opposition.

This is the significance of the lack of attention the scandal of Guantanamo receives: it illustrates Obama’s critical role in suppressing dissent and opposition. The Democrats, who would oppose Guantanamo, are quiet, because Obama is President, and Obama can push forward the normalization of the fascist state, opposed only by a few, who must step outside the structure of two-party power, to voice their opposition.

It’s irrational to vote. A single vote never makes any difference anyways.

It is likewise irrational for the vast majority of us to engage in any kind of political activity, since there are few individuals can change the course of a polity of any significant size. (But I’m probably being redundant because I think you explicitly acknowledge this.)

But if it were up to me, I’d rather that everyone gave up on the system and cleared the way for making a new one.

I think that’s where we differ. By my reckoning, principled refusal to engage the current system more-or-less by definition does nothing to clear the way for a new system.

You look at the demographics of the people who don’t vote, and they tend to the same folks whose views are so poorly represented. And their non-voting hasn’t done a thing to move policy in their direction. Jerry Falwell had it right. Religious nutjobs advanced their program when they decided to get deeply involved in politics, even if they haven’t had anything resembling their whole program enacted.

Is this highly praised constitution is only as good some unelected, ordained for life into the high priesthood (and probably 90 years old already) smart ass lawyer interprets it, what sort of a political system is it anyhow?

At least 70% of our attention should be on Congress and Congressional races/candidates, at least 2/3 of what’s left should be on state and municipal races. Congress and state offices are the vast cauldron of stewy broth from which fragrant, or putrid presidential candidates emerge. Not to mention that they are the ones who write laws like the NDAA, and SOPA and PIPA, the AUMF, and so on.

This. During the decades when liberals have been engaged in futile battles over Democratic presidential politics, radical rightists were taking over over the Republican Party from the ground up. That’s the only way forward via electoral politics that I can see. And you don’t even start with candidates for even the lowest offices- you start with county committeepeople.

radical rightists were taking over over the Republican Party from the ground up

Nonsense. No one is taking either party from the ground up. Both of them are sold and paid for, everywhere where it matters. Power is heavily concentrated at the top, and you need nearly a billion to get there.

Sure, but this is just a side effect. The culture war is a tool, not the purpose.

Nobody is supported by anybody below. The congressional job approval is 11%. I’m sure Charlie Manson has a higher job approval.

I’ve heard/read repeatedly (I don’t have time to go and look up the details) that the right has made severe inroads into reproductive rights across the country.

For example: “Texas can enforce sonogram law, appeals court says.” The opinion is issued by a 3-judge panel of GOP nominees. For those too busy to click through:

H.B. 15, passed in May 2011, substantially amended the 2003 Texas Woman’s Right to Know Act (“WRKA”). The amendments challenged here are intended to strengthen the informed consent of women who choose to undergo abortions. The amendments require the physician “who is to perform an abortion” to perform and display a sonogram of the fetus, make audible the heart auscultation of the fetus for the woman to hear, and explain to her the results of each procedure and to wait 24 hours, in most cases, between these disclosures and performing the abortion. TEX. HEALTH & SAFETY CODE § 171.012(a)(4). A woman may decline to view the images or hear the heartbeat, § 171.0122(b), (c), but she may decline to receive an explanation of the sonogram images only on certification that her pregnancy falls into one of three statutory exceptions. Id. at § 171.0122(d).

Because Texas truly believes in defending a woman’s right to know. And be known, apparently.

(My favorite line from the op: “For the sake of judicial efficiency, any further appeals in this matter will be heard by this panel.” Because it would be awkward for some less enlightened judges to find differently on a fuller record or whatever.)

@148

An astute and eloquent post, Bruce, reflecting the sentiments of most former Obama devotees. You depict clearly the ugly reality that sham liberals and pretend progressives refuse to face.

“congressional level”

Who cares if he was or even is a racist.

Well it’s important to care because a platform may not be what it seems; words written by a racist may easily be misread by a leftist. I’m happy Ron Paul just about keeps topics in the conversation that would otherwise be buried even more completely, but an actual political alliance with the right in opposing imperialism (for example) is impossible and attempting one is a huge mistake.

It’s impossible because the paleo-conservatives who, say, populate Counterpunch nowadays do not actually care about – to pick but one example – justice for the Palestinian people. They happen to oppose US support for Israel because they represent a faction of the ruling class whose interests (which they of course define as the “national interest”) would be served by doing so (others seem to be motivated by good old-fashioned anti-semitism but that’s for another day). The libertarians opposing the war on drugs don’t do so because they are concerned about its function as an instrument of racial oppression. Etc. All this matters. Ideology matters, where a politics is situated in class society matters. If you ally with such people – who represent ruling class interests – you’ll eventually be very very disappointed, to put it mildly.

It is of course right to take advantage of splits within the ruling class. I’m not advocating we join in the attempts to silence arguments we agree with simply because they come from ruling class ideologists. But it’s not right to ally with any faction of it – that’ll just get us used and spit out.

As for Clinton, not being a liberal I never liked him or his politics. But bad personal behaviour (eg being a womanizer) is manifestly different from bad politics (eg opposing the civil rights act) when it comes to picking which politician to support.

Well, I don’t believe much in a welfare state, nor the concern about “throwing yet more people to the mercies of the “free” market” impresses me much. In the end, people will have to fight the fight themselves, a tribune is not going to save them. Getting rid of the empire would be a big deal, however, and that’s one thing that I think, possibly, conceivably, arguably, can be done from the top. If a right guy or gal by some miracle manages to get there… Nah, probably not.

RP, the people who actually run things won’t be scared in the least, and there is no way, none at all, that you can make Obama and Dem other establishment types more scared of you than they are of them. You can cause their defeat as often as you want, and it still won’t work.

Obama isn’t going to close GTMO, I agree. He’s going to appoint judges who will, eventually, because they’ll have to, or betray their creed. And again, I’m not talking about some radical fringe that can only come about through a transformation like no other in our lives. No, judges from the Dem mainstream will tighten up the evidence rules, and, eventually, find that the war is over.

I wasn’t thinking in single issue terms, but a broader progressive context.

I agree that Wall Street doesn’t care about GTMO. The Pentagon (including rank and file) cares a whole lot about it, though, and I suspect (but we’ll have to wait for the historians to really flesh this out) that Obama was quite surprised in March/April 2009 to learn how strongly they cared about it.

Well, I’ll just add that Paul&Co’s programme doesn’t really prevent you from arranging your welfare state and protecting helpless people from the tough world out there. It’s just that you would have to operate on the state, rather than the federal level. I realize that this idea is controversial, but it’s hardly a reason to get hysterical.

Why, Kucinich is a racist too: I think he was wearing a racist baseball cap or something. And, of course, he was a white mayor of Cleveland, so how could he not be.

“What does it mean that Ron Paul has been able to get so much further in the Republican party than Dennis Kucinich did in the Democratic one? ”

That Republicans are racists and that Paul’s racism helped him.

John @165 I actually don’t think it’s always obvious that “Obama” is shorthand for “Obama and the Dems that support him”, and even if it were obvious, the devil is in the details–if the names of individual Congresspeople aren’t being mentioned and the dynamics of Congress aren’t the subject of political blogging (outside of very specialized and/or partisan blogs), awareness of that aspect of politics isn’t going to increase the way awareness of other aspects of politics has increased.

So I’m making a new year’s resolution to read up more on Congress and Congressional candidates and, as a blog commenter, bring that up a lot more.

@Rich 173 Getting back to Gauntanamo, I fail to see how this is anything but Obama’s fault.

Yes, but there is at least some chance that Congress could be incrementally changed, and the potential for the left to do this has been largely unexploited/untested.

@179 What does it mean that Ron Paul has been able to get so much further in the Republican party than Dennis Kucinich did in the Democratic one?

Because Dems and Dem-supporters think that mainstream Dem candidates like Obama will be unwarlike, whereas in the Republican party, only Paul is unwarlike.

@182 That Republicans are racists and that Paul’s racism helped him.

Citation needed. One could just as easily respond that EVEN MORE Dems or Dem-supporters (who won’t vote for Paul or Kucinich) are authoritarians, islamophobes, or Israel-firsters than Republicans are racist. I mean, do people who vote for Obama HATE brown people or what? How could anyone support him after the things he’s done? The mass-deportations? Torturing people at Bagram? If supporting Paul damns you as a racist, then surely supporting Obama, with all the things he’s done, should damn you as something?

Actually, I suspect it has to do with the fact that there is a sizable (enough) paleocon minority in the GOP and among Republican-leaning Independents that Paul has a (potential) double-digit, if barely double-digit, natural constituency. It also helps that the almost certain GOP presidential candidate is seen as a moderate and a member of a cult by many on the right, and that, unlike in 2008 (when Paul made a lot of noise online, but didn’t finish even as well as he has this year), there is no other candidate on the right who has emerged as the clear “anyone but Romney / McCain” (in 2008 it was Huckabee).

Kucinich does less well for a variety of reasons. Some voters on the left of the Democratic Party mistook Obama as a much more progressive politician than he is. Many more, I think, have gotten so used to trimming their own sails that they ignored Kucinich as unelectable (I suppose this is just a less kind spin on Anderson’s point @183).

But the biggest problem Kucinich has always had is that he is a total nebbish. Politics is about personality as much as policies. Ron Paul is hardly Obama or Reagan when it comes to the charisma department, but he has a certain rough charm. Kucinich, on the other hand, couldn’t crack 10% of the Democratic primary vote if he embraced the centrism of an Obama or a Clinton. Candidates like Kucinich or, to take two older, centrist examples, Paul Tsongas and Bruce Babbit, face very low political glass ceilings due to their charisma issues. It’s no wonder that the last “unelectable” Democrat from the left of the party to seriously challenge for the nomination was Jesse Jackson, who, whatever else you may think of him, had enormous charisma.

Bruce Wilder @148:

As with most of your entries, I find your thoughts compelling.

But I’m confused here about your take on the ACA. The first-order result from that legislation has got to be the additional 30 million people getting insurance, no? We can argue about whether it “bends the curve” appropriately, or whether it brings us closer to or further from single-payer nirvana, or whether it was passed by making sure that certain masters were properly sated, but that’s still a lot of progress, no?

“Citation needed. ”

Minimal Google searching didn’t find what I was thinking of, sorry. But the way I’ve heard it, Paul — or Lew Rockwell advising Paul — basically decided that the mainstream GOP was doing great with the Southern Strategy, and that if they ever wanted to give paleocons a serious chance, they had to get in on that action. And they implemented the newsletter racism as a cynical way to get support and money. And it worked: they raised millions off of those things.

If you want to make that sound less creepy, you could envision them doing the same thing that contemporary liberals are doing now when they say they’re going to vote for Obama no matter how bad his civil rights record is: accepting that politics is all about the lesser of evils. Or maybe that just makes the liberal lesser-evilists sound more creepy.

Hmm, what, they only like these things when are administered from a super-concentrated power center to 300 million people? And they would hate them if they are distributed to 50 much smaller centers? Do they suffer from megalomania or something?

you are proposing that they be diminished radically

Not at all. Diminished in some places, blossom in others, perhaps. Surely, if the idea is so great.

@ Rich 190 I made the snarky “citation needed” remark because I haven’t seen anybody present solid evidence that the racism was really helpful to Paul. Even with the newsletters, were they consistently racist, or (as a Paul supporter somewhere retorted) were the racists statements all from a brief period and not characteristic of the newsletter over the many years that it ran? I strongly suspect that associating with some of the more obvious racists was helpful to Paul, because that’s a significant part of who’s in the Republican party, and I’ve heard other racist things from his mouth, but that’s very different from saying that Paul wouldn’t enjoy much of the support that he enjoys among Republicans had he not made these racist statements, even to the extent that he would be less popular than Kucinich is among Dems.

Hmm, what, they only like these things when are administered from a super-concentrated power center to 300 million people?

Read it again, Henri. They only like these things when they actually happen. The idea that 50 state governments will have the same ability and inclination to support, say, civil rights is absurd. You apparently think otherwise, but why do you think that supporters of civil rights or various government programs are unhappy with Paul. They’re “hysterical”? Are you nuts?

@politicalfootball
Well, the commenter I responded to sounded somewhat hysterical, to my ear.
No one prevents anyone from supporting anything they want. People went from NY to Alabama and supported.
The idea that some law passed in Washington must be the best and optimal for a half of continent with 300 million people, and passed at exactly the right time, this seems less than obvious to me, frankly. But all this is completely OT, so we should probably stop.

“There are not enough people, willing to act in political unison, because the organization to lead them and instruct them does not exist. ”

Yes. I should point out that the organization to lead people about matters like this is generally known as a “political party” — that this is, in fact, what the Democratic Party is supposed to do. But they haven’t been, and it’s impossible to replace them, given that the structure of America’s elections is mathematically set up so that a third party can’t really do anything. Nor is it really possible to organize at the ground level to take over the party; that is a myth told by right-wingers to each other so they won’t have to admit to plutocratic capture, and a myth that left-wingers tell each other that’s functionally equivalent to Animal Farm’s “I will work harder”. That is why I’d go further than saying that “The whole institutional structure put in place in the 1930s and 1940s is played out”; the Constitution is played out. It fails in very predictable ways, and no other first-world democracy suffers under anything quite as comparably bad.

Bruce Wilder (at 199): “Obama is evil”.

Well, I don’t live there and maybe a view from the other side of the Pacific isn’t very clear, but he doesn’t appear “evil” to me. Not “evil” in the sense of “evil be thou my good”, anyway.

Obama strikes me as a rather simple instance of a black guy from a non-privileged background who made good. That was his ambition and he has achieved it. He is the first black US President. That in itself appears to him and many others quite enough. Like many such upwardly-mobile people, his idea about inequality, race, disadvantage etc. is just to try to join the guys at the top. I don’t see any interest in reform or social change. To hazard a guess, he would probably find such ideas futile and silly (aside from political rhetoric of course). “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer” is to such a person obvious and just another reason to join the rich. Even if he loses the Presidential election later this year he will have done very well. There will be a place in history and plenty of opportunities for book-writing, speech-making, hobnobbing with those at or near the top and he will always have the trappings of ex-Presidency. That’s all terrific stuff for a guy who started at the bottom. It’s the American Dream.

You might call it selfish, you might call it callous, you might call it abandonment of responsibility, but can you really call it evil?

gordon: “Obama strikes me as a rather simple instance . . . ”

As fascinating as speculation about his personal psychology may be, I try not to reduce my understanding of political dynamics to the personality of any individual, even a President. When I say, “Obama is evil”, I do not mean that he is personally some kind of psychopath; what I mean is that his political strategies and policies function in our political dynamics in a way destructive of the political society, its institutions and values. He subverts and neuters the forces of potential reform, and promotes the forces of self-destruction. Most centrally, he has promoted and reinforced policies favorable to a predatory and destructive financial sector, as well as a runaway military-industrial complex. An adroit politician, he’s done this with the active support of many of the people, who would otherwise be opposing a corrupt financial sector or a corrupt military-industrial complex. It is that disabling of the natural forces of reforms and opposition to corruption, which makes him “evil”, imho.

On some level, I suppose, I’m implicitly making fun of people, who explain World War II with the “uniquely” “evil” personality of Hitler.

Rich @200: I agree, on the whole. I’d say, though, that in some deep way it’s irrelevant whether a deeply motivated, networked, informed, self-financed, and self-organized popular movement decides to take over the Democratic Party or form a new party, or whether it decides to amend the Constitution or scrap it. The point is to have a movement capable of doing those things: and then, whichever things it decides to do will be, by definition, democratically legitimate.

How to get there? As Chomsky keeps saying, there’s no formula, no short cut. You talk to people, call meetings, form organizations, do research, link up with like-minded organizations, raise money, launch campaigns, lose, win, learn from your mistakes, etc, etc. The way North American farmers and shopkeepers did it in the mid-18th century, and the way Central American peasants did it in the late 20th century.

Like many such upwardly-mobile people, his idea about inequality, race, disadvantage etc. is just to try to join the guys at the top. I don’t see any interest in reform or social change.

This view is completely at odds with much of Obama’s biography before he reached the presidency. It might be helpful to actually know a little bit about someone’s life before making these ridiculous, sweeping assertions.

HV:
Well, the commenter I responded to sounded somewhat hysterical, to my ear.
My goal as a CT commenter is to sound hysterical to HV.

A perfect foreign policy? Far from it. But not “perpetual war” either.

Perhaps you haven’t been following the news. The USA is engaged in a global WAR ON TERROR. This war has no geographic or temporal boundaries. The President and the Congress have declared that the battlefield encompasses the entire world, including the United States, and that the President can summarily arrest and/or kill anyone he deems a terrorist threat, without due process of law.

Obama has extended and amplified all of the claims of executive privilege Bush and Cheney introduced to prosecute the WAR ON TERROR. He has vigorously employed state secrecy policies and ruthlessly prosecuted government whistle-blowers. Had Bush and Cheney pursued Obama’s current policies, they would have been denounced by millions of liberals. Now, apart from the cries of the occasional handcuffed OWS protester, all we hear is crickets chirping.

Rich,

Paul has not run as a racist. The major thing he has said about race is that the injustice of the drug war and the general high incarceration rate as racist because the burden falls disproportionately on minorities. That is something that very much needs to be said, and no one else visible is saying it. The newsletters have been brought in the discussion by Paul’s detractors and the media. Bringing them up is fair enough, but that is not the same as his running on them. He is running from them. He also has not given us the dog whistles that Newt and Ricky have.

Anderson,

If Demos do not build a movement around Kucinich when Republicans do around Paul because they’re “realistic”, they could really use a bit more unreality. IF Kucinich had gotten the percentages in Iowa and New Hampshire that Paul has gotten, it would give progressives much more clout in the Democratic Party. Sacrificing that to get invested in a Clinton/Obama conflict, when it was clear there was little difference between the two, does not seem a realistic way to further goals. Admittedly, Edwards was a bit further left, or at least so presented himself. In hindsight, he too was a waste. Voting for Edwards has become meaningless because of Edwards personal failings. Voting for Kucinich would have been much more of a statement. I admit, I, too, failed to see this at the time.

Kaveh,

Given how much support there is within the Democratic Party – especially the punditry, but also the rank and file to a degree – for wars of choice like Kosovo and Libya, I doubt liberals can be any more considered generally antiwar. It depends on the justification, but legitimate justifications are not limited to self-defense. For Paul, they basically are, which is more clearly an antiwar position.

LFC,

I probably should have said “Democrats and Independents” rather than liberals, as those categories are better defined and more easily measured. There is a lot of talk of youth who previously supported Obama and now support Paul, and I imagine most of those would qualify as liberal. 45% of the New Hampshire electorate in the primary were non-Republicans and 32% of those went for Paul. Kucinich’s vote was almost entirely non-Republican, of course, but came nowhere near that in absolute terms. Paul is grabbing votes available to Democrats that Kucinich could not, principally among youth. I think Paul’s appeal to youth has a lot to do with anti-militarism, civil liberties, and anti-drug war positions. Possibly also flaky economic ideas, less because the youth like the ideas in themselves, as because they recognize that basic changes are needed and therefore will listen to someone proposing something substantially different, rather than wanting to sacrifice everything to keep the existing system afloat without major change, which is what Obama has done.

And there are specialized constituencies. Obama made only one promise to the pot constituency – I will not use the feds to bust medical marijuana operations. Which was no more than maintaining the Bush status quo. He betrayed it, and mocked those he was betraying. This is like gun control – most may be in favor, but most who will vote on this issue are adamantly opposed. I think the pot move alone may have cost him 5 or 6 percent of the electorate to Paul.

Ben,

This sort of thing is too subjective to debate, but, for what it’s worth, I do not find Paul more charismatic than Kucinich. Ignoring the content, he strikes me as a hectoring dotty uncle and is obviously too old to be President anyway. And having to invoke the lack of charisma arguments in three different cases – while setting aside the tedium of Kerry, the creepiness of Nixon – many US Presidential nominees have lacked charisma. And Sharpton had a lot of style, and the best rhetorical flair in the race that year, but he got nowhere too.

Aside from all that, saying that the left cannot get behind the candidate who advocates what they actually believe because he is too much of a nebbish is as much a condemnation as anything else, especially when many more of the Republicans are supporting their nebbish. BTW, Paul has now gotten about 20% in the first two contests. He obviously has cross-over appeal. And he faces the standard handicap that there is no way he will win. His natural constituency has to be more than barely in double digits.

@ 119 “Obama is evil” , and @ 197, “Thus, Obamacare…” : I think it is helpful to step back a bit; the “war on terror” is a political decision made in part in order to remain in power: given the huge population of the country governed & its general ignorance/inattention to important issues (and the great activity of the part of those in the population who are partisan/major political players [the wealthy, etc]) this administration knows it would soon be gone if it did not appear strong in this “war”– a perennial problem for Dems. That’s just the reality of the situation. And it –this “war”– is immoral, and unethical — but as a reaction to a perceived threat, it is human down to the core, and it will take much time and effort to change this way of thinking: to throw up one’s hands and say “the system is broken” is to remove oneself from this effort. Re the new healthcare reform: it is without a doubt a step in the right direction — just a glance at the opposition to it should indicate so…cynicism has its place, but it also corrodes.

“it has scaled back the first”

Has it? Things turned out so that Libya didn’t end up taking long, but if it had, we would still be there. The administration is aggressively using drones and killing people in places like Pakistan and Yemen, and appears to be killing, or winking at the killing, of Iranian nuclear scientists. It’s not leaving Afghanistan and didn’t want to leave Iraq. That sounds to me like the position of an administration that wants endless war, is willing to provide plenty of casus belli, and doesn’t really care which one works out.

Britta, as a sidenote, I do have to object to describing Obama’s actions against civil liberties as “populism”. This is elite-driven, not populace-driven, policy. The majority of people who voted voted for “Barack Obama”, a candidate who promised to be decent on civil liberties issues. President Barack Obama has failed to live up to this. But this has not been in response to huge marches and letter writing campaigns. The Tea Party has been focused almost entirely on other issues. Indeed, most of the attacks on civil liberties have been done with as little fanfare as possible, a sure sign that this is not theatre for the rubes. Among the governing, business, and media elites, however, there is a great deal of support for what Obama is doing.

221. Yep.

And a judiciary that told states they had to move faster than Congress or the President were going to push them.

Without Loving v. Virginia, we’d still be waiting for the last few states, or Congress, to make the most obvious (and painless to any legitimate interest) civil rights progress imaginable.

Ugh… ignore the itallics. The first part of my comment was in response to:
mark drago @ 216 I think it is helpful to step back a bit; the “war on terror” is a political decision made in part in order to remain in power: given the huge population of the country governed & its general ignorance/inattention to important issues

Britta, fair enough.