By Justin Elliott, ProPublica

In the months following the October 2001, passage of the Patriot Act, there was a heated public debate about the very provision of the law that we now know the government is using to vacuum up phone records of American citizens on a massive scale.

“A chilling intrusion” declared one op-ed in the Baltimore Sun.

But the consternation didn’t focus on anything like the mass collection of phone records.

Instead, the debate centered on something else: library records.

Salon ran a picture of a virtual Uncle Sam gazing at a startled library patron under the headline, “He knows what you’ve been checking out.” In one of many similar stories, the San Francisco Chronicle warned, “FBI checking out Americans’ reading habits.”

The concern stemmed from the Patriot Act’s Section 215, which, in the case of a terrorism investigation, allows the FBI to ask a secret court to order production of “any tangible things” from a third party like a person or business. The law said this could include records, papers, documents, or books.

Civil liberties groups and librarians’ associations, which have long been fiercely protective of reader privacy, quickly raised fears of the FBI using that authority to snoop on circulation records.

The section even became known as the “library provision.”

Yet as the Guardian and others revealed this month, the government has invoked the same provision to collect metadata on phone traffic of the majority of all Americans — a far larger intrusion than anything civil libertarians warned about in their initial response.

“A person might uncharitably think of us as lacking in imagination,” says Lee Tien, a longtime attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

In a speech before casting the sole dissenting vote in the Senate against the Patriot Act, Sen. Russ Feingold did zero in on Section 215 as “an enormous expansion of authority” with “minimal judicial supervision.”

But even Feingold did not conceive of the provision being used for bulk data collection, merely mentioning the possibility of individualized cases — for example, compelling “a library to release circulation records.”

Civil liberties advocates said in interviews there is a simple reason for the disconnect: In the period immediately after the Patriot Act passed, few if any observers believed Section 215 could authorize any kind of ongoing, large-scale collection of phone data.

They argue that only a radical and incorrect interpretation of the law allows the mass surveillance program the NSA has erected on the foundation of Section 215. The ACLU contends in a lawsuit filed last week that Section 215 does not legitimately authorize the metadata program.

The reason libraries became a focal point, Tien says, is that, “People could see that those kinds of records were very seriously connected to First Amendment activity and the librarians were going to war on it.”

Even before the Patriot Act passed, the American Library Association warned members of Congress that the business records provision under consideration would “eviscerate long-standing state laws and place the confidentiality of all library users at risk.”

“The library groups have a very well-informed and active lobby,” says Elizabeth Goiten, who co-directs the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.

So has the government ever used Section 215 to get library records? We don’t know.

Testifying before Congress in March 2011, a Justice Department official said Section 215 “has never been used against a library to obtain circulation records.”

But as with so much else about the Patriot Act, how often or even whether the government has obtained library records is secret. Section 215 imposes a gag order on people or businesses who are compelled to produce records.

The FBI has also used a separate Patriot Act provision, issuing what is known as a national security letter, to seek library patron records. One such episode prompted a successful court challenge by Connecticut librarians in 2005-06.

The government itself didn’t get around to using Section 215 to vacuum up phone metadata until five years after the Patriot Act passed, in 2006, according to a new Washington Post report. The government had been sweeping up metadata since after 9/11 but apparently was doing so without a court order.

USA Today revealed that warrantless surveillance in 2006.  Around the same time, according to the Post, the telecoms asked the NSA to get a court order for the data, believing that it would offer them more protection.

On May 24, 2006 two weeks after the USA Today report, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decided to redefine relevant business records under Section 215 “as the entirety of a telephone company’s call database,” according to the Post.

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, says that she has for years worried about bulk collection of metadata, but believed the government might be justifying it using other provisions in the Patriot Act.

“It was a really novel idea on the part of the government that they could use 215 to get bulk phone records,” she says.

As part of the Patriot Act reauthorization of 2006, Congress changed some of the wording in Section 215. But because the government’s interpretation of the law is still secret, it’s not clear whether the changes made any difference in the court’s ultimate authorization of the metadata program.

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New Orleans Mother’s Day Shooting: Apparently not a tragedy

“George Bush does not care about black people!”

 - Kanye West going seriously off-script is amongst the most iconic unplanned television moments of the 21^st century.

Whilst being careful not to place too much gravitas on a man who refers to himself as ‘The Louis Vuitton Don,’ Mr West must be credited for risking his career with the most honest statement injected into the midst of a public show since a Danish child declared his Emperor should probably put some pants on.

George Bush would later say that Kanye’s attack was the worst moment of his Presidency, worse than 9/11, Iraq and the 2008 crash. “I’m not racist” Bush protested (which, by the way, only ever makes people sound more racist). All those years later, he still couldn’t comprehend what Yeezy could have meant by that statement. Well if it’s still giving ‘W’ sleepless nights on the ranch, maybe he could look at the media response to the New Orleans Mother’s Day shooting, compare it to the response that followed the tragic events that took place in Massachusetts or Connecticut recently and see if that doesn’t help clarify things a bit

Kanye, as rappers tend to do, chose his words careful when he said what he said in 2005. He didn’t say Bush hates black people, he said ‘he doesn’t care.’ He was saying Bush sees poor black people as people, but still belonging to a cultural group distinct from his own. These are not people that Bush looks at and shares a sense of identity with. Kanye was alluding to the fact that Bush’s empathy could not overcome the hurdles erected by the social distinctions of race, class and wealth. These hurdles barred Bush, consciously or subconsciously, from prioritizing the suffering of the people of New Orleans as he would with rich white people in his neighborhood in Texas.

In 2013, there is a new President of darker pigmentation. But a change in President doesn’t lead to an immediate change in society’s power structure – and that power structure still dictates normative narratives that continue to edit out America’s tragic tale of New Orleans.

I was fortunate enough to spend a few months living in New Orleans whilst working with a law firm last year. My impressions was that New Orleans is certainly a city apart; it is aware of its outsider status and wears it’s technicolored lifestyle proudly on its sleeve. Maybe it is this self-conscious embrace of difference that leads to the mainstream seeing it as somehow ‘un-American .’ Its kind of European, it has a little of the African, a bit of the Caribbean and a lot of the outer-space about it. But it is also associated with violence and a reputation as being America’s ‘murder city’. The combined effect of all this allows the media to view the city as a place where horrific events like the shooting that occurred last Sunday, are ‘meant’ to take place. The shooting in New Orleans has been subtly denied the status of tragedy as the domestic and international coverage has been virtually non-existent. David Dennis wrote an excellent piece in The Guardian this week asking why the New Orleans shooting isn’t being considered a tragedy. He highlighted the fact that the story hadn’t even finished before the media lost interest. The suspects were still at large as the story disappeared from the newspapers.

Remember the media coverage when the Boston suspects were on the run?

A tragedy is not determined by facts or the body count, it is reliant upon public perception. Writer Aldous Huxley told us ‘We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.” What we collectively decide to be a tragedy says more about us that about the actually horror of the event we mourn. When we decide that the shooting of innocent teenagers in our hometown is tragic but not the unprovoked drone strike that killed on 16-year old U.S citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlak in Yemen, we are subconsciously revealing who we think should be included in the club of empathy. Watch the below video for the reality of the tragedy that the media has minimized:

When you see this you have to ask, why isn’t this a bigger story? Why isn’t there blanket media coverage, outcry from all over the globe and vocal demand from all media outlets to find out how this could have happened? Where are the Alex Jones conspiracy theories, the internet trolls posting ‘THE TRUTH’ on every Youtube video, blaming Obama for orchestrating the whole thing to take away their liberty? The reason for the absence of Benghazi-level paranoia is the same reason behind Bush’s lethargic response to Katrina, the same reason why the anniversary of Katrina passes each year with minimal acknowledgement, whilst a few a weeks later mourning for 9/11 is compulsory even for us here in London. People I got to know in New Orleans hadn’t forgotten how it felt to be deserted and then demonized by the rest of the country when they were crying out for help; I’m sure they are not too surprised with the lack of reaction to the Mother’s Day shooting either. As President ‘W’ said: Fool me once, erm… fool me twice… fool me you can’t fool me again.”

An enduring irony of the global appeal of America is that it often comes from the margins, those who are being excluded from the official national narrative. In other countries it is usually the culture of the mainstream that is exported overseas. Yet it was the second class negroes of this ‘un-american’ city who are credited with creating the first ‘American artform’ in Jazz. Jazz was embraced around the world in same way the hip-hop of the South Bronx left behind by Reganomics would also be nearly a century later. New Orleans will of course recover from this latest tragedy; behind all the magic and madness in city was a toughness that any visitor could not ignore. However, the rest of America may wish to start expanding its empathy to include this city again. Because with its multi-cultural influences and avowed lust for life, not just is New Orleans part of America, it might just be its best part.

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They say two wrongs don’t make a right, but ignoring one of those wrongs while vilifying the other is intellectually dishonest and violently hypocritical, among other things. And certainly that’s the case surrounding news that the IRS targeted tea party groups as a means of determining and verifying their tax-exempt status has resurrected a familiar debate about government overreach and abuse of power.

As of right now, it’s unknown whether the IRS was acting on the behalf of the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party. What we do know, however, is that it’s not the first time something like this has happened. We also know that the Democrats have almost universally condemned the actions of the IRS, as they’ve done when the congressional Republicans and, naturally, the Bush administration used the nearly unlimited might of the government to engage in similar investigations — or worse. And we know that the lock-step party, the Republicans, spent eight years defending, applauding and enabling Bush abuses on this front, while subsequently cheerleading the congressional Republicans as they carry forward the politics of intimidation and government overreach into the Obama era.

Let’s begin there. The congressional Republicans are outraged by the IRS story, but they haven’t been able to scramble to the floor of the House quickly enough to target left-leaning groups.

1. Planned Parenthood. After a hoax video was produced by James O’Keefe and released by a professional clown-wrangler, the late Andrew Breitbart, the Republican Party has engaged in a years-long effort to strip the organization, which offers cancer screenings and other affordable medical services for women, of critical funding from the government. The votes in the House as well as in state legislatures from Arizona to New Jersey to Texas and New Hampshire — to the tune of at least $60 million — are nothing more than assault against a political enemy.

2. ACORN. The government attack on ACORN, traditionally a left-leaning organization, might be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic. As with Planned Parenthood, the Republican inquisition against ACORN was nothing more than a politically-motivated witch hunt based on, once again, a selectively-edited prank video by a scam artist, O’Keefe, who’s been convicted of wiretapping a sitting U.S. Senator and forced in court to pay $100,000 in restitution to a fired ACORN employee. Yet the entire Republican congressional delegation lined up behind Breitbart and O’Keefe and destroyed ACORN, which entirely shut down in 2010. But that hasn’t stopped the Republicans from continuing to vote on at least several occasions to defund the nonexistent group. In fact, last week the chairman House Appropriations Committee Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) introduced a section into a spending bill that reads: “None of the funds made available in this Act may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries or successors.”

3. Voter ID Laws and Voter Purges. Whether it’s Governor Rick Scott of Florida purging voter rolls of minority voters who are likely to vote for Democratic candidates or states like Georgia, Indiana, Kansas and Tennessee passing restrictive Voter ID laws, the Republicans are making sure that fewer and fewer Democrats will be able to freely cast a ballot — our most sacred right as citizens in a representative democracy.

What about the Bush years?

4. The Bush Justice Department Targeted Democrats for Prosecution. Back in 2007, the House Judiciary Committee investigated charges that attorney general Alberto Gonzales singled out prominent Democrats for prosecution, specifically Pennsylvania Democrats — an assertion that was backed up by Dick Thornburgh, the attorney general under Reagan and Bush 41.

5. The Attorney Firing Scandal. Of course there was the attorney firing scandal in which the Bush Justice Department fired a slate of U.S. attorneys for strictly partisan reasons, either because the attorneys were prosecuting too many Republicans or because they weren’t prosecuting enough Democrats.

6. The Bush IRS Audited Greenpeace and the NAACP. Not only was the NAACP suspiciously audited during Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, but high profile Republicans like Joe Scarborough had previously supported an audit of the organization even though he’s suddenly shocked by the current IRS audit story. Also in 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that the IRS audited the hyper-liberal group Greenpeace at the request of Public Interest Watch, a group that’s funded by Exxon-Mobil.

7. The Bush IRS Collected Political Affiliation Data on Taxpayers. In 2006, a contractor hired by the IRS collected party affiliation via a search of voter registration roles in a laundry list of states: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin. This begs the obvious question: why? Why would the IRS need voter registration and party affiliation information?

8. The Bush FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force Targeted Civil Rights / Anti-war Activists. In 2005, an ACLU investigation revealed that both the FBI and the JTTF surveilled and gathered intelligence about a variety of liberal groups including PETA and the Catholic Workers, along with other groups that it hyperbolically referred to as having “semi-communistic ideology.”

9. The Bush Pentagon Spied on Dozens of Anti-war Meetings. Also in 2005, the Department of Defense tracked 1,500 “suspicious incidents” and spied on four-dozen meetings involving, for example, anti-war Quaker groups and the like. Yes, really. The Bush administration actually kept track of who was attending these meetings down to descriptions of the vehicles used by the attendees, calling to mind the pre-Watergate era when the government investigated 100,000 Americans during the Vietnam War.

10. The Bush FBI Targeted Journalists with the New York Times and the Washington Post. Yesterday, it was learned that a U.S. attorney, Ronald Machen, subpoenaed and confiscated phone records from the Associated Press as part of a leak investigation regarding an article about a CIA operation that took place in Yemen to thwart a terrorist attack on the anniversary of Bin Laden’s death. Well, this story pales in comparison with the Bush administration’s inquisition against the reporters who broke the story about the NSA wiretapping program. In fact, the Justice Department considered invoking the Espionage Act of 1917, the archaic sequel to the John Adams-era Alien and Sedition Acts. The Bush FBI seized phone records — without subpoena — from four American journalists, including Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez. How do we know this for sure? Former FBI Director Robert Mueller apologized to the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Adding… Bush White House Warns Bill Maher After 9/11. Congressional Republicans Condemn Moveon.org. I’ve coupled these two instances into one simply because they each underscore the Republican penchant for bullying dissenters. Shortly after 9/11, Bill Maher committed the mortal sin of suggesting that terrorists weren’t “cowards” (he was merely agreeing with conservative fire-eater Dinesh D’Souza). White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, speaking from the White House, warned Maher: “people have to watch what they say and watch what they do.” Maher’s show at the time, Politically Incorrect, was cancelled shortly thereafter. Years later, Moveon.org criticized conservative superhero David Petraeus with a full-page ad featuring the awkward play-on-words “General Betray Us.” George W. Bush himself pilloried Moveon and the Senate voted to condemn the ad while lionizing Petraeus (a love affair that came to an end last year).

With the IRS and AP stories, any cursory glimpse at the news will prove that Democrats — even liberal bloggers — have been critical of the Obama administration’s actions, just as they had been with the actions of the Bush White House and the Republican Party. But Republicans? No such fairness or honesty. Of course. And it’s also important to note the distinction between these recent stories and what’s obviously a Republican textbook strategy of employing any means necessary in suppressing its opposition — from the ballot box to the pages of our top-shelf newspapers. This is what they do: they intimidate, bully, prosecute and silence their critics as a matter of routine. And they rarely apologize or accept responsibility for it.

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Few things are more irritating than stupidity.  What makes this even more annoying is knowing you are paying for it.  Congressman Eric Cantor has scheduled a vote this week repealing “Obamacare.”  His proposal’s chances of passing the Senate and/or being signed into law by President Obama are pretty much the same. Talk about exercises in futility.

The House cut its operating budget in 2011 by five percent.  More info on that can be found here.   That amounts to nearly $33 million a year.  Legistorm has information on how much each office spends on salaries for members and staffers.  One sure thing cam be said of all the offices from the big spenders to the most frugal is the source of the funding.  Paying for Eric Cantor to drag te House through this flight of fancy/political posturing at its most absurd.  No one — even Cantor himself, sees this as becoming law — at least not with the current Senate and White House.

This is shameful and not our founding fathers had in mind when they crafted our constitution.

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Welcome to this weeks edition of The Daily Banter mailbag!! Today, Bob, Ben and Chez discuss the government’s decision not to read Djokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights, Sarah Palin’s assertion that everyone who went to the White House Correspondents Dinner was an ‘assclown’, and the penalties for bringing a book back late to George Bush’s new Presidential Library.

1. How do you feel about the government holding off on reading Djokhar Tsarnaev his miranda rights before questioning him at first? I thought it was a bad idea for a lot of reasons, first because it would give people like Greenwald more ammo but mostly because it just doesn’t pass the smell test. 

– Marta

Chez: It wasn’t a big deal and anyone who says it was is a) just looking for something to be pissed about, and b) doesn’t understand how his Miranda rights were held off and why. Nobody ever said Tsarnaev was going to be deprived of Miranda for the entire time he was being held and he wasn’t. The feds had a delay of about 48 hours by invoking the public safety exception, and that’s about all they got. Not a big deal. Greenwald and his ilk were going to make a big deal out of it regardless because that’s how they make their living, but in the end it was much ado about nothing.

Bob: Considering the insanity of the last 12 years I don’t blame you or anyone else for being skeptical of anything to do with these kinds of things. But at the same time, with new levels of transparency and access to the process that we evaluate what’s truly a crisis. In this case, questioning a terrorism suspect without mirandizing him has been done numerous times but we all noticed it for the first time last week. In fact, I was concerned myself until, believe it or not, I caught a tweet from Greenwald who confirmed that questioning a suspect without Miranda is, indeed, okay but only for a short time. Gratefully, that’s exactly what came to pass.

Ben: Hmm, not sure about this one. Given the US government’s propensity to use terrorism to justify increasingly invasive security measures, I’m always skeptical about them doing things like this. But I’ve done a bit of reading into this after I went on Thom Hartmann’s show on Friday, and what they did with Tsarnaev was actually perfectly legal (check here for Adam Goodman’s explanation in the Atlantic). The issue is going to be used by everyone to score political points, but as long as Tsarnaev is treated is afforded the same legal rights every other citizen is, there shouldn’t be too much to complain about.

2. I assume you all saw Sarah Palin’s response to the White House Correspondents Dinner. WTF? Was she just throwing a temper tantrum because she wasn’t invited? Also, how could someone who was once almost elected to the second highest office on earth use the word “assclowns” and not die of embarrassment?

– Todd

Ben: I actually agree with Sarah Palin’s tweet. She’s right, the WHCD is a nerd prom for a bunch of assclowns. But they’re not nerds and assclowns for the reasons Sarah Palin thinks they are. She’s just mad because 1. she wasn’t invited and 2. everyone there is a lot smarter than her. Events like that poke fun at people like her, and she’s so stupid, she doesn’t understand the jokes.

Bob: I’ve never seen anyone quite as ridiculous as Sarah Palin. She’s descended from being a vice presidential candidate to an internet troll. She’s Morton Downey Jr. with less talent. Yet millions of Americans love her and if she’s ever elected to anything  again, her voters deserve her.

Chez: Yeah, my first thought was that somebody was all pissy and jealous because she wasn’t asked to the prom. You know that if Sarah Palin were vice president right now, and she and John McCain hadn’t brought about Armageddon, she’d be loving every second of the attention. But since she wasn’t part of the party she has to be a fucking child about it. And yes, “assclowns.” Again, the fucking bullet we dodged in 2008.

3. What do you suppose happens to you if you check a book out of the Bush presidential library and keep it out for too long?

– AJ

Chez: Nothing you should be worried about. The library will go after the people who live next door to you.

Ben: Depends how rich you are. If you have tons of cash, you can keep it out for as long as you want. The library will even give you other books to keep. If you’re poor, you’ll be charged by the hour and forced to sell your belongings to pay for it. It’s fair though, because the rich might allow some of the knowledge they’ve received from the books to trickle down to everyone else.

Bob: There’s probably a small fine, but on the upside you’ll be able to finish coloring in the drawings.

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Bush and Rove: Tweedledumb and Tweedledick

Continuing in the longheld GOP tradition of making shit up, Karl Rove has come out swinging to defend George W. Bush’s legacy as President. In a wide ranging interview, he made the following claims on an ABC interview:

1. “He kept us safe after 9/11,”

2. “He moved to modernize our tools, provide the tools to fight terror, he called terror for what it was”

3. “He tackled the big issues of trying to reform Social Security, Medicare, immigration, education,”

4. “The Iraq War was the right thing to do and the world is a safer place for having Saddam Hussein gone,”

5. “The greats, you can’t touch: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, FDR, the greats. But yeah, I’d put him up there,”

Tearing this nonsense apart isn’t particularly difficult, because, well, everyone reading this experienced the Bush years for themselves. The man only left office five years ago, and much of the world is still recovering from the monumental fuck ups he and his gang of lunatics wrought while in office.

Let’s take Rove’s claims one by one and match the fiction with the reality.

1. “He kept us safe after 9/11″

First of all, he didn’t exactly do a great job of keeping the nation safe before 9/11, when it actually mattered. It is well documented that Bush ignored many credible warnings that Al-Qaeda was planning an attack on American soil and did next to nothing to investigate them. He then attacked the wrong country afterwards and let the country fall apart under his disastrous management. As a result, authoritative studies have shown that the threat of terrorism increased by 700%. Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank
Research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, note that:

“As The administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate on “Trends in Global Terrorism: implications for the United States,” circulated within the government in April 2006 and partially declassified in October, states that “the Iraq War has become the ’cause celebre’ for jihadists…and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”

2. “He moved to modernize our tools, provide the tools to fight terror, he called terror for what it was”

If by modernized our tools, Rove means the unprecedented expansion of the security state and the use of torture, then he’s kind of right. As for calling terror what it was, Bush essentially ushered in a war against a military tactic – about as useful as declaring a ‘War on Reconnaissance Missions’.

3. “He tackled the big issues of trying to reform Social Security, Medicare, immigration, education,”

Despite Bush’s best efforts to privatize Social Security (ie. dismantle it), he had no luck, and the popular government program remains intact. On medicare, Bush introduced a baffling, ludicrously expensive bill (Medicare Part D) that was essentially a giant giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry and added trillions of dollars to the deficit. As for immigration, Bush was reasonably pro immigrant, but then that’s because he saw immigrants as a giant source of cheap labor for beloved corporations. On education, Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy was about as successful as the post war occupation of Iraq. As Diane Ravich at The Daily Beast wrote:

NCLB [No Child Left Behind] is the worst federal education law ever passed. About half of all public schools in the nation have been stigmatized as “failing” because they couldn’t meet its utopian mandates, and the proportion is certain to grow every year. In Massachusetts, the nation’s highest performing state, 81 percent of the state’s schools are officially “failing” by the standards of NCLB. No national legislature in history has ever designed a law that resulted in the shaming of most of its public schools.

4. “The Iraq War was the right thing to do and the world is a safer place for having Saddam Hussein gone”

Consider this when thinking about the war in Iraq:

More than a million deaths and millions more wounded with varying lifelong disabilities, including thousands of tortured prisoners, with an estimated 16,000 of them still unaccounted for. Twenty-eight percent of Iraqi children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and 2.8 million people are still internally displaced or living as refugees outside the country.

Add to that the complete upheaval of the Iraqi economy, as well as its transportation, education and medical institutions….the countless people suffering from trauma and depression, sectarian strife, terrifying birth defects from toxic pollution, and a brain drain that has left the country illiterate.

Forget the fact that the war was illegal, unnecessary, stupendously expensive, and incomprehensibly badly executed, it also left a power vacuum for Iran to fill, making it the biggest power in the Arab world and direct threat to US/Israeli hegemony in the region. Iraq is now an open breeding ground for terrorists and is decades away from serious stability.

5. “The greats, you can’t touch: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, FDR, the greats. But yeah, I’d put him up there”

If think that allowing the biggest domestic terror attack ever to happen under your watch, invading two countries with no post war plan, trashing America’s image around the world, increasing the threat of terrorism, gutting the government to the point of no return, massively expanding the debt, creating unprecedented levels of wealth inequality and poverty and wrecking the global economy makes you a great President, then yes, Rove is right on the money.

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Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com

George W. Bush was easily the least qualified person in U.S. history to hold the presidency. Other failed presidents occasionally have one element of their tenure that they can hail as a success, but George W. Bush ended his presidency with failure on both domestic and foreign policy.

By the time he mercifully left office on January 20, 2009, thousands of American soldiers were unnecessarily dead, thousands of Iraqis were dead, and millions of Americans were out of work. That doesn’t even account for global instability thanks to the vacuum of leadership in the Bush White House.

Yet somehow, my fellow liberals are too soft in assessing Bush’s failure.

They claim that he was a puppet, a tool of other, craftier forces. Most often Cheney is invoked as the man behind the curtain, who used Bush to achieve his evil goals.

Wrong.

Bush is responsible. Bush was the President. Bush was the man who made the ultimate decision to invade Iraq, to do so with an incompetent fool like Donald Rumseld in charge. Bush chose not to react to the memo that warned him about Bin Laden’s plan to attack on 9/11. Bush chose to take resources away from fighting Al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq. Bush chose to put industry cronies in key regulatory positions, including those who were supposed to be watching Wall Street. Bush chose to cut taxes for the super-rich without regard to its long-term effect on the U.S. economy. It was Bush who looked out of an airplane window with that same blank expression he always had, watching as New Orleans drowned.

At practically every critical juncture in his presidency, Bush made the decisions that lead to failure, death, and strife for Americans and people around the world. The buck stopped at his desk.

So when liberals lay the blame on people like Cheney, or Rice, or any of the other goons that ran amok in the White House for eight years, they’re letting the ultimate bad actor off the hook.

Bush is responsible for what happened. We shouldn’t ever forget that.

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President George W. Bush in a flight suit after landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln to give his “Mission Accomplished” speech.

By Paul R. Pillar

There is a moral deficit in the way much American discussion of foreign policy fails to take account of the perspectives and interests of foreigners that U.S. policy affects.

Marc Lynch noted this failure with regard to recent retrospective commentary about the Iraq War, Robert Wright has referred more generally to a chronic lack in this country of “moral imagination,” and Robert Golan-Vilella recently summarizedthe observations of both.

If we apply widely accepted principles of moral philosophy to the level of international relations, then taking better account than we usually do now of those foreign perspectives and interests would be the ethical thing to do.

An important further point, however, is that it also would be the right thing to do from a hard-boiled realist perspective that is tightly focused on U.S. interests and that some people might view (however incorrectly) as amoral. Paying insufficient attention to foreign interests, perspectives and sensibilities is wrong on this count as well as being wrong on ethical grounds.

Usually it is those critical of realism — including most conspicuously, but not limited to, today’s neoconservatives — who claim to be the ones who understand and practice a convergence between morality and power, and between values and interests. They tend to criticize realists for insufficiently incorporating values into an otherwise empty pursuit of power for power’s sake.

But these claims rest on unduly narrow interpretations both of values and of the effects on national interests. The values being asserted are more parochially American than is usually acknowledged. The neoconservative perspective, for example, rarely takes account of the value of justice as it usually is articulated throughout the Middle East.

This perspective also tends to limit its consideration of effects on national interests to direct, first-order (especially kinetic) effects, while failing to take adequate account of broader, longer-range, more indirect consequences.

Paying insufficient attention to foreign interests and perspectives has multiple negative consequences for U.S. interests. These consequences are no less important for being generally less readily apparent and less measurable than are the kinetic and other direct consequences that get more attention.

This attention gap can make it more difficult for the United States to accomplish whatever it is trying to accomplish overseas, because the support and understanding of a foreign population is needed to make a project succeed. If one is trying, for example, to establish a fairly stable representative democracy, as was the case in the Iraq War, this objective will be undermined by creating disaffection among Iraqis.

Outright resentment of the United States among foreign populations damages U.S. interests in further ways, with a resort to terrorism or other extremist violence by some subset of the resentful population being the most obvious but by no means the only such consequence.

Those bearing grudges may extend far beyond the foreigners directly affected by U.S. actions, to include many who are hundreds or thousands of miles away and learn of the actions through mass media and rumors.

Whenever populations acquire strongly negative sentiments, it necessarily affects what their governments do, even in authoritarian regimes. This means in the current instance less willingness by governments to cooperate with the United States in countless other endeavors.

Finally, the credibility of the United States usually gets damaged — especially its credibility whenever it says it is acting in other peoples’ best interests. That loss of credibility means still less willingness to cooperate on many other matters that may be important to Washington.

Often there are difficult choices or trade-offs between different practices, but this is not one of them. Morality and realism point in the same direction. The need to pay far greater heed to the interests, perceptions, objectives and sentiments of foreigners than Americans routinely do now is over-determined.

Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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George W. Bush’s nude self-portrait in the shower.

By Coleen Rowley

A recent news report asking “Where is Dubya?” found the former president totally unengaged, spending his time painting strange portraits of himself in the bath. In what seems to be a weird personal attempt to emulate Winston Churchill (but more reminiscent of Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess in her last days), the former president calmly ignores the sickening truth that slowly but surely emerges about his administration’s crimes as well as recent UN demands that U.S. leaders be charged with war crimes.

Ben Emmerson, the lead special investigator, recently described to gathered UN dignitaries a setting of self-approved legal immunity among U.S. and UK national leaders. He called the two governments’ standing policy, “A policy of de facto immunity for public officials who engaged in acts of torture, rendition and secret detention, and their superiors and political masters who authorized these acts.”

So the hard task will clearly fall to George W. Bush’s soon-to-open Presidential Center to re-fashion history and create the legacy of the great “Decider” who, with neo-con help, so longed to be a “war president” that he decided to illegally and recklessly launch a “war of choice” (otherwise known as the illegal and catastrophic war of aggression upon Iraq based on false premises).

The new Bush Library will undoubtedly also credit their namesake with the idea of initiating the “global war on a tactic (GWOT)” that, despite a recent bipartisan congressional bill to end it, teeters on the verge of being made permanent. Bush’s successor having cleverly re-named it, then stretched and expanded GWOT to so many new countries that it now has come full circle under rhetoric of “keeping us safe” from foreign enemies that it now targets U.S. citizens for what could possibly be indefinite detention and assassination and includes the U.S. as part of its ever-widening global battlefield.

(Though to be fair, Bush already had established those principles with his military detention of alleged terrorist and U.S. citizen Jose Padilla, arrested and imprisoned on U.S. soil as an “enemy combatant.”)

Whoever said we can’t look back must not have reckoned with the fact and force of such a Presidential Lie-Bury! Luckily some Dallasresidents have sprung to the task of putting forward an honest “People’s Response” to the deceptive refashioning of this unethical and illegal history. Here’s an excerpt from their press release:

“When the George W. Bush Library and Policy Institute is dedicated on April 25, 2013, at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, protestors will be there to demand the ex-president be held accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of U.S. and international law. President Barack Obama, formerU.S.presidents and many heads of state are expected to attend the dedication ceremony. “

A coalition of local, state and national peace and justice groups organizing the protest is inviting people from across the country to participate in an event called “The People’s Response.” According to Leslie Harris of CODEPINK Greater Dallas, “The illegal invasion of a sovereign nation was declared a ‘supreme crime’ at theNurembergtrials. That Bush and his advisors walk free today is unconscionable; there must be accountability so history won’t repeat itself.”

Reverend Bill McElvaney, professor emeritus, Perkins School of Theology at SMU, an early opponent of locating the George W. Bush Institute on campus, said, “The invasion of Iraq, and the approval of torture are violations of the United Methodist Social Principles, thus placing Southern Methodist University in contradiction to its own heritage as an institution of The United Methodist Church.”

I plan to participate for a lot of reasons but most fundamentally, from having spent 24 years as an FBI agent working in the criminal justice system always and inherently focused on looking backward to solve the worst crimes, I understand the true purpose of Obama’s ridiculous “only look forward” cover-up was to continue, make worse and even expand upon Bush’s illegal wars, war crimes and war profiteering.

It’s hard to put this into words better than author and researcher, “War Is A Crime” and “Let’s Try Democracy” activist David Swanson as he explains “Why I’m Attending the Dedication of the Bush Lie Bury:”

“On April 25th the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum and General Rehabilitation Project will be dedicated in Dallas, Texas. It takes up 23 acres at Southern Methodist University, 23 acres that neither humanity nor any other species may ever reclaim for anything decent or good. I’ll be there, joining in the people’s response (http://ThePeoplesResponse.org) with those who fear that this library will amount to a Lie Bury.

” ‘The BushCenter’s surrounding native Texaslandscape,’ the center’s PR office says, ‘including trees from the Bush family’s Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas, continues President and Mrs. Bush’s longstanding commitment to land and water conservation and energy efficiency.’ Does it, now? Is that what you recall? Bush the environmentalist?

“Well, maybe you and I remember things differently, but do we have a major educational institution that will effectively repeat our corrections of the Lie Bury’s claims for decades to come? According to the Lie Bury, Bush was and is an education leader, saving our schools by turning them into test-taking factories and getting unqualified military officers to run them. This is something to be proud of, we’re told.

“The Lie Bury’s annual report shows Bush with the Dalai Lama. No blood is anywhere to be seen. The Lie Bury’s website has a photo of a smiling George W. golfing for war. ‘The Warrior Open,’ it explains, ‘is a competitive 36-hole golf tournament that takes place over two days every fall in theDallasarea. The event honorsU.S.service members wounded in the global war on terror.’

“Now, I actually know of some soldiers wounded in what they call by that name who don’t feel honored by Bush’s golfing, just as millions of Iraqis living as refugees within or outside of the nation he destroyed find Bush’s liberty to walk outdoors, much less golf for the glory of war, offensive. But none of them has a quarter-billion dollar ‘center’ from which to spread the gospel of history as it actually happened — as it happened to its losers, to those water-boarded, shot in the face, or otherwise liberated by Bush and his subordinates.

“When Bush lied about excuses to start a war onIraq– as with everything else he did — he did so incompetently. As a result, a majority of Americans in the most recent polls, still say he lied to start the war. But few grasp the lesson as it should be applied to wars launched by more competent liars. And memory of Bush’s lies is fading, buried under forgetfulness, avoidance, misdirection, revisionism, a mythical ‘surge’ success, and a radically inaccurate understanding of what our government did toIraq.

“I won’t be attending the Lie Bury ceremony for vengeance, but in hopes of ridding our culture of the vengeance promoted by Bush. He based a foreign policy and a domestic stripping away of rights on the thirst for vengeance — even if misdirected vengeance. We have a responsibility to establish that we will not support that approach going forward.

“Bush himself is relevant only as his treatment can deter future crimes and abuses. No one should wish Bush or any other human being ill. In fact, we should strive to understand him, as it will help us understand others who behave as he has. Bush, of course, knew what he was doing when he tried to launch a war while pretending a war would be his last resort, suggesting harebrained schemes to get the war going to Tony Blair. Bush knew the basic facts. He knew he was killing a lot of people for no good reason. He was not so much factually clueless as morally clueless.

“For Bush, as for many other people, killing human beings in wars exists outside the realm of morality. Morality is the area of abortions, gay marriage, shoplifting, fornicating, or discriminating. Remember when Bush said that a singer’s suggestion that he didn’t care about black people was the worst moment in his presidency? Racism may be understood by Bush as a question of morality. Mass murder not so much. Bush’s mother remarked that war deaths were not worthy of troubling her beautiful mind. Asked why he’d lied about Iraqi weapons, George W. Bush asked what difference it made. Well, 1.4 million dead bodies, but who’s counting?

“I won’t be attending the Lie Bury because Bush’s successor is an improvement. On the contrary, our failure to hold Bush accountable has predictably led to his successor being significantly worse in matters of abusing presidential power. And not just predictably, but predicted. When we used to demand Bush’s impeachment, people would accuse us of disliking him or his political party. No, we’d say, if he isn’t held accountable, future presidents will be worse, and it won’t matter from which party they come.

“I helped draft about 70 articles of impeachment against Bush, from which Congressman Dennis Kucinich selected 35 and introduced them. I later looked through those 35 and found 27 that applied to President Barack Obama, even though his own innovations in abusive behavior weren’t on the list. Bush’s lying Congress into war (not that Congress wasn’t eager to play along) is actually a standard to aspire to now. When Obama went to war inLibya, against the will of Congress, he avoided even bothering to involve the first branch of our government.

“When Bush locked people up or tortured them to death, he kept it as secret as he could. Obama — despite radically expanding secrecy powers and persecuting whistleblowers — does most of his wrongdoing wide out in the open. Warrantless spying is openly acknowledged policy. Imprisonment without trial is ‘law.’ Torture is a policy choice, and the choice these days is to outsource it. Murder is, however, the new torture. The CIA calls it ‘cleaner.’ I picture Bush’s recent paintings of himself washing off whatever filth his mind is aware he carries.

“Obama runs through a list of men, women, and children to murder on Tuesdays, picks some, and has them murdered. We don’t know this because of a whistleblower or a journalist. We know this because the White House wanted us to know it, and to know it before the election. Think about that. We moved from the pre-insanity state we were in circa 1999 to an age in which presidents want us to know they murder people.

“That was primarily the work of George W. Bush, and every single person who yawned, who looked away, who cheered, who was too busy, who said ‘it’s more important to elect a new president than to keep presidential powers in check,’ or who said ‘impeachment would be traumatic’ — as if this isn’t.

“InGuatemalaa prosecutor has charged a former dictator with genocide, remarking, ‘It’s sending the most important message of the rule of law — that nobody is above the law.’ It’s not so many years ago that theUnited Stateshad the decency at least to hypocritically propose that standard to the world. Now, we advance the standard of lawlessness, of ‘looking forward, not backward.’

“That’s why the people need to respond to the lie bury. Ann Wright is going to be there. And Diane Wilson. Robert Jensen and Ray McGovern are coming. So are Lon Burnam and Bill McElvaney and Debra Sweet. Hadi Jawad and Leah Bolger and Marjorie Cohn and Kathy Kelly are coming. As are Coleen Rowley and Bill Moyer and Jacob David George and Medea Benjamin and Chas Jacquier and Drums Not Guns.

“Also coming will be many familiar faces from the days when we used to protest in Crawford. When we’d go into that one restaurant at the intersection in Crawford, there’d be a cardboard cut-out Dubya standing there. We picked him up and stood him in the corner, facing the corner. We said he needed to stay there until he understood what he’d done wrong. In reality, of course, he was cardboard. The lesson was for everyone else in the restaurant. It’s a lesson that still needs to be taught.”

Please join us inDallas!

Coleen Rowley, a former FBI special agent and legal counsel in the Minneapolis field office, wrote a “whistleblower” memo in May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about some of the FBI’s pre-9 / 11 failures. She retired in 2004 and is now a writer and speaker.

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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This is my donkey tattoo.

Seeing as my post supporting Senator Rand Paul‘s (R-KY) filibuster on Wednesday, received some responses that made me feel like my Democratic bona fides were being questioned, I thoughtI would respond and am am showing them to you.  This photo is a tattoo I have.  It is the Democratic donkey.   And the responses I am talking about are not the comments on the page where the post was published.

I feel like there is an almost knee jerk reaction liberals have to any criticism of President Obama or his administration.  The comments I received here are not the first I have received about this.  Yeah, I have been called a DINO (Democrat in name only).  That is why I am so sensitive about this issue.  There is an old adage: Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.  It has seemed recently like we are trying to be more like the Republicans.  I don’t need to fall in love but there’s no way I am ever going to “fall in line.”  Criticizing a president — of either party — is what our First Amendment is all about and it is also the patriotic thing to do.

Teddy Roosevelt said:

““Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”

My criticisms of the right don’t have a lot of merit if I am not willing to praise that side when I agree with them or if I am not willing to criticize my side when I see fit.  I have been active in Democratic politics since I was eight years old.  And, truth been told, I have been one who has lamented the fact that we do not have a more parliamentary system where one side gets the ball to run with.  Maybe under that sort of system, we’d have a single payer health care system.  Maybe.  Then I think about administrations that I don’t trust as much as I do the current one.  George W. Bush, I am looking at you.  What other misadventures would the neocons in your administration taken us on?  Would we be at war in Iran? North Korea? France?  And that brings me back to see the value in our system and even the current set up.  Yes, the House seems hell bent on letting nothing constructive happen but it is possible to have a constructive conversation with people whose point of view differs from your own.  Just because we are on the left does not mean our echo chamber is any better than theirs.

For whatever it may be worth, I am not alone in supporting Paul’s right to do a full on, old school, in your face filibuster.  Chris Matthews said, “I may not have the same attitude of a Rand Paul but I worship his right to have it.  I would never put that down simply because there is a little right wing paranoia attached to that guy.”  Ron Reagan, Jr, had this to say, “The Dick Cheneys of the world will get into power and you do not want to set the precedent.” (He was talking about the first letter Eric Holder sent Paul on the subject. Agreeing with Paul on this issue — that the drone program needs more transparency and that we need clarification on when the administration thinks using drones against US citizens is permissible   Wanting a conversation on this subject does not make you a right wing nut job.

Ps.  I have to think that this week’s dinner President Obama had with 12 Republican Senators had a real impact.  It’s the only reason I can think of that it was Senators Graham (R-SC) and McCain (R-AZ) came out to criticize Senator Paul’s filibuster and defend the president.  In fact, Graham said, on the floor:

“I welcome a reasoned discussion but to my Republican colleagues, I don’t remember any of you coming down here suggesting President Bush was going to kill anybody with a drone.  I don’t even remember the harshest critics of President Bush on the Democratic side, they had a drone program back then. What is it about this drone program that has every Republican spun up?  What are we up to here?”

Oh, and I am also happy that the House passed the Senate’s Violence Against Women reauthorization bill, which included the provisions to protect partners in same sax couples.  Good for you, House.  See?  Not everything they do is crazy.

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