Either It's Getting Closer or It's the Illusion of Getting Closer

Accountability for the torture used by the Bush administration in the "war on terror" might have come one step closer to being actualized, or the leaks to the press might be making it look like tortured, hard decisions are about to be made within the Obama administration.

I can't tell the difference yet. Newsweek's Daniel Klaidman reported in a long and very "personal" look into the character and family of Eric Holder, Jr., Attorney General of the United States, that four separate sources claim he is struggling with the decision whether to go after the Bush administration officials responsible for authorizing torture.

Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," he says. "But that can't be a part of my decision.

Citing the two recent extremes of attorneys general--Janet Reno who was fiercely independent and therefore not an insider of the Clinton administration and Alberto Gonzales, a mere "yes-man," Newsweek claimed that since Holder was the White House liaison during the embattled Reno years, he is extremely sensitive to the balance he needs to bring to his job--enforce the law yet also support the President's agenda. Rahm Emanuel, Obama's Chief of Staff, is the constant reminder of just what that Presidential agenda is. But according to these sources, what Holder has learned about what occurred during the Bush years is moving him closer to opening an investigation.

Then there is the New York Times story this morning by Scott Shane. What began as a disingenuous attempt by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to wiggle out of responsibility for knowing that the CIA was waterboarding has turned into admissions that the CIA, under orders of the evil mentor of Bush, that's vice president Dick Cheney, to prevent Congressional oversight committees from being briefing on a yet unnamed CIA program: extraordinary rendition, more wiretapping, assassinations, torture of detainees?

According to the Times: The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

This is major news. Surely the Sunday morning talking heads will be all abuzz. We have to find out what happened, and hold people accountable. That is the essence of the rule of law. Yes, Obama's popularity around the world has restored much of America's lost credibility. But the only way to restore our credibility at home, among the voters and citizens, is to undo the corruption to the rule of law and restore government to its foundations in the constitution.

President Obama as Frodo?

What we now know is that Dick Cheney was at the heart of the smear campaign against Joseph Wilson, former ambassador, and husband of Valerie Plame, CIA operative, after Wilson wrote that the Bush administration cooked documents about Niger and yellow cake to substantiate a claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to make a nuclear bomb.

Despite Obama's attempts to block the release of the interview between Dick Cheney, then Vice President, and Patrick Fitzgerald, special prosecutor, some aspects have been made public. Truthout.org by Jason Leopold has an interesting piece, and leaves one wondering: now that President Obama has the "ring" like Frodo, is he being tempted?

What is the extent of appropriate executive privilege? One of the most frightening aspects of the Bush administration was the insistence by Cheney that the office of the presidency be shrouded in secrecy, so much so that policy making avoided the channels of the State Department and Pentagon, and the White House pulled the Office of Legal Counsel way off course.

Will Obama have the strength to return the balance?

Memorial Day

Yesterday my daughter and I went to the New York City Ballet, and before the performance, wandered around the Upper East Side in search of fun street crafts. That's when we saw them: young men and women in uniform enjoying Fleet Week.

Our country is at war and certainly looking at their faces close up, we both understood that we send children to fight our country's battles.

They were so young, no matter how white their uniforms.

Last year I grabbed my camera and went into town to photograph Oyster Bay, NY's annual Memorial Day parade. I asked permission to take the images of people, saying I was an amateur photographer. Lining the main street, which is not called "Main Street," were the residents of this small hamlet, some of whose families have lived here for generations: white, black, Hispanic, old, young. The residents of the assisted living center, with a memory unit, sat outside with their attendants. People brought their children and their dogs. Oyster Bay has two volunteer fire departments; they are around the corner and down the block from each other. I've heard different stories as to why, including that one was Protestant and the other Catholic. The parade was short, our country was at war. Only one veteran of the current war in Iraq wore anything to indicate that he had fought there. Most of the veterans were from Korea, when I toured the American Legion Post, the men complained that the Viet Nam vets rarely came to the Post. I spoke with a World War II vet who was seated in a lawn chair in the shade.

We are still at war although under the leadership of another president. I don't think I want to go to the parade this year. I think I just want to hand water my garden, weed out the far right side in preparation for planting the sun flowers I have growing in pots, and pretend for a day, just a day, that things weren't set in motion eight years ago, if not before, that brought out the utter worst in our country and in our leaders. We allowed those leaders--George Bush and Dick Cheney--to do reprehensible things in our names. President Obama, I suspect, has learned just how reprehensible our treatment of the men held in Guantanamo Bay was, making anything looking like a trial for their crimes nothing like a trial at all.

So although I thank the men and women who are sacrificing their lives and youth for our country, I still deplore that they are and despise the men who brought us to this moment in history. Dick Cheney shouldn't be on television; he should be in prison for war profiteering and failing to uphold the constitution of the United States. George Bush shouldn't be retired in Dallas, but condemned because of his failure to understand the nature of the job of president, the structures of government, and the history of this nation. We shouldn't be making waterboarding into a bet between television pundits, but remember that we tried and convicted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding during World War II. This isn't a day for fireworks and parades, it should be a day of national mourning.

The White House Correspondents' Dinner--How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People

Wanda Sykes was the comedian this year at The White House Correspondents' Dinner, where the sitting president gets gently roasted and then he turns and does a little routine on the press, fellow insiders, and himself.

Remember the year when Stephen Colbert really roasted Bush II and all the talking heads on Fox were screaming that he was impudent and went way beyond the line of propriety?

There are three segments to this year's Dinner program.

Wanda started off pretty tame with jokes that were respectful and fun.

Then in the second half, she went after Rush Limbaugh in a way that he will twist and turn into weeks of continued diatribe on his radio show.

"I can break Sean Hannity by giving him a middle seat in coach."

Finally President Obama got the microphone. He first prodded Michael Steele, chair of the Republican National Party, who was in the audience, reminding him that the RNC is not eligible for a bail out and that Rush Limbaugh is not a troubled asset.

Larry Summers recently asked if he could chair the White House Council on Women & Girls.

The New York Times Blog has some more of the jokes, if you just want to read them.

OK, Michelle's arms were in site lines, Joe Biden's gaffes, and some fun was had. But nothing like what happened when Colbert did his performance. Take another look at that if you want to get sentimental for a time when the president was the laughing stock of the world, although frankly, I prefer it this way.

Good Riddance

My friend Susan flew in from Vancouver to help another friend Nina throw out all of the stuff she has collected over the years to make room for a less cluttered life. Susan, trained as a teacher, has avoided the classroom for many years. She started a business--Good Riddance--in which she helps people discard and organize after living too many years in a consumer society. "Making room for living well." That's her slogan.

Susan is exploiting the worst of our buying sprees. She and her partner Heather offer courses in how to make money from your own junk, and poignantly, how to move your mother and father into assisted living without breaking their hearts, and yours when you throw out their stuff. Having emptied my parents' home after my father died five years ago, I understand what happens when you ship too much of their stuff into my home so that now I have multi-generational stuff cluttering my home. I even have an object in the Good Riddance Virtual Clutter Museum.

There is even Cluttermania, the Musical Revue, which is how Susan hopes to make her money, performing now before assisted living audiences, corporate functions, and women's groups. Someday, Cluttermania might be on Broadway, well, at least off-off Broadway, or Las Vegas, if it ever revives.

Susan has this business because we are not a sustainable society and it doesn't look like we have the determination to get there despite the dire warnings of global warming. President Obama, in an interview published this weekend in the New York Times magazine, is speaking about radical change. After the Recession doesn't mean a return to normal.

"It is true that as tough an economic time as it is right now, we haven’t had 42 months of 20, 30 percent unemployment. And so the degree of desperation and the shock to the system may not be as great. And that means that there’s going to be more resistance to any of these steps: reforming the financial system or reforming our health care system or doing something about energy. On each of these things — you know, things aren’t so bad in the eyes of a lot of Americans that they say, We’re willing to completely try something new. But part of my job I think is to bridge that gap between the status quo and what we know we have to do for our future."

Read the entire interview and how Obama wants to unclutter our lives of the wasteful, and reorganize our economy.

Now back to Susan: I drove her back to North Shore Towers, a very large apartment complex where many octogenarians live. When we drove up to the security gate, the guard waved us in without issuing a parking permit or calling up to her mother's apartment to verify our identity at 11:00 on a Sunday night. The guard looked into the car and saw Susan, still slim, still attractive at sixty. "Just dropping off," and he waved us in. Susan was in shock, and I couldn't stop laughing.

Post script: We might not be able to afford more clutter, but these guys certainly can. Look through the highest paid CEOs for 2008, and notice how white and male they are!

The Next Supreme

At his press conference last week, President Obama described what he is looking for in a new Supreme Court nominee: The process of selecting someone to replace Justice Souter is among my most serious responsibilities as president. So i will seek somebody with a sharp and independent mind and a record of excellence and integrity. I will seek someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook, it is also about how are laws effect the daily realities of peoples lives--whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome and their own nation. I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with peoples' hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes. I will seek someone who is dedicated to the rule of law, who honors our Constitutional traditions, who respects the integrity of the judicial process, and the appropriate limits of the judicial role....

The emphasis added comes from Talking Points Memo.com.

Obama's emphasis should be on a young, experienced, vital, intellectually powerful, articulate, and not a compromise, but a bold appointment.

Obama should not bother being bi-partisanship. Look at the Elena Kagen vote for Solicitor General! Former Dean of Harvard Law School and the vote was still unprincipled: 61 yeah, 31 nay. Only 7 Republicans voted for this highly competent candidate to represent the United States in appearances before the US Supreme Court.

In by-gone years, not all nominees to the Supreme Court had judicial experience. Take Earl Warren, former governor of California and an Eisenhower appointment. One of his first decisions was Brown v. Board of Education, written without footnotes and legalese, because Chief Justice Warren understood how important it was to have the decision printed in every newspaper in the United States. He wanted the language and reasoning to be accessible.

And there was William Rehnquist, who never served on a court before his nomination by Richard Nixon as associate justice. Rehnquist had served in the Justice Department during the turbulent anti-war years, when surveillance of students, laborists, and other protestors was rampant. there is even evidence that he might have lied at his confirmation hearings as to his role in opposing the overturning of state-enforced segegation in Brown v. Board of Education when he was clerking for Justice Jackson.

Supposedly President Obama is looking for another woman since only Ruth Bader Ginsburg is currently serving. Elena Kagen would be an excellent choice, but the likelihood of having two Jewish women on the high court seems impossible.

100 Crises, 100 Cars

The affect that President Obama projects is that none of the things CNN is shouting about are really crises--foreclosures, bank failures, type A H1N1 influenza, Chrysler's bankruptcy, GM's impending one, Iran, Iraq, the revival of the right wing in Israel, North Korea, and now he is faced with appointing a new member of the US Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter.

That's why I do take the time to watch him when he goes on television, as I did Wednesday night, during his press conference.

We are in a crises, however, no matter how cool the president manages to appear. America, as Bill Clinton once said, manufactures houses and cars. Right now, America is doing neither. And to just ramp up production of these commodities by making credit more available will do nothing to end the serious threat of global warming.

So this confluence of crises might be one of those opportunities the Chinese speak about, but only if President Obama strongly steers us there: to restructure our economy to sustainability.

In 1974 we were suffering from inflation and a recession brought on by the oil embargo. I left New York and moved to San Francisco to start my career as a young lawyer. San Francisco's economy was robust because it was based on small businesses--restaurants that were adopting the Alice Waters' outlook of eating locally grown wholesome food, small law firms that had specialty niches (My firm only did plaintiffs' antitrust class action work. We were terrible at most everything else.) The Napa and Sonoma Valleys were being planted with vineyards and boutique wineries were blossoming. The first video rental stores soon sprouted up; there was no Blockbuster then. And of course, in garages all through the Silicon Valley, computer hardware, the Macintosh, and software were being developed by geeky guys.

Saving Chrysler and GM, and reviving the McMansions market, isn't the future for America. Will we be able to accept that? Our individual status has been linked to how much we consume for almost our entire history. It began before the Europeans arrived here. Where I live on Long Island, the Mattinicock tribes wore so many strands of wampum, early European explorers might have misstaken them for mollusks. Ostentation seems to be in the rich top soil that once supported the local farming that fed New York City.

Now mega-farms with cruel pens holding hundreds of thousands of animals, supply the dead carcasses that get quick frozen and shipped around the world. In those pens of hundreds of thousands of animals, weird viruses mutate, hence type A H1N1 influenza. Our acts have consequences.

We have to change, and what I so admire about our new president is that he is thoughtful, that he surrounds himself by very smart people, and as we learned from the debate about the release of the torture memos, he likes to listen to debate, but unlike Bill Clinton, he makes a timely decision after digesting the information.

My head aches just thinking about how much information he has to digest and how many decisions he has to make. But it isn't just him. As the myth of Obama fades a bit, as we see through our own illusions, it's time for us to engage so that our democracy is fueled by an informed and articulate electorate. We can do it.

Yom Hashoah

April 20 was Hitler's birthday and the tenth anniversary of Columbine. If you recall, there was a reason for the calendar madness. Yesterday was Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. It didn't exist when I was a child, when the first accounts of what happened in Germany were making their way into novels by Leon Uris and Meyer Levin, when The Diary of Ann Frank was compulsory reading for any Jewish girl, whether observant or not.

A day of remembrance. I attended a lecture given by the son of one of Germany's most renowned legal ethicists, Max Friedlander. His son, Gerhardt Friedlander is a nuclear chemist, worked on the Manhattan Project, at over 90 years of age although frail, still has a riveting mind and a clear voice. He read from his father's memoir, which he translated from German. His father's work on legal ethics had been plagiarized by the man who would later become a chief judge of the courts that presided over bar admissions and practice. And the man who presided had stolen the work of his father! Gerhardt later told the story that when he was attending UC Berkeley, he received a letter from his father who was still living in Germany, although by then not allowed to practice law under the Nazis. The Germans had issued another suffocating law, this time that all Jews had to include the name "Israel" as their middle names. "My father wrote to me and told me to take my passport and have it amended. Even under the Nazis, my father believed in obeying the law."

Of course, Gerhardt did not.

The other speaker was Douglas Morris, a Holocaust scholar whose expertise is in Nazis and the legal profession. He told the story of Max Hirschberg, who coincidentally had been an apprentice in the law offices of Max Friedlander. Max Hirschberg was the most renowned criminal defense attorney in Munich when the Nazis came to power. Their first act against the Jews in 1933 was to prohibit Jewish lawyers from practicing law. However, this first act had exceptions: if the attorney had been admitted since before 1914, had served in the German army during World War I, or whose father or son had served in World War I. Professor Morris explained that in the beginning, the German attorneys and judges continued to apply the law to the facts in a forthright way, and since Hirschberg had been admitted to the bar before 1914 and was himself a WWI veteran, he was not disbarred. That intellectual honesty didn't last long, because the next exclusions, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, had no such exceptions.

When I got back to the office, I learned with relief that President Obama had not excluded the possibility of prosecuting the architects of the "war on terror" whose distortion of legal analysis and legal reasoning produced the Office of Legal Counsel memos that authorized the use of torture on detainees in the "war on terror."

Unfair and Not So Balanced

It seems that the right, playing to the right media, is claiming that in addition to President Obama disavowing his Christianity (see, we said he was a Muslim) when he said, out of context, that America was not a Christian nation, he is dangerously demilitarizing the military. However, no matter how much Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) claims otherwise, the Obama budget raises our commitment to the military. The numbers are astronomical. How did we get so jaded that a few billion in increases is a decrease?

Talkingpointsmem.com put together a mixture of which news shows got it right.

AIG Timeline Revealed--But We Are Still Enraged

ProPublica.org has published a timeline of the AIG bonus debacle.

What doesn't appear is the removal from legislation by Senator Chris Dodd's office of language that would preclude the payment of these and other bonuses in the industry that was being bailed out.

Unlike the former President, President Obama took the heat for everything last night in a town meeting in Orange County. "The Buck Stops Here."

At least that was refreshing.