Harold Koh: President Obama's Drones Defender-In-Chief


This article was originally posted on Policymic 04/13/12

The Daily Beast recently published Tara McKelvey's interview with Harold Koh, the human rights lawyer and former dean of Yale Law School who has since become a legal advisor for the Obama administration, specializing in justifying the exercise of unrestrained executive authority.  

While the interview portion of the article is negligible – out of three pages, Koh's remarks consist of just seven short sentences – the portrait McKelvey paints of Koh is of a rather unpersonable, prickly man. According to retired General James Cartwright, Koh was "hated" in the opening months of the Obama administration. Cartwright also claims that Koh described drone strikes as "extrajudicial killings" in some of these early meetings, something that Koh denies ever saying.

Of course, Koh's personality, unpleasant or not, is less important than his significant changes of heart (although the interview quotes Koh himself saying "I have never changed my mind") on national security issues. In 2002, Koh referred to George Bush as the "torturer in chief" andexpressed concerns over the targeted killings carried out under the Bush administration. By contrast, in 2012, Koh answered the question: "How do we deliver justice to the enemy?" with the flippant: "I think there are different ways. It can be delivered through trials. Drones also deliver." 

Providing legal justification for drone executions seem to be one of Koh's recurring duties. In 2010, he defended them, saying, "Our procedures and practices for identifying lawful targets are extremely robust, and advanced technologies have helped to make our targeting even more precise." The death and disfigurement of civilians that seem to accompany every drone strikedon't seem to figure into Koh's precise targeting technologies, much to the anguish of the drone policy's victims.

In the context of the Obama presidency, Koh's sudden conversion to assassination advocacy is somewhat less surprising, however. Despite the rhetoric of the campaign trail (and the oft-repeated assurances of Obama's remaining fans), the Obama administration's record on human rights has more often than not been a continuation of the policies favored by its predecessor (not exactly surprising, given how many members of the Obama national security team are Bush-era appointees). Despite promises to close Guantanamo, America's most famous prison camp remains open. Despite grandiose claims of ending torture, loopholes in Obama's orders kept torture a viable policy, and with the signing of the 2012 NDAA, it was reauthorized under the auspices of "enhanced interrogation."

The Obama administration has refused to investigate the war crimes of Bush, saying "it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice, that they will not be subject to prosecution." In other words, if you were just following orders, don't worry, you won't be prosecuted for torturing.

Obama has also declined to release further photo documentation of torture by American forces, interceding to reverse a Pentagon decision to make public hundreds of images of detainee abuse.  Obama described the Abu Ghraib abuse photos as "painful,"a curiously elastic use of the word in the context of a discussion on torture.

In some areas, such as the prosecution of whistleblowers, the current administration is exceeding its predecessor in the zeal with which it defends the excesses of the national security state. From the attempted prosecution of an NSA agent leaking information on unauthorized government surveillance techniques to the recent prosecution of former CIA agent John Kiriakou for revealing information related to the abuse of prisoners, the Obama administration has made it very clear it has little tolerance for anyone taking campaign promises of transparency seriously. The Espionage Act has been used as the principle tool for silencing whistleblowers - six times so far this administration. Prior to Obama's administration, the act had only been used three times in the nation's history.

So what are we to conclude from all this? Certainly, not that the Obama administration is uniquely awful in its policies. Even disregarding the perverse willingness of the previous administration to make its crimes publicly known, torture is nothing new for America; the "water cure" was practiced in the Philippines long before it was applied to captured Afghans. Nor is the trite phrase "power corrupts" useful as an analysis, especially if we hope to even begin to affect change.  

What we must recognize is that on a structural level, our government and its obsession with secrecy engenders these abuses. No matter who sits in the Oval Office, without massive outcry and organized resistance to the status quo, nothing will change, no matter who is voted in or out.

Obama's State of the Union: A "Stump Speech" Grandiose in Scope, Short on Specifics


This article was originally posted on Policymic 01/25/12

The 2012 State of the Union (SOTU) was nothing but election-year posturing of the sort practiced by the Democratic Party for several decades, designed to assure the working class that, in spite of the last four years, they really do have its best interests in mind. From jobs to foreign policy, President Obama was very clearly speaking as Candidate Obama, full of promises to make education affordable, keeping bankers and profiteers in their place, and trumpeting his triumphs over America’s multifarious enemies. As other PolicyMic contributors have noted however, Obama’s speech was rather short on specifics. 

The full text of the speech is readily available, but let’s focus on the highlights for the moment. Obama begins with a throwaway mention to a troop draw-down in Afghanistan, which neglects the fact that tens of thousands of troops have been deployed to Afghanistan during Obama’s term and the current troop reduction falls far short of that – but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps those troops were necessary to impose order on Afghanistan and are being withdrawn because everything is so, well, orderly there now.

Obama goes on to praise the “greatest generation” who returned home after WWII and produced the longest continual boom in the history of American capitalism, saying “they were contributing to a story of success that every American had a chance to share — the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement.”

Leaving aside how perverse it is for America’s first non-white president to fail to mention how many groups were excluded from this “American promise,” Obama also neglects the fact that the relatively good conditions of American workers in the post-war era were also accompanied by an outstandingly high rate of strikes and other labor struggles to force American employers to accept their demands. 

And that golden age of near-full employment — how did it slip away? Listening to Obama’s SOTU you might believe that the jobs had simply got up and strolled away on their own. Not once is NAFTA mentioned, not once is GATT mentioned, nor is any context at all provided. The jobs just “began leaving our shores.” 

Of course, to his credit, Obama wasn’t entirely without ideas for creating jobs. He mentioned how recent trends have led to labor being more expensive in China, following that up with the idea that America can undercut them, or, I’m sorry, the phrase he used was “America is more productive,” which is true in some ways; American productivity having been on the rise for decades, although pointedly it has not kept pace with wages.  The Swedish owners of IKEA certainly think American workers are “productive.”

Speaking of China, Obama also invoked the name of Steve Jobs in this SOTU, saying “every risk-taker and entrepreneur” should aspire to be like the recently deceased Apple founder. Perhaps he was thinking of all the jobs Jobs has created in China, utilizing its “competitive” conditions — if only America could be so willing to sacrifice! Of course, given that Obama has so far in 2012 introduced a jobs program made up nearly two-thirds by unpaid jobs, no one can doubt his commitment to sacrificing for job creation, whatever the cost.

The SOTU also saw Obama mention the 2008 financial crisis, saying “in 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn't afford or understand them” and pledging that “I will not go back to the days when Wall Street was allowed to play by its own set of rules” — a nice sentiment, restraining the injustices of banks and finance, although somewhat undercut by a number of things —  including the recent plan emanating from the Obama administration to subsidize a mortgage settlement with the very groups who constructed that “house of cards” using the pension funds of American citizens.

Of course, besides that, talk of getting tough on Wall Street falls rather flat coming from the president who has appointed former Goldman Sachs employees Rahm Emanuel, Robert Hormats, Stephen Friedman, Diana Forrell, Philip Murphy, Mark Patterson, Adam Storch, Alexander Lasry, Sonal Shah, Gregory Craig, and Gary Gensler to his administration. Or the same president who has appointed a former banker for his Chief of Staff three times in a row now. Or the same president who is considering Larry “Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Less Developed Countries?” Summers to head the World Bank.

These are just a few highlights. Length precludes me from mentioning Obama’s jingoism or his subtle encouragement of fracking or any number of other lovely inclusions in the SOTU. I can say confidently that if Obama wins another turn (something that seems likelier every day) he will not turn into the second coming of FDR, as some liberals are desperately hoping. But odds are they’ll vote for him anyway.

The Radical Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr


This article was originally posted on Policymic 01/16/12 with the title "Why Martin Luther King Would Not Get Along With Mitt Romney or Barack Obama"

Today marks the birthday of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Both political parties will likely use the opportunity to try to appropriate the man for their own political agendas. Both liberals and conservatives will try to affiliate themselves with King, but neither are correct. However sanitized his public image is today, King's words are those of a brave and radical man who would be shunned by both of America’s mainstream political parties.

For example, in discussing the strange behavior of American troops supposedly sent to “liberate” Vietnam, King said, “We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops … We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?” Would this view be at home on the stage of any of the recent Republican primary debates? Does anyone think that the DNC will host any voices asking similar questions about America’s modern day imperialist adventures in the 2012 election?

King famously said of the Vietnamese, “they watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees … So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children.” What would this man say of our current drone-friendly president, who has ordered the push-button murders of who-knows-how-many foreigners, many (if not most) of them civilians?

King would be firmly against people like GOP candidate Mitt Romney, the draft-dodging protestor of anti-war draft dodgers, when he speaks of the necessity of counseling young men of military age on “our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection.”

It would be easy to go on at length about King’s principled stand against U.S. imperialism (and not just in Vietnam), to provide passage after passage where he abjures the methods of his own government in favor of a policy of compassion and peace. But it is not only foreign policy where King disagrees with the American political consensus.

When it comes to domestic issues, and especially racial policy, King’s stances are in conflict with both the Republican Party – whose stance on racial oppression seems to vary between ‘it is a relic of the past’ and 'white people are the real victims' – and with the tepid liberal non-solution of “tolerance” presented by the Democrats. This is embodied perfectly by King in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail in the person of the “white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’"

King identified the source of racial oppression not as a flaw of bigotry in individual people but in a “system that still oppresses us.” His advice was to organize to obtain the power necessary to fight the entrenched and oppressive systems of racism and empire in this country.

When it came to economics, King committed the cardinal sin of questioning the benevolence and usefulness of the capitalist system, asking, "Why are there forty million poor people in America? … When you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.” No pundit in America would ever question the idea of private property by asking, "Who owns the oil?" and “Who owns the iron ore?” and "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?"

Neither did King limit himself to these broader questions of inequality and exploitation. He proposed concrete policies to combat poverty and inequality, including the creation of a national guaranteed income program, which he estimated would cost $20 billion a year, and said “if our nation can spend $35 billion a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their own two feet right here on earth.”

King was radical in the truest, most original sense of the word. He understood that problems of oppression cannot be confronted piecemeal but must be solved through a total transformation of society, something he expressed by saying "America, you must be born again!” While most of the political establishment rejects this idea, a radical social transformation is, and has been, the only real path to the country and the world King and people like him wished to live in. The words of Langston Hughes, quoted by King and many others, remain just as relevant today as when they were written:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Hugo Chavez Gives Heating Aid to U.S. Poor Following Obama Budget Cuts

This article was originally posted on Policymic 01/16/12

Many poor Americans in colder climes will doubtless be dismayed to hear that shortly after ringing in the New Year, Congress and the president have decided to cut 25% from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, (LIHEAP) showing once again their preference to default on the needy and vulnerable rather than asking the most powerful and wealthy to make even the smallest sacrifices.

Far more welcome news came from Citgo Petroleum Corporation, a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, which announced that it would be continuing its six-year-old program of providing heating oil to poor Americans free of charge. The contrast between the values displayed by the American and Venezuelan governments – the “good guys” and “bad guys,” respectively, of the American political consensus – could not be more striking. 

$1.2 billion will be cut from LIHEAP, reducing its budget to $3.47 billion. Thankfully the initial requests of the Obama administration to cut the program’s funding to $2.5 billion were not carried out. In 2011, 8.3 million people were helped by LIHEAP, although there were more people eligible than the program was able to assist. According to the National Energy Assistance Director’s Association (NEADA) 90% of families participating in the program contain at least one “vulnerable” member, defined as the elderly, children, and the disabled.

The cuts come at a time when the cost of heating oil has reached $3.93 a gallon, up 57 cents from last year. This is a 22-year high, according to the Energy Information Administration. The escalating price of heat is especially threatening to people living on a fixed income, including the retired.

Citgo expects to help more than 400,000 Americans this year with a 100-gallon donation of heating oil and said that in addition to providing assistance to private citizens, Citgo would also provide assistance to 250 homeless shelters. 

Venezuela’s generosity towards its northern neighbor began in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina had ravaged the Gulf Coast, when Citgo donated $1 million to disaster relief and President Hugo Chavez offered to send food, water, fuel, and other humanitarian assistance.  Chavez was not taken up on his offer by the U.S. administration.  That same year, in response to a call by 12 U.S. Senators for oil companies and oil producing nations to donate heating oil to help ease the pain of high prices caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Venezuela rose to the occasion once again. Despite criticism from the American government, the program has continued each winter since.

Heating oil is not the only humanitarian assistance promoted by the Chavez government.  Over the last decade, Venezuelan doctors, many of them trained in Cuba, have provided free medical care, including surgeries all around Latin America.  In New York's South Bronx, Citgo has donated millions to support community building organizations, including natural food co-ops, environmentally sound recyling programs, and youth groups.

Indeed, several days before Citgo announced its 2012 assistance program, President Obama criticized Venezuela’s ties to Cuba and Iran, saying "It is up to the Venezuelan people to determine what they gain from a relationship with a country that violates universal human rights and is isolated from much of the rest of the world."  It is to the credit of Venezuela that it continues its relationship with one nation that often finds itself at odds with the rest of the world over human rights – the U.S. itself.  Obama went on to cast aspersions on human rights and democracy in Venezuela – despite the fact that both have been strengthened immensely since the American-friendly two-party oligarchy that ran the country for decades was thrown out in Venezuela’s 1999 elections. No more are hundreds massacred in the streets of Caracas, nor do paramilitary death squads roam Venezuela murdering labor organizers – unlike in neighboring American ally Colombia.

As the U.S. continues to export warfare and empire on the backs of its increasingly-struggling citizenry, and Venezuela exports doctors and free heating, long-held and infrequently-examined assumptions about U.S. benevolence must be questioned. 

Shame on Obama for leaving the most vulnerable Americans in the cold. The poor, retired, and disabled of this country deserve better than that.

NDAA Another Broken Promise by President Barack Obama and an Attack on Civil Liberties


This article originally appeared on Policymic 01/09/12

On the last day of 2011, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act(NDAA) for the upcoming year, following the Act’s passage through the Senate (with an 86-13 margin) and House of Representatives (283-136). Passing an NDAA has been an annual act of the government for decades, but included in this year’s NDAA are provisions asserting “the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons … pending disposition under the law of war.” The vague definition provided by the bill for “covered persons” includes supporters of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda or “associated forces,” as well as “any person who has committed a belligerent act.” What constitutes associated forces or belligerent acts, though, is left to the president to determine. In addition, the bill also authorizes “enhanced interrogation techniques,” i.e., torture.

Obama’s handling of the NDAA has been nothing but deception and broken promises. 

First, the president pledged to veto the NDAA, should it reach his desk. He did not. He signed it, and in doing so broke his campaign promises to end the use of torture and roll back Bush-era curtailments of civil liberties. The NDAA also includes provisions which make it even more difficult to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp – another broken promise for Obama. Additionally, despite pledging, “I will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law” during his time as Senator, he did exactly that. 

The signing statement itself includes language expressing Obama’s “serious reservations” about the bill, including a promise “not to authorize the indefinite detention without trial of American citizens.” However, this promise is nothing but a cruel joke in light of Senator Carl Levin’s (D-Mich.) disclosure of the fact that the Obama administration expressly asked language preventing American citizens from being subject to indefinite detention without trial to be removed from the final bill. 

One of the few provisions of the bill that the administration seems to really object to is section 1029, which requires the Attorney General to confer with the Pentagon before filing criminal charges against suspected terrorists. Obama’s signing statement claims that this section limits flexibility, and states the administration’s intention to ignore it.

It is unsurprising that Obama signed the NDAA, despite his declared intent to veto it. After all, it was not so long ago that the President signed off on the extra-judicial assassination of American citizen Anwar al-Alwaki before announcing that fact to the world, following up that assassination with the killing of Alwaki’s 16-year old son. To go from assassination to imprisonment is hardly that large a step.

Indefinite detention without trial is, of course, not a new policy for the U.S., as the involuntary residents of Guantanamo Bay could tell you. Nor is torture or summary execution. What is sinister about the turn that America has taken in the last decade is that these actions are no longer denied. They are no longer reviled as being barbaric, or “the method of the enemy.” Instead they are justified in the name of security and safety.

Obama has the dishonor of being the man to sign those abhorrent practices into law. He will not be remembered fondly.