Unfortunately, over the last decade, we’ve not done what’s necessary to shore up the foundations of our own prosperity. We spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.

But there’s no getting away from the fact that these statements apply equally to the first two years of the Obama administration.

If it hurts the economy to finance these huge war expenditures by borrowing, then why has Obama made exactly zero efforts to do anything about it? I don’t see how it’s a defense to say “But Bush started it!” Maybe, but Obama cheerfully continued it. As if there was no choice but to do so. And, of course, the whole point of that quote from his speech is that there was always a choice. There was a choice for Bush. And there was a choice for Obama. And Obama made the same choice as Bush. Even though he’s been criticizing Bush’s choice for the last three years.

I really think that Obama should have proposed a “Bush’s Wars” tax increase early in 2009. Perhaps a temporary increase, to be phased out as the wars wound down.

Clearly, the wars needed to be paid for. And there was no reason for Obama to take the political heat for this necessity. But it really shouldn’t have been too difficult — even for the hapless Democrats — to hang this fairly and squarely around Bush’s neck.

I’m not saying the Republicans — together with the elements of the Democratic Party who have proven time and again that they are easily intimidated by Republican rhetoric — would have actually allowed the tax increase to go through. But doesn’t Obama’s consistent rhetoric on the irresponsibility of funding these two wars by borrowing require that he should at least have tried?

And wouldn’t he have won politically even by losing?

President Obama‘s Oval Office address was impressive and perplexing. Politically, I liked the clever pivot to the domestic economy, but he left me utterly confused about the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are we to continue to spend trillions supposedly building “democracy” in those nations or not? He still has not defined what success means. If we’re just getting the hell out of those countries, then say say so and do so. But as always, Obama seems to be trying to split the difference between the irreconcilable. That is perhaps his greatest strength — or weakness.

It might be a strength if he had actually managed to get anywhere trying to do this. (Not just a strength, actually, but a miracle.) But, of course, he hasn’t. Because that’s what the word “irreconcilable” means, after all.

15. Do you think that a Muslim should be allowed to …

Run for President of the United States?
Yes: 61%
No: 32%
No answer/Don’t know: 7%

Serve on the U.S. Supreme Court?
Yes: 65%
No: 28%
No answer/Don’t know: 7%

Almost one-third of the country would bar Muslims from running for President? More than one-fourth would bar them from serving on the Supreme Court? Holy fucking wow!

The person having the last laugh would have to be George W. Bush. When he embraced torture by other names, and started to trample on some of our more cherished American values, there was a loud outcry from liberals that we, as a country, are better than this. But Bush apparently knew all along who we really are. Or who we were in the process of turning into (with a little bit of help from professional conservative hatemongers.)

The CIA has videotapes, after all, of interrogations in a secret overseas prison of admitted 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh.

Discovered in a box under a desk at the CIA, the tapes could reveal how foreign governments aided the United States in holding and interrogating suspects. And they could complicate U.S. efforts to prosecute Binalshibh, who has been described as one of the “key plot facilitators” in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
[...]
The two videotapes and one audiotape are believed to be the only existing recordings made within the clandestine prison system and could offer a revealing glimpse into a four-year global odyssey that ranged from Pakistan to Romania to Guantanamo Bay.

The tapes depict Binalshibh’s interrogation sessions in 2002 at a Moroccan-run facility the CIA used near Rabat, several current and former U.S. officials told The Associated Press. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the videos remain a closely guarded secret.

How closely guarded? The tapes were discovered in 2007, and we’re only just hearing about them:

When the CIA destroyed its cache of 92 videos of two other al-Qaida operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri, being waterboarded in 2005, officials believed they had wiped away all of the agency’s interrogation footage. But in 2007, a staff member discovered a box tucked under a desk in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and pulled out the Binalshibh tapes.

How inconvenient is it that the Binalshibh tapes exist?

Apparently the tapes do not show harsh treatment — unlike videos the agency destroyed of the questioning of other suspected terrorists.

Imagine that! The only tapes known to have survived do not show harsh treatment.

Note that we’re implicitly being asked to believe that, for some reason known only to the CIA — and, maybe, to God, though that’s doubtful — the CIA made interrogation tapes only of these three detainees. There were the tapes of Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri that were oh so regrettably destroyed. And there are the tapes of Binalshibh that we have just learned about. And the CIA never made tapes of any other detainees.

Because, like, what was the point? After taping three detainees, they had a top-secret eyes-only meeting, and they decided: “Been there. Done that. Enough.” Of course, they took a vote. The outcome? “The eyes have it.” And that was that. Henceforth, all interrogations were eyes-only.

The AP story has one statement that baffled me:

With military trial commissions on hold while the Obama administration figures out what to do with a number of terror suspects, Binalshibh has never had a hearing on whether he is mentally fit to stand trial.

I could have sworn that a military commission trial started just the other day. Last week, wasn’t it? Here’s Dahlia Lithwick from last Friday (a really eloquent piece; well worth your while reading the whole thing):

But instead of subjecting the so-called “worst of the worst” to a military tribunal, this past week the Obama administration fired up the tribunal system to try Omar Khadr, a child soldier. Khadr’s defense counsel, Jon Jackson, collapsed Thursday while questioning a witness and was airlifted back to the United States for treatment. There will be at least a 30-day delay in the proceedings. Maybe we can use this small break to look again at what Guantanamo has become and to acknowledge that Omar Khadr represents everything we shouldn’t be trying before a secretive military commission.

But just because the AP was totally wrong about military commission trials being on hold doesn’t mean the rest of their story isn’t 100% accurate.

The part about the CIA’s lies — first brazen, then tortured — certainly rings true:

The CIA first publicly hinted at the existence of the tapes in 2007 in a letter to U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in Virginia. The government twice denied having such tapes, recanting once they were discovered. …

At the time, the CIA played down the significance of the videos, saying they were not taken as part of the agency’s detention program and did not show CIA interrogations.

But that case can be made only because of the unusual nature of the Moroccan prison, which was largely financed by the CIA but run by Moroccans, the former officials said. The CIA could move detainees in and out, and oversee the interrogations, but officially Morocco had control.

Let’s hope that the Ramzi Binalshibh tapes don’t become too controversial. Because what the CIA found yesterday can just as easily go missing again tomorrow. The CIA already knows there aren’t any real consequences for such shenanigans. Not beyond having to listen to Congressional fulminations, and having to keep a straight face while pretending to be extremely redfaced.

The study didn’t make much of a splash at the time, but it has suddenly hit the liberal blog circuit this week.

The contrast between how waterboarding was covered before the Bush administration embraced it as official policy, and after, is not at all unexpected, but pretty stark, nevertheless (pdf):

From the early 1930’s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

In a statement to Michael Calderone of Yahoo! News, The New York Times was moved to defend its waterboarding coverage practices thusly:

A spokesman told Yahoo! News that the paper “has written so much about the waterboarding issue that we believe the Kennedy School study is misleading.”

However, the Times acknowledged that political circumstances did play a role in the paper’s usage calls. “As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement. “When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

The Times spokesman added that outside of the news pages, editorials and columnists “regard waterboarding as torture and believe that it fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture.” He continued: “So that’s what we call it, which is appropriate for the opinion pages.”

Perhaps in gratitude for that fine statement, Michael Calderone was inspired to whitewash the NYT‘s whitewashing of torture with this fine piece of journalistic commentary:

Clearly, the Times doesn’t want to be perceived as putting its thumb on the scale on either side in the torture debate. That’s understandable, given traditional journalistic values aiming for neutrality and balance. But by not calling waterboarding torture — even though it is, and the paper itself defined it that way in the past — the Times created a factual contradiction between its newer work and its own archives.

So, all the NYT guilty of is “a factual contradiction between its newer work and its own archives”, which may be mildly deplorable but is perfectly understandable, especially since it was clearly motivated by the lofty and high-minded desire not “to be perceived as putting its thumb on the scale on either side in the torture debate”?

That’s called taking the NYT‘s minima culpa, and becoming its water-carrying poster child.

Someone not inclined to curry favor with the NYT might say that “by not calling waterboarding torture, even though it is”, the NYT very clearly did, to its everlasting shame, put its big fat thumb on the scale in the torture debate. On the side of whitewashing the practice thereof by the President of these here United States.

But, of course, saying stuff like that doesn’t do a whole lot for your future job prospects at the NYT.

And who can blame someone who is currently employed by Yahoo! News for nursing dreams of perhaps moving to the NYT one day?

(Michael Calderone’s byline describes him as “the media reporter for Yahoo! News“. But there is, of course, an inherent conflict of interest when a reporter who wants to remain in the reporting business covers a story like this one.)

Here’s a perfectly representative example of the hosannas that greeted every key appointment, from Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel:

If you needed any further proof that things are different–very different–today, there’s this: Balkinization blogger Marty Lederman will take John Yoo’s former position, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for OLC.

As of today, the commencement of the Obama Administration, he begins work as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. There he will be joined by two of his former OLC colleagues, Dawn Johnsen, nominated to be head of the office; and David Barron, who will serve as the Principal Deputy (and as the Acting AAG while the Senate considers Dawn’s nomination).

We’ve replaced the guy who did Bush and Cheney’s evil bidding with a blogger-prof and Constitutional champion, Marty Lederman.

Welcome to a new day, America.

It wasn’t just bloggers, either. The Washington Post gushed thusly:

President Obama has made fine choices in tapping Dawn E. Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel and Martin S. Lederman and David Barron as her deputies. His selection of David S. Kris to head the department’s National Security Division is another excellent move. The appointments signal a return to the best traditions of the Justice Department …
[...]
Ms. Johnsen, Mr. Lederman and Mr. Barron, OLC lawyers during the Clinton administration and law professors since, have been leading and thoughtful critics of Bush administration policies on detention and national security.

And McClatchy brought us:

In filling four senior Justice Department positions Monday, President-elect Barack Obama signaled that he intends to roll back Bush administration counterterrorism policies authorizing harsh interrogation techniques, warrantless spying and indefinite detentions of terrorism suspects.

That was then.

After a long and disappointing succession of cases in which the Obama Justice Department Dream Team not only supported Bush-era positions but in several instances cheerfully outBushed the Bush Justice Department, this, sadly, is now:

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.

The detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base.

But a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the three had no right to habeas corpus hearings, in which judges would review evidence against them and could order their release. The court reasoned that Bagram was on the sovereign territory of another government and emphasized the “pragmatic obstacles” of giving hearings to detainees “in an active theater of war.”

The ruling dealt a severe blow to wider efforts by lawyers to extend a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A lower court judge had previously ruled that the three Bagram detainees were entitled to the same rights, although he had found that others captured in Afghanistan and held there were not.

A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, said that if the precedent stood, Mr. Obama and future presidents would have a free hand to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without having to prove in court that their suspicions about such prisoners were accurate.

“The thing that is most disappointing for those of us who have been in the fight for this long is all of the people who used to be opposed to the idea of unlimited executive power during the Bush administration but now seem to have embraced it during this administration,” she said.

Here’s the crux of the matter:

The men’s case was originally heard by Judge John D. Bates of the Federal District Court, an appointee of former President George W. Bush. The Bush and Obama administrations had both urged Judge Bates not to extend habeas corpus rights beyond Guantánamo, arguing that courts should not interfere with military operations inside active combat zones.

But in April 2009, Judge Bates ruled that there was no difference between the three men who had filed suit and Guantánamo prisoners. His decision was limited to non-Afghans captured outside Afghanistan — a category that fits only about a dozen of the roughly 800 detainees at Bagram, officials have said.

In urging the appeals court to let Judge Bates’s decision stand, lawyers for the detainees argued that reversing it would mean that the government would be able “to evade judicial review of executive detention decisions by transferring detainees into active combat zones, thereby granting the executive the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.”

Those who we once naively celebrated as champions of the Constitution are now fighting for the government’s right to switch the Constitution on or off at will. And winning.

At a closed briefing in 2003, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee raised no objection to a C.I.A. plan to destroy videotapes of brutal interrogations, according to secret documents released Monday.
[...]
According to a memorandum prepared after the Feb. 4, 2003, briefing by the C.I.A.’s director of Congressional affairs, Stanley M. Moskowitz, Scott Muller, then the agency’s general counsel, explained that the interrogations were reported in detailed agency cables and that officials intended to destroy the videotapes as soon as the agency’s inspector general completed a review of them.

“Senator Roberts listened carefully and gave his assent,” the C.I.A. memo says. (emphasis mine)

In November 2005, after nearly three years of internal debate, the agency destroyed 92 videotapes of interrogations of two people suspected of being terrorists, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

That action has been under criminal investigation by the Justice Department since early 2008. A prosecutor, John H. Durham, is trying to determine whether it violated court orders to preserve evidence related to detention and interrogation or violated any laws.

The CIA memo leaves no doubt that Roberts understood exactly what he was assenting to the destruction of:

Last August, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. directed Mr. Durham to expand his inquiry to consider whether the interrogations themselves broke any law. Mr. Holder noted that in at least a few instances, interrogators went beyond methods authorized by the Justice Department, including threatening Mr. Nashiri with a pistol and a power drill.

Those incidents were also described in the 2003 briefing for Mr. Roberts; when they were described, “Senator Roberts winced,” according to the memo on the briefing.

Roberts’s defense, by the way, consists of arguing that he did not assent, he only failed to dissent. He seems to believe that there’s an important distinction to be made between affirmatively approving, and implicitly approving by being in a powerful oversight position and raising no objection:

But Mr. Roberts, through a spokesman, denied having approved the destruction of the videotapes, which is under criminal investigation, and defended his record in overseeing the interrogation program.

His assertions were backed by his former staff director on the Intelligence Committee, William D. Duhnke, who said that while the senator had not objected to the tapes’ destruction, he was “in receive mode” and was simply listening to get the facts about the interrogation program, which he was learning about for the first time.

It is entirely because people like Roberts chose to define their jobs this way, because people like Roberts abdicated the oversight responsibility vested in them and decided that all they would do is be in receive mode and simply listen, that the Bush-Cheney regime was able take our most hallowed American values and grind them so comprehensively into the dust.

(To expose the shallow sophistry of Duhnke’s argument, we only need to ask: “Okay, so what did Senator Roberts do about it after he had listened and got the facts? When did he digest the facts and get out of receive mode?”)

Turds like Pat Roberts contributed to the stains we now have on our national honor — the stain, for example, of having unrepentantly practiced torture as a matter of state policy — just as much as excrescences like John Yoo.

Too bad the only shame turds like Pat Roberts will be forced to face for their actions is the shame of being forced to argue publicly: “Come on, I wasn’t an active collaborator, I collaborated only by looking the other way!”

But such is the wisdom of Obama, and not too many people seem to care. (It’s not like it matters, after all. It’s just a bunch of stains on our national honor. Sure, they aren’t indelible but, hey, why bother to cleanse our national honor?)

Three of Britain’s most senior judges have ordered the government to reveal evidence of MI5 complicity in the torture of British resident Binyam Mohamed – unanimously dismissing objections by David Miliband, the foreign secretary.

In a ruling that will cause deep anxiety among the security and intelligence agencies, they rejected Miliband’s claims, backed by the US government, that disclosure of a seven-paragraph summary of classified CIA information showing what British agents knew of Mohamed’s torture would threaten intelligence sharing between London and Washington, and therefore endanger Britain’s national security.

One of the key paragraphs states that there “could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of Binyam Mohamed by the United States authorities”.

The judges – Sir Igor Judge, the lord chief justice; Lord Neuberger, the master of the rolls; and Sir Anthony May, president of the Queen’s Bench – shattered the convention that the courts should not question claims by the executive relating to national security.

In damning references to claims made by Miliband and his lawyers, and stressing the importance of the media in supporting the principle of open justice, they said the case raised issues of “fundamental importance”, of “democratic accountability and ultimately the rule of law itself”.

Publication of the material Miliband wanted to suppress was “compelling”, Judge said, since they concerned the involvement of wrongdoing by agents of the state in the “abhorrent practice of torture”. The material helped to “vindicate Mr Mohamed’s assertion that UK authorities had been involved in and facilitated the ill- treatment and torture to which he was subjected while under the control of USA authorities“.

No ifs or buts. No strained euphemisms. It’s now right there in black and white. In the judgment of the British legal system — a judgment rendered over the strenous can’t-we-just-continue-to-cover-this-all-up-please? objections of the British government — we did indeed torture suspected terrorists in the time of Bush. In the judgment of the British legal system, when Bush said “We do not torture people”, that was a bare-faced lie.

It’s now certified that the British government not only knew about, but facilitated and participated in this torture. And British society does not seem to share our why-not-let-bygones-be-bygones attitude. So stand by for further fallout.

(2)
On November 19, 2009, U.S. Federal District Judge Gladys Kessler unambiguously ruled that Binyam Mohamed was subjected to torture. This was in the course of ruling, on Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed‘s habeas corpus petition, that he should be released forthwith. Because the charges against him were based almost entirely around statements made by Binyam Mohamed. And Binyam Mohamed’s statements could not be relied upon, because a) they were torture-induced, and b) he recanted his statements after his release from Guantanamo.

The Government argues that Petitioner left the Jalalabad guesthouse to train at an al-Qaida camp, and then returned to Jalalabad before fleeing the country for Pakistan after September 11….Its chief support for this argument consists of the statement of Binyam Mohamed, who told interrogators at Guantanamo Bay in October and November of 2004 that Petitioner attended a training camp with him.
[...]
Petitioner contends that Binyam Mohamed’s statements—the only other evidence placing Petitioner in a training camp—cannot be relied upon, because he suffered intense and sustained physical and psychological abuse while in American custody from 2002 to 2004. Petitioner argues that while Binyam Mohamed was detained at locations in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan, he was tortured and forced to admit a host of allegations, most of which he has since denied. When he arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Binyam Mohamed implicated Petitioner in training activities. However, after being released from Guantanamo Bay, he signed a sworn declaration claiming that he never met Petitioner until they were both detained at Guantanamo Bay, thereby disavowing the statements he made at Guantanamo Bay about training with Petitioner. In that sworn declaration Binyam Mohamed stated that he was forced to make untrue statements about many detainees, including Petitioner. Binyam Mohamed stated he made these statements because of “torture or coercion,” that he was “fed a large amount of information” while in detention, and that he resorted to making up some stories.

And then Judge Kessler’s judgment spells out exactly what Binyam Mohamed suffered, without mincing words:

Binyam Mohamed’s trauma lasted for two long years. During that time, he was physically and psychologically tortured. His genitals were mutilated. He was deprived of sleep and food. He was summarily transported from one foreign prison to another. Captors held him in stress positions for days at a time. He was forced to listen to piercingly loud music and the screams of other prisoners while locked in a pitch-black cell. All the while, he was forced to inculpate himself and others in various plots to imperil Americans. The Government does not dispute this evidence.

Surprisingly, Judge Kessler’s judgment didn’t cause much of a ripple in the US when it was rendered last November. Or maybe it’s not so surprising. We have, after all, decided as a country that it’s far better to simply ignore all evidence of the torture the Bush administration conducted in our name, than to distract ourselves from the challenges of today by looking backwards in any kind of reckoning, moral or legal.

In the UK, though, people are hopeful that the court of appeal ruling will lead to some real societal soul-searching, a real investigation into the conduct of and complicity in torture:

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said the ruling and revelations made a public inquiry “inescapable”.

“It has been clear for over a year that the Foreign Office has been more concerned with saving face than exposing torture.

“These embarrassing paragraphs reveal nothing of use to terrorists but they do show something of the UK government’s complicity with the most shameful part of the war on terror.

“The government has gone to extraordinary lengths to cover up kidnap and torture. A full public inquiry is now inescapable.”

In fact, it looks like a real investigation is already under way:

An MI5 officer known only as Witness B is being investigated by the Metropolitan police over his alleged role in questioning Mohamed incommunicado in a Pakistan jail.

(3)
There’s another angle to the court of appeal judgment that is creating a bit of a hullabaloo. The draft judgment had contained a scathing indictment of MI5, but the master of the rolls, Lord Neuberger, agreed to water it down considerably:

The government launched a successful last-minute bid to persuade the court of appeal to erase the most damning details of MI5′s complicity in torture from its decision in the Binyam Mohamed case – but has been unable to suppress a letter that details some of the contents of the original draft ruling.

On Monday, Jonathan Sumption QC wrote to the court warning that the paragraph in question was “likely to receive more public attention than any other parts of the judgments”.

This, Sumption pointed out, was because the paragraph would state that MI5 did not operate in a culture that respected human rights or renounced “coercive interrogation techniques”.

The letter also reveals that the judgment, before being rewritten, said this was particularly true of the MI5 officer known as Witness B who gave evidence in the case – and that this man’s conduct was characteristic of MI5 as a whole.

Furthermore, the letter shows, the judges originally ruled that MI5 officers had “deliberately misled” the Intelligence and Security Committee, the body of MPs and peers supposed to oversee its work, on the question of coercive interrogations, and that this “culture of suppression” reflected its dealings with the committee, the foreign secretary and the court.

Finally, the letter makes clear that the court ruled MI5′s culture of suppression “penetrates the service to such a degree” that it undermines any government assurance based upon information that comes from MI5 itself.

The master of the rolls, Lord Neuberger, told the court this morning that he had discussed Sumption’s request with the lord chief justice, and decided to amend the relevant section “quite significantly”.
[...]
Judges were entitled to change their draft judgments, the master of the rolls said, but “it was over-hasty of me” to do so without giving others the opportunity of making representations.

He would therefore give parties who wished to object until 4pm on Friday to make representations, when he would decide whether to reinstate his judgement.

The justices’ opinion of MI5 is already on the public record now. It might even be restored to the formal judgment. Either way, it will no doubt cause some real ripples.

In June 2006, the Bush military announced that three Guantánamo detainees had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells.

In November 2009, a team of students and faculty at the Seton Hall University law school analyzed a heavily redacted NCIS report of the alleged suicides, and found the official government account of how these three men died to be riddled with inconsistencies and, literally, unbelievable:

Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.

Yesterday, Harper’s magazine published online a copy of an article by Scott Horton that will appear in their March issue. Horton provides an eyewitness account by Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman (who was on duty as sergeant of the guard at Guantánamo’s Camp Delta on the night of the deaths in question). Hickman’s account of what did and did not happen that night strongly suggests that the three Guantánamo detainees who were declared to have committed suicide actually died as a result of some aggressive (and, possibly, illegal) enhanced interrogation. Hickman’s account suggests that the Bush military engaged in a massive cover-up operation. And Horton’s article accuses the Obama administration of active complicity in the cover-up:

…new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

It’s a long article, but well worth reading. It brings the duplicity and mendacity and sheer disregard of the law with which the Bush regime conducted The War Against Terror into sharp focus. And it suggests that the Obama administration seamlessly continued that duplicity and mendacity. Apparently because covering up war crimes is infinitely better than distracting ourselves from the future by looking backwards.

The biggest political story of the year, I think, should have been the huge gulf between the Obama we were sold (Obama-who-walks-on-water) and the Obama we find we actually bought (Obama-who-governs-strangely-like-Bush-in-so-many-ways).

Notice that I’m not even referring to the obsessive-compulsive need to envelop Republicans in his warm legislative embrace, the need which led to making huge concessions before negotiations even started (sometimes to the point of giving away the store in advance), the need which led to continuing to make concessions even as Republicans laughed in his face and publicly declared they weren’t negotiating in good faith, in fact they weren’t even negotiating at all, and that they would vote in lockstep against whatever deal was eventually “negotiated”.

And I’m not referring to this obsessive-compulsive need, because this was hardly a surprise. This is exactly what Obama had advertised throughout his presidential campaign he was going to do, bring us all together, Republicans and Democrats, and forge consensus, heal all our George Bush wounds by applying the balm of compromise, which would involve bending over backwards to meet Republicans halfway, regardless of how absurd their positions were, and how inflexible.

Here’s how little of a surprise it was. Here at 1115.org, we were already complaining about him doing it — not talking about doing so, but doing it already — back in August of 2008 (when he suddenly decided to “back limited offshore drilling as part of a broader energy package that attempted to bring down gas prices” after firmly opposing offshore drilling as a policy of pointless pandering).

But back in the giddy days of “Yes, we can!” and “Change you can believe in!” — when people who should have known better became starry-eyed Obama girls — anyone who tried to ask questions about what Obama’s defining principle of bipartisan compromise would involve, and how it could possibly work in practice, given that the Republicans were who they had become, was just ignored and dismissed. There was, evidently, some kind of deeply felt need to embrace Obama without critical scrutiny, to feel offended by critical scrutiny.

So the bipartisan-compromise-mania certainly wasn’t a bait-and-switch. But what about all the myriad issues where Obama — after imploring us to elect him so that he could dismantle Bushworld — unaccountably decided that what he wanted to do most of all was to seamlessly continue some of Bush’s seamiest and most odious policies?

Here, via Glenn Greenwald, is a short list:

Has he appointed financial officials who have largely served the agenda of the Wall Street and industry interests that funded his campaign? Has he embraced many of the Bush/Cheney executive power and secrecy abuses which Democrats once railed against — from state secrets to indefinite detention to renditions and military commissions? Has he actively sought to protect from accountability and disclosure a whole slew of Bush crimes? Did he secretly a (sic) negotiate a deal with the pharmaceutical industry after promising repeatedly that all negotiations over health care would take place out in the open, even on C-SPAN? … Is Bob Herbert right when he condemned Obama’s detention policies as un-American and tyrannical, and warned: “Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House”?

What’s really funny, though, is how, despite all this, Obama still walks on water for so many people.

Maybe I should rephrase what I said at the beginning?

The biggest political story of the year, I think, should have been how so many people are still so blind to the huge gulf between the Obama we were sold (Obama-who-walks-on-water) and the Obama we find we actually bought (Obama-who-governs-strangely-like-Bush-in-so-many-ways).