Tag Archives: Barack Obama

To be clear (quick note)

Media, Politics, , , , ,

Although I did in fact just post a couple videos from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner the other night, let this in no way be construed as my endorsement of the fact of the event’s existence itself, because it emphatically isn’t. As much as I enjoy watching Obama goof around on stage (and, for what it’s worth, I think he has a terrific sense of comedic timing, including in relation to other recent U.S. presidents), the annual WHCD ritual is, in so many ways, an embodiment of all that is wrong with American media today.

I would elaborate, but then Gawker’s already gone ahead and done all the hard work for me.

Today’s random assortment

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The annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner took place last night, and President Obama was actually (in my opinion) a bigger hit than the actual comedian, Jimmy Kimmel, who seemed rushed and nervous the entire time. His timing was never quite there, but he had some good moments anyway.

And lastly, if you’re looking for the principal difference between European- and American-style politics, look no further than this. How many American presidential speeches have you ever seen where they place him in front of random window blinds? Never underestimate the theatrical element powering every modern American president’s public persona.

“Assassination” is just a scary word for “due process” – links of the day

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At least, that’s what Attorney General Eric Holder would have you believe, in defending the Obama administration’s policy of targeted assassination(s) of American citizens:

Some have argued that the President is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qaeda or associated forces.   This is simply not accurate.   “Due process” and “judicial process” are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security.   The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.

Charles P. Pierce, responding in Esquire, was rightly outraged:

Attorney General Eric Holder’s appearance at Northwestern on Monday, during which he explained the exact circumstances under which the president can order the killing of just about anyone the president wants to kill, was not promising. The criteria for when a president can unilaterally decide to kill somebody is completely full of holes, regardless of what the government’s pet lawyers say. And this…

“This is an indicator of our times,” Holder said, “not a departure from our laws and our values.”

…is a monumental pile of crap that should embarrass every Democrat who ever said an unkind word about John Yoo. This policy is a vast departure from our laws and an interplanetary probe away from our values. The president should not have this power because the Constitution, which was written by smarter people than, say, Benjamin Wittes, knew full and goddamn well why the president shouldn’t have this power. If you give the president the power to kill without due process, or without demonstrable probable cause, he inevitably will do so. And, as a lot of us asked during the Bush years, if you give this power to President George Bush, will you also give it to President Hillary Clinton and, if you give this power to President Barack Obama, will you also give it to President Rick Santorum?

Shockingly — at least to me, since I didn’t expect to see this coming from the New York Times — Andrew Rosenthal, writing in the section titled “The Loyal Opposition,” defended Holder’s speech, utterly ignoring the most insidious part, about the assassination policy. Even stranger still, Rosenthal neglected to mention, in his praise of Holder’s insistence on terrorists being tried in civilian courts, that his own government has killed a citizen without any trial or even any charges.

That said, Attorney General Eric Holder and Jeh Charles Johnson, the general counsel of the Defense Department, both delivered strong speeches on terrorism recently. The contrast between their remarks and the bad old days of the Bush era was striking.

Some of what they said troubled me. They both seemed to reject any role for the courts in deciding when to kill American citizens suspected of terrorism. And I am not as enamored of military tribunals as Mr. Holder and Mr. Johnson are…

At Northwestern University yesterday, Mr. Holder made a powerful case for the need to prosecute terrorists in the federal courts. “Simply put, since 9/11 hundreds of individuals have been convicted of terrorism or terrorism-related offences in Article 3 courts and are now serving long sentences in federal prison,” Mr. Holder said. “Not one has ever escaped custody. No judicial district has suffered any kind of retaliatory attack.”

Glenn Greenwald, fortunately, made a persuasive case against Holder’s remarks, based on contradictory statements made by Holder and Barack Obama just a few years ago:

Throughout the Bush years, then-Sen. Obama often spoke out so very eloquently about the Vital Importance of Due Process even for accused Terrorists. As but one example, he stood up on the Senate floor and denounced Bush’s Guantanamo detentions on the ground that a “perfectly innocent individual could be held and could not rebut the Government’s case and has no way of proving his innocence.” He spoke of “the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence.” He mocked the right-wing claim “that judicial inquiry is an antique, trivial and dispensable luxury.” He acknowledged that the Government will unavoidably sometimes make mistakes in accusing innocent people of being Terrorists, but then provided the obvious solution: “what is avoidable is refusing to ever allow our legal system to correct these mistakes.”How moving is all that? What a stirring tribute to the urgency of allowing accused Terrorists a day in court before punishing them.

Then we have Eric Holder, who in 2008 gave a speech to the American Constitution Society denouncing Bush’s executive power radicalism and calling for a “public reckoning.” He specifically addressed the right-wing claim that Presidents should be allowed to eavesdrop on accused Terrorists without judicial review in order to Keep Us Safe. In light of what the Attorney General said and justified yesterday, just marvel at what he said back then, a mere three years ago:

To those in the Executive branch who say “just trust us” when it comes to secret and warrantless surveillance of domestic communications I say remember your history. In my lifetime, federal government officials wiretapped, harassed and blackmailed Martin Luther King and other civil rights leader in the name of national security. One of America’s greatest heroes whom today we honor with a national holiday, countless streets, schools and soon a monument in his name, was treated like a criminal by those in our federal government possessed of too much discretion and a warped sense of patriotism. Watergate revealed similar abuses during the Nixon administration.

To recap Barack Obama’s view: it is a form of “terror” for someone to be detained “without even getting one chance to prove their innocence,” but it is good and noble for them to be executed under the same circumstances. To recap Eric Holder’s view: we must not accept when the Bush administration says “just trust us” when it comes to spying on the communications of accused Terrorists, but we must accept when the Obama administration says “just trust us” when it comes to targeting our fellow citizens for execution. As it turns out, it’s not 9/11/01 that Changed Everything. It’s 1/20/09.

Finally, as is so often the case, Stephen Colbert got it exactly right.

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The Obama administration warns Israel via a media proxy?

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More interesting developments in the whole will-they-or-won’t-they saga, a romantic comedy starring Israel, bunker-busters, and Iranian nuclear sites. Or as the Greeks might argue, more of a tragedy, really. I suppose this debate is moot until we find out what happens in the end.

And speaking of endgames, I am (slightly, incrementally) heartened by the noises emanating from the American camp. Yesterday, an article appeared on the New York Times web site titled, “U.S. Agencies See No Move by Iran to Build a Bomb.” The article begins thusly:

Even as the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said in a new report Friday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment program, American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.

Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

This is strikingly different rhetoric than we’ve been hearing in most quarters recently regarding Iran. My take is that the Obama White House is preemptively trying to distance itself from any decision Israel may take on its own. A similar story took place several days earlier, when American General Martin Dempsey told Fareed Zakaria in an interview that an Israeli strike against Iran would not be “prudent.” This interview aired on the very same day that the Telegraph reported similar comments from British foreign secretary William Hague: an Israeli attack “would not be wise,” he said.

The subtext in the similarity of both the language and the timing of the two interviews was unmistakable: the U.S. and Great Britain are clearly acting in concert to warn the Israeli government, led by the fairly maniacal Benjamin Netanyahu, that they should not expect much support from either the U.S. or the U.K. in planning to attack Iran.

I believe, however, that this latest salvo — fired via the New York Times — is not only a stronger statement than the earlier ones, but may actually be indicative of a point of no return for the United States’ position on Iran. If Israel were to attack Iran, it would be very difficult for the Obama administration to rationally justify supporting or becoming involved in Israel’s military venture, since its own American security and intelligence agencies are making it very clear that they don’t believe the Iranian threat to be as serious as it is often described. I would imagine that Netanyahu is cognizant of this meaning, and I’m betting he’s seething right now. Could we actually be witnessing a 1956 Suez Canal moment, and during an American presidential election year no less?

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Mind-blowing arrogance from Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit

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From an opinion piece on the web site of Haaretz:

The Netanyahu-Obama meeting in two weeks will be definitive. If the U.S. president wants to prevent a disaster, he must give Netanyahu iron-clad guarantees that the United States will stop Iran in any way necessary and at any price, after the 2012 elections. If Obama doesn’t do this, he will obligate Netanyahu to act before the 2012 elections.

The moral responsibility for what may happen does not lie with the heirs of Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion. The moral responsibility will be borne by the man sitting in the chair that was once Franklin Roosevelt’s.

That’s funny. I could’ve sworn that Israel had its own government, whose job it is to protect the nation from external threats. I must have missed the memo where that responsibility was passed on to Obama.

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On the supercommittee

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For the last week or so, I’ve been reading all over the place about what a colossal failure the Congressional supercommittee has been for failing to reach a deficit deal and, as a consequence, automatically triggering $1.2 trillion of “sequester” cuts. To take one recent example, this week’s Economist stated that “the implications of the committee’s failure are more disturbing than the reaction of the markets has let on” and argued that, going forward, “Congress will be trying to undo the supposedly automatic budget cuts it agreed to only in order to make it impossible for the supercommittee to fail.”

Perhaps this is a naive question, but why is no one floating the possibility that the “failure” of the supercommittee was actually intentional? Or at the very least, semi-intentional. One of the biggest problems with the debt negotiations going all the way back to the debt-ceiling crisis, it seems to me, was that even the members of Congress who wanted to cut a deal felt they didn’t have sufficient political cover to do so. This was especially true on the Republican side, which is facing extraordinary rightward pressures from the Tea Party, Grover Norquist’s cultish no-tax-increases “pledge,” et al.

So then, wouldn’t automatically triggered cuts, in the event of a “failure” to reach a deal, work beautifully for both sides? In that, during months of negotiations, the two parties couldn’t reach any agreement in the traditional sense (writing a deficit-reduction bill and passing it) due to pressures from their respective political bases, instituting the very same type of deal but calling it a “failure” (for which each side can blame the other) is a fancy little way of avoiding criticism by pretending that that the “sequester” cuts were not expected to ever occur. Now, both Republicans and Democrats get to hammer each other for obstructing the deal, but there’s no clear loser — except for the institution of Congress itself, whose approval ratings are, quite frankly, already at rock-bottom anyway. Democrats get to talk about how they’ve cut defense (liberal red meat) and how Obama will veto any attempts to reverse this; Republicans get to crow about taking a step to tackle the deficit (conservative red meat). I wouldn’t necessarily call it a “win-win” situation, but I don’t see how it’s particularly damaging for the parties either. The one “loser” besides Congress in all of this could be Obama, but given the disparity between his approval ratings and those of Congress, it seems the American public has at least a cursory notion of which institution has proved itself so useless for the past couple years.

Am I wrong on this?

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Live-blogging tonight’s Republican presidential debate

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Hello! Are you ready? I’ll be live-blogging from Paris, where I’m sitting on a couch in the living room and generally wondering why I’m not asleep.

2:01 AM — Hello, and welcome to the nth GOP debate (n, in this case, stands for infinity). Anderson Cooper just showed up, and we’re now watching a truly entertaining (in a car-wreck sort of way) promo video about…the American West, Las Vegas, and (I think) the Republican debate.

2:03 AM — And the crowd goes wild! Can I just say, I love Anderson Cooper. Also, I have a full glass of wine waiting for me, and another half-bottle in the kitchen. I think I may have to turn this night into a 9-9-9 drinking game.

2:04 AM — Newt Gingrich is announced. I take a quick sip of merlot.

2:05 AM — They just announced Rick Santorum’s name. I suddenly have this uncontrollable impulse to Google something.

2:06 AM — While the national anthem is sung, a large video of the waving American flag is displayed at the front of the theater, just in case we didn’t get the point that this debate is taking place in the United States. Honestly, would any other country allow a pizza magnate to lead a presidential race? There has to be a law against this somewhere.

2:09 AM — Ron Paul opens with, “I am the champion of liberty.” And I am Captain America, but we can’t all be heroes, Ron.

2:11 AM — +1 to Bachmann for incorporating the “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” slogan. She also just got the first question from the audience, which means she has now matched her entire TV exposure from the last three debates combined. I give her three minutes until she mentions her 1500 or so foster kids/army.

2:13 AM — Herman Cain is speaking about the economy. I compulsively gulp down more wine.

2:14 AM — “Herman’s well-meaning,” says Santorum, “but what is a black guy doing on stage?” OK, so I may have made up that last part, but I know he was thinking it.

2:15 AM — Cain: “I invite every American to do their own math.” Now you’re just stealing George W. Bush’s intellectual property, Herman. Not cool.

2:16 AM — This debate has gotten off to a surprisingly wonky start. Wow, and then Rick Perry just called Herman Cain “brother” twice in thirty seconds. Not a good sign from a guy who may or may not have painted over a rock named “Niggerhead.”

2:18 AM — Cain is under fire. Big time. You can almost see the thought-bubble around Anderson Cooper’s head: “Fight. Fight. Fight!”

2:19 AM — Cain is holding up surprisingly well so far. He must’ve eaten a lot of pizza beforehand. Oops, spoke too soon. Romney just calmly, coolly, and calculatingly owned him. Just like the cruel, job-killing CEO he is. Where do I sign up?

2:22 AM — Gingrich with a good line. When asked why he thought Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan would be a hard sell, he quickly replied, “You just watched it.” Well played, Mr. 1994. Well played.

2:24 AM — And there it is! Ronald Reagan gets mentioned by Bachmann. I’m going to go ahead and drink one for the Gipper right here.

2:26 AM — OK, I’ll say it: Rick Perry looks better this time around. Now time to take Mitt to task over health care.

2:27 AM — Rick Santorum’s plan: Kill all gay people and bomb every country starting with the letter I. (I really need to stop making things up. What is it with me and Santorum?)

2:29 AM — Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney Go. At. It. “Rick, Rick, let me speak.” But I have to say (gulping down my pride): Santorum was right. Romney’s lying.

2:32 AM — Now it’s Mitt’s turn to get hammered. And by Newt, of all people. And now Bachmann.

2:36 AM — Andddd we take a break. Which means I take a drink. It’s getting a little hot in here.

2:40 AM — Rick Perry looks sick every time he’s called on. I know that feeling from sitting in the front row at comedy clubs. I guess there is a minor difference, though, since I’m not running for president.

2:43 AM — Wow, Mitt actually reached out and touched Rick for several seconds. I was waiting for a fistfight. Didn’t happen. But the fight continues.

2:45 AM — Mitt Romney just inadvertently admitted he had to fire the undocumented immigrants that landscaped his lawn because he’s running for public office. Gotta admire the man’s honesty. Even if it wasn’t on purpose.

2:48 AM — I cannot believe Rick Perry just advocated using Predator drones in the service of guarding the border. Then, just as I was regaining my composure, Bachmann pinged Obama on his undocumented relatives previously living in the US. Wow. This is getting dirty. And disgusting. (Now she said English will be the official language of the United States government.)

2:54 AM — A Latino questioner reasonably asks what message the Republican candidates have for Latinos in the United States. Newt Gingrich ably evades the entire question. Ron Paul immediately begins discussing how to “attract Latino votes.” Sorry, Ronnie, but that wasn’t the question; it was just what you heard. And Herman Cain makes it a trifecta of avoidance. Make it quadrafecta (is that a word?), with the addition of Perry.

2:58 AM — It is unclear whether Michele Bachman supports the repeal of the 14th Amendment. I have just downed the rest of my merlot. Now she just finished educating us all on “anchor babies.”

3:04 AM — Mark notes that Rick Perry just referred to France as a “who.” This personification is, however, a step up from the usual way Republicans address France-related issues. That said, he did have a bit of a hard time remembering what the 10th Amendment is. (Don’t we all.)

3:09 AM — No way! Bachman just said, “I’m a mom.” But then she did not mention the foster kids. What happened? Did someone trademark the phrase?

3:11 AM — Ron Paul dings the Fed. I guess we could all see that coming. When do we get our next commercial break so I can refill my glass?

3:18 AM — Another break in progress. Another glass of merlot for me.

3:27 AM — Bachmann: “That makes all of us much danger.” Or something along those lines.

3:28 AM — Bachmann: “First Obama brought us into Libya. And now he’s gone into Africa.” You can’t make this up.

3:30 AM — Uh oh. Here come the Israel questions. I always cringe a little when this happens in GOP debates. Cain on the Gilad Shalit deal: I would not negotiate with terrorists, but it’s possible I would make a Gilad Shalit-type deal. Coherent as always.

3:34 AM — Ron Paul: “I want someone willing to cut something.” So, so true. But when it comes to defense, no one will touch anything. Except the brave Rick Perry, who just announced he wants to defund the UN. Sure.

3:38 AM — Michele Bachmann actually just said she wants Iraq and Libya to “compensate” the United States for “liberating” its citizens. There really are no words. Her comments speak for themselves.

3:40 AM — Ron Paul just nails everyone else by asking if they would condemn Ronald Reagan for his hostage deal with the Iranians. Rick Santorum stumbles through a response. Why is Ron Paul so crazy on some issues? If it weren’t for, well, every single domestic policy he has, I’d vote for him immediately.

3:49 AM — Rick Perry keeps getting booed. This is especially shocking at a Republican primary debate, where Rick Perry should absolutely own.

3:51 AM — Michele Bachmann is just about crying that her time is almost over. Her desperation is really showing. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich continues his streak of being incredibly cranky.

3:53 AM — And that’s it. This may be the beginning of the end for Rick Perry. Even with his stronger responses, he may have crossed a line with some of them and got booed multiple times.

3:55 AM — And that’s good night from me.

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These thoughts don’t fit together

Books, Politics, , , , , , , , ,

The following two snippets aren’t necessarily related, but they’ve been percolating in my mind for a few days now, so I thought I’d include a little of each.

1) Buy Andrew Bacevich’s book Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. Bacevich is currently a professor of history and international relations at Boston University and was formerly a colonel in the U.S. Army. Washington Rules is a deeply insightful critique of what Dwight Eisenhower so presciently labeled the “military-industrial complex.”

“The Washington rules” of the title, Bacevich explains in his introduction, “were forged at a moment when American influence and power were approaching their acme. That moment has now passed.” What follows is a brilliant historical overview of the American drift from moderate isolationism to strident interventionism. Bacevich, like many on the disaffected left, fears perpetual war. Entrenched interests in both the public and private sectors never cease to make use of fear-mongering tactics to frighten a restive population into acquiescence. This is how the CIA and Strategic Air Command, two institutions whose central role in establishing American militarism is thoroughly dissected in Washington Rules, managed to upend decades upon decades of American reluctance to flex its muscles in the global arena.

It is also how the United States finds itself enmeshed in three simultaneous wars right now. The legacy of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden (and yes, their legacies are forever linked) is not simply the overreaction, the blind rage that led the United States into endless wars against unseen enemies with unclear objectives, all accompanied by the impossibility of victory. More enduring still is the zombie-like, unquestioning deference with which American citizens approach their warrior-leaders. Bush accomplished in eight years what the decades-long Cold War never could: permanent war, it seems, has become the new norm. Civil liberties are but a noble casualty along the way.

All one needs to do to confirm this sudden, collective disavowal of the pursuit of peace is to witness the nearly inaudible protest to President Barack Obama’s decision to intervene in the Libyan revolution. Where the war in Iraq invited some (albeit relatively muted, especially in light of the still-heightened emotions following September 11) immediate condemnation, our Libyan incursion barely raised eyebrows. Osama bin Laden may be dead, but the terror attacks he masterminded laid bare an uncomfortable truth: it takes very little to galvanize the American public in support of a perceived cause, however dubious the rationale and however vague the endgame.

Washington Rules was published in 2010, before the Jasmine Revolution and before today, when the key provisions of the Patriot Act that authorize controversial surveillance techniques were renewed for four years by Congress, despite the warnings of two U.S. senators that the bill is being interpreted in very dangerous ways. One can only imagine the blistering new foreword Bacevich could pen now.

2) Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress this week was chock-full of half-truths, prevarications, and outright lies. In fact, his entire visit to the States was an exercise in exaggeration and hyperbole, as the reaction he provoked following Obama’s speech on the Middle East was completely unwarranted. Obama stated that Israeli-Palestinian borders must be based on the 1967 lines, something every American and Israeli leader has known for years. (This includes Netanyahu himself as recently as six months ago.)

Ultimately, Netanyahu is a coward, and his intransigence will only harm Israel in the long run. What I found far more disturbing was the appalling sycophancy displayed by the United States Congress, which was roused to twenty-nine standing ovations, including once — inexplicably — that immediately followed Netanyahu’s statement that Israel was not occupying Palestinian land.

As Glenn Greenwald of Salon has demonstrated on many occasions, American politicians’ obsequiousness to the Israeli right-wing knows no bounds. This absurd rubber-stamping (not to mention heavy financing) of what is in many ways a racist regime owes in large part to the enormous influence of the Israel lobby (yes, the one so strongly debated following the eponymous book by Walt and Mearsheimer).

But a word of caution may be in order. As any sane person who follows Middle Eastern politics with even a passing interest knows, yes, the Israel lobby is indeed a powerful force, perhaps the most influential outside group (especially in proportion to its immediate constituency, American Jews) affecting American politics today. One of the hallmarks of this lobby is to stifle any critique of Israel, no matter how thoughtful or well-reasoned, by using the threat of being branded an anti-Semite as a deterrent.

Of course, anti-Semitism does exist, and whether it’s John Galliano or Lars von Trier spouting racist ideas in public, it’s wrong, always. But wielding the “anti-Semite” label as a baton in order to smother dissent is not just wrong, it’s undemocratic. The dilemma, then, lies in criticizing the lobby itself. Care must be taken to avoid being perceived as an adherent of the age-old, harebrained conspiracy theories that “Jews control the media,” “Jews control the government,” and so on. They do not. But they do, unlike many underrepresented minority groups in the U.S., exert enormous influence on American policy. To acknowledge this fact is not to exhibit anti-Semitism; it simply proves one has eyes and ears.

A crucial distinction is in order, then. The Israel lobby exists, and it is powerful. But it is not synonymous with Judaism, nor even American Judaism. AIPAC, while purporting to act on behalf of both American Jews and the state of Israel, in reality is little more than a well-connected conduit between the most radically right-wing voices in both camps and the United States government. So while many are understandably reluctant to give voice to their misgivings about the Israel lobby for fear of conflation with actual anti-Semites, it is vital to differentiate between criticism of Israeli policies and hatred of a race. It is also important to remember that AIPAC, in portraying itself as the public mouthpiece of Jews in both the U.S. and Israel, is actually doing both nations a huge disservice in its unquestioning support of continually failing policies. It is only when reasoned criticism becomes the norm that the United States and Israel will both be able to enact sensible policies with regard to the Holy Land.

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Death by execution? The questions just keep on coming

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Early on, it seemed as if the daring raid to “capture or kill” Osama bin Laden took place amidst a veritable explosion of gunfire, blood pouring everywhere. But the story keeps on a-changin’. Now The New York Times tells us this:

The new details suggested that the raid, though chaotic and bloody, was extremely one-sided, with a force of more than 20 Navy Seal members quickly dispatching the handful of men protecting Bin Laden.

Administration officials said that the only shots fired by those in the compound came at the beginning of the operation, when Bin Laden’s trusted courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, opened fire from behind the door of the guesthouse adjacent to the house where Bin Laden was hiding.

After the Seal members shot and killed Mr. Kuwaiti and a woman in the guesthouse, the Americans were never fired upon again.

(Bolded words mine.) MSNBC, likewise, casts doubt on the early official story:

As the U.S. commandos moved through the house, they found several stashes of weapons and barricades, as if the residents were prepared for a violent and lengthy standoff — which never materialized.

The SEALs then made their way up a staircase, where they ran into one of bin Laden’s  sons on the way down. The Americans immediately shot and killed the son, who was also unarmed.

Once on the third floor, the commandos threw open the door to bin Laden’s bedroom. One of bin Laden’s wives rushed toward the NAVY SEAL in the door, who shot her in the leg.

Then, without hesitation, the same commando turned his gun on bin Laden, standing in what appeared to be pajamas, and fire two quick shots, one to the chest and one to the head. Although there were weapons in that bedroom, Bin Laden was also unarmed at the time he was shot.

Instead of a chaotic firefight, the U.S. officials said, the American commando assault was a precision operation, with SEALs moving carefully through the compound, room to room, floor to floor.

In fact, most of the operation was spent in what the military calls “exploiting the site,” gathering up the computers, hard drives, cellphones and files that could provide valuable intelligence on al Qaeda operatives and potential operations worldwide.

(Bolded words mine again.) Two days ago, by the way, Ben Smith of Politico pointed out the nuance in President Obama’s speech announcing bin Laden’s death:

Obama said Sunday night:

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

The key word there is “after,” not “during,” and it matches the revised White House account. You had to be listening extremely carefully the first night to catch that nuance.

In less formal remarks last night, Obama offered a similar sequence, describing “an operation that resulted in the capture and death of Osama bin Laden.”

“Capture and death.”

Dave Weigel at Slate is similarly skeptical as to the government’s consistently inconsistent narrative (and provides a useful timeline of the administration’s shifting statements as well):

What changed in three days? It depends how you define the “firefight.” There was a firefight at the start, but the confrontation between the commandos and OBL was one-sided — they were shooting, OBL and the woman weren’t. The “weapon” part of the story has changed slightly, and if you graphed it it would be a sine wave. We went from no details about OBL, to a detail about OBL at least trying to get a gun, to a detail about OBL not having a gun, to a detail about OBL being within reach of a gun.

Alright, then. Everybody clear?

Finally, Michael Crowley at Time asks:

A major question lingers unanswered at the center of this story: Why was bin Laden killed? Michael Scherer has reported that the Navy Seals who landed at Osama bin Laden’s safehouse were not given orders specifically to kill, but were on a “kill or capture” mission. That implies they were prepared to accept bin Laden’s surrender. It didn’t work out that way. But despite earlier reports to the contrary, including from White House counter-terror adviser John Brennan, Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters Tuesday that bin Laden was in fact unarmed. (“Resistance does not require a firearm,” he said.) So, what happened?

Indeed, what exactly did take place here? It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the Obama administration took pains to cast the operation in a favorable light, and that this interpretation has steadily unraveled in the face of newly available evidence. What just days ago resulted in near-universal celebration (Osama bin Laden’s death) is now causing serious head-scratching. Did the United States execute bin Laden in cold blood? And if so, do we care?

I would argue that yes, we do. To execute someone (as opposed to shooting him in a firefight), regardless of the heinous nature of his crimes, is to run directly counter to well-established rules of engagement. In World War II, in the Persian Gulf War, and in countless other examples, when someone surrendered, he was taken prisoner and accorded humane treatment. Of course, we have no evidence that Osama bin Laden actually surrendered (even if he was unarmed, there are other ways his behavior could have been justifiably deemed threatening), but the initial stories as to his “resistance” have been almost entirely discredited now, leading one to wonder exactly what the Obama administration is trying to conceal.

Let’s have the real story, shall we?

P.S. As usual, MacLeod Cartoons gets it just right.

Osama bin Laden’s death: a Pyrrhic victory?

Politics, , ,

I am very weirded out by all the sudden bursts of patriotism following Osama bin Laden’s death. Even President Obama said something to the effect of, “This goes to show that when Americans set out to do something, we can accomplish anything.” Really? An assassination (and one that took 10 years, no less) is a symbol of our can-do spirit? (There were also impromptu rallies outside the White House, Ground Zero, Times Square, etc.)

Nothing is more ironic to me than the fact that, in Osama Bin Laden’s assassination, we have achieved the ultimate Pyrrhic victory: we have finally eliminated the physical presence of the principal challenger of American values over the last decade, and yet our collective reaction to this killing demonstrates how clearly and decisively bin Laden won the war on our values. We lost sight of absolutely everything and went crazy for ten years (torture, followed by a national refusal to call it torture, not to mention the bloodlust that led us to attack an unrelated country, Iraq, and even now continues to agitate for military action against Iran, etc. etc.). Then, to cap it all off, it took less than a day following bin Laden’s killing for people to come out of the woodwork and claim torture was the reason we were able to find him.

Somehow, I think Osama bin Laden would be OK with all of this.