Where Will Brennan Land in Rahm v. DOJ Spat?
As Jason notes, David Axelrod has already taped a CSPAN response to Jane Mayer’s piece on Rahm’s spat about distractions like “the law” and “human rights” with Eric Holder and Greg Craig. In it, Axe appears to try to distance the White House from the decisions that have been attacked in the last few weeks, particularly the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York.
David Axelrod did not dispute that a rift had emerged between the White House and the Justice Department over the 9/11 case, which has recently become a political sore spot for the administration.Despite a rising tide of opposition to having a trial in Manhattan, which has sent the administration scrambling to find another location, Axelrod said it was not a mistake for Holder to announce the trial would be held there. But Axelrod did not defend it — or portray it in any way as a decision that came from the White House. “The attorney general was responding under the protocol that was developed between the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense for the prosecution of terrorists,” Axelrod said in an interview for C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” series set to air on Sunday.
Acknowledging White House resistance to the Justice Department decisions, Axelrod continued: “Rahm has a perspective that’s different. He’s the chief of staff. He looks at things from a legislative perspective, he looks at things from other perspectives.”
Side note: Responsible journalism would dictate that Anne Kornblut avoid the metonymy of “White House” here, as it obscures whether this is just Axe and Rahm working the press as they do, or Obama as well. After all, if Obama has decided to give Holder autonomy on this decision, he has, in fact, supported such a decision, or should have. But therein may be the real root of White House dysfunction on this issue.
So Rahm and Axe are out there declaring that the decision to try KSM in a civilian trial in NY belongs entirely to DOJ and DOD, which Axe appears to portray as somehow divorced from the authority and will of the White House (and therefore, from Obama). In the likelihood that the trial will be moved to some other venue altogether, then, Axe and Rahm can continue to make Holder the scapegoat. Heck, they may even be trying to force Holder out like they have forced Craig out.
But what’s going to happen when the White House strongly owns its decisions on the handling of the Underwear Bomber? They’ve got John Brennan on Meet the Press tomorrow to defend the Administration’s decisions on his treatment. As Mark Ambinder tweets,
Admin puts Brennan on Sunday shows to defend Abdulmuttalab’s handling. He is steaming mad about the CW.
Whatever my complaints with Brennan, he does come off as less of a backroom bumbler than Rahm and Axe of late. And he plans to go on TV and rebut the conventional wisdom about the decision to mirandize Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and try him in civilian court.
In other words, Brennan will be making the same defense of civilian law as Eric Holder has. Maybe, in the process, he’ll explain how Abdulmutallab’s testimony has already led the White House to put Anwar al-Awlaki on a kill list, just to look tough in the process!
So it seems that as Rahm and Axe try to set up and scapegoat Holder, one of the grownups is about to go on TV and own not the KSM decision, but certainly the decision to sustain our system of civilian law.
I’m fine with a “rift” between the White House (Rahm or Obama, take your pick) and Holder. It sure beats the hell out of the former direct connection between Rove’s butt and Gonzales’ ear (or lips, take your pick again). What I’m not fine with is Congress trying to override the separation of powers to put suspects into military commissions rather than criminal trials. That decision of course belongs only to DOJ and Congress should butt out.
[Yes, I know they control the purse-strings and can de-fund the trials, but prosecution decisions are strictly DOJ’s turf. Sheesh, if only they would be so eager to de-fund the wars…]
Thanks so much, EW. It boggles the mind that so much that has and is going so wrong in DC seems to result from the ego-needs of one individual. It doesn’t seem that satiety is possible in this case.
O/T Oh wow!
NEW SETON HALL LAW REPORT RAISES FURTHER QUESTIONS ABOUT DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE INVESTIGATION OF THREE DETAINEE DEATHS AT GUANTÁNAMO
“The Center for Policy and Research Report shows that each of the cell block guards on duty that night gave two statements, and the first statement for each is missing. The only statements from the guards in the NCIS reportwere made only after those guards had been threatened with prosecution because of the contents of their previous—and now missing—statements.”
Link.
I have to assume that their initial statements were incriminating someone that the government feels must be protected.
I’d rather that that someone, whoever it is, were properly investigated, and, if necessary, prosecuted.
Otherwise, all the talk about the ‘rule of law’, from either party, is just noise and without meaning.
They’re in a box with the missing 3 thoraxs, behind the box of torture tapes.
This whole God damn circus is sickening.
What’s worse is that I’m pretty confident that as a last resort Obama will pardon anyone involved on the grounds that “They were following DOJ and AFM guidelines as they understood them”.
But it will be a last resort, Obama seems to go to quite a bit of trouble to disguise the origins of any contraversial decisions he may actually make. This would be something he couldn’t have Rahm do for him.
I can see it now: “I’ve delegated pardon authority to my chief of staff to avoid even the appearence of conflict of interest on my part. Rahm will make the key decisions without political interference and America can have confidence in his impartiality”
Boxturtle (Just like Holder at DOJ is independent, fair, and balanced)
Yep. Circus of horrors.
I suspect Brennan going on the tube to back Holder and the decision to try terrists civilly is a feint. Brennan was in the room, so to speak, when the torture policy was made and helped put it into effect. He has too much blood on his hands to be doing anything other than trying to wipe it off on someone else.
When KSM’s defense brings up the torture – and they will – that will run right back to Brennan’s office. Then, if KSM is acquitted or the charges dismissed (which they should be, in a jurisdiction that follows the rule of law), Brennan can blame it on Holder and get him shitcanned for failing to get a conviction.
OTOH, in the event KSM is convicted in a civilian court, then Brennan’s torture policy gets the Court and Jury Seal of Approval, and we go forward with binding precednt which states that torture is no bar to a civil court convicting someone. I’ve been saying all along that trying KSM in a civilian court has been nothing more than a cynical exercise in validating torture as a legitimate means of … government practice.
Just like shipping alleged, uncharged, unconvicted terrists from Gitmo to Illinois for continued indefinite imprisonment without trial or conviction means that law-free zones would now exist within the territorial boundaries of he United States, not just in enclaves offshore. Like a cancer metastasizing, we would now have a spot on the liver, so to speak.
The real objective throughout has been to vitiate the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments as guaranteeing anything more than a fig leaf of seeming – but not actual, enforceable – rights. Brennan has been the exponent of that and, FWIW, Rahm’s been entirely on board with that. Progress on that objective continues unabated.
IMHO, Holder is being entirely too subordinate with respect to investigations and prosecutions. Regardless of OBama’s desires, he should be pressing ahead with investigating and prosecuting the authors of the Bushco policies and, if anyone in Obama’s WH gets in the way, them too. Bring the charges and, if Obama wants him fired for it, go, leaving the charges behind for Obama to forgive – and the stain to adopt.
But Holder’s a pussy and won’t do it.
I still wonder what part of the ratification of the last convention against torture stumbled in Congress; and, whether the legislature cares to address both that treaty and its incomplete list of tortures it banned once the tocha policy of the prior administration saw the light of day. The other part of the current dynamic that seems salient is the way that other, earlier congress with Republican leadership at the time, lapsed the Independent Counsel construct as it impeached the then sitting president in retribution for the IC*s viability. There was lots of chortling among Republicans after the IC statute sunsetted that, well, you*ve got the IG process. To me, a more effective review of how torture became so closely alloyed to the Republican party*s outlook would have been thru the IC process. I think that lack of the right instrument to conduct a balanced reexamination wholesale in scope lessened the appeal of keeping with the early announced closing date of the prison camp. Instead, the tortured persons represent tainted evidence in any form of trial. The media riffs about the venue shift for one trial is transitory. It is these other infrastructure issues which have hampered progress thru this particular swamp. Torture in a prison camp is psychologically and legally different from battlefield incidents, and near-battlefield *atrocities*. The psychiatrists may call subsequent problems PTSD in individuals trained to torture, but I think that backwash of the new paradigm of inhumane treatment has yet to see full study in the US. So, I guess I think the moral issues have larger significance for governance at the present moment.
Brennan’s not the only one “steaming mad at the CW.” How does it fall to one who made way for torture now to look like the grown-up? In the process of busting the “Mirandizing terrorists makes us less safe” myth, what myth will make? That Brennan himself has always been opposed to torture?
Greenwald busted an attempt to rehabilitate Brennan in November of 2008:
And now he’s supposed to be our champion? Sickening is right, tjbs.
And when will John Perkins be here?
There is a lot of upside for Brennan and the CIA guys – whether they assisted in blowing up a missionary’s plane and killing an infant or whether they assisted in torturing a 20ish yo non-al-Qaeda to death in Afghanistan.
The more cases hit US trials, the less incentive for Spanish Judges and South American commissions and British parliamentarians to kick up a fuss. It all becomes, “there was a public trial (where torture never even came up and/or where a “fair and impartial jury” found nothing to worry about) and there’s nothing to see here, nothing to see, no CAT issues, just a fair trial that resulted ina bad guy going to jail/being executed”
What was needed when Obama took office was for him to have a national chat – explaining that we used very fallible bounty processes, that we used unreliable torture info, that we didn’t understand naming systems and the organizations we were battling and as a result, we caught up a lot of innocent people with some very bad people and that as a result, we are on the wrong side of the Geneva Conventions and the rule of law with respect to a lot ofinnocent people, as well as having a lot over very bad guys – the only way to sort out the wheat from the chaff is a public review that acknowledges we made some very bad mistakes and at a minimum owe reparations to some while we owe a very different kind of justice to others – the way to sort this out is public trials and along with those public trials of the bad guys, some reparations and publication of our mistakes as well for the innocents, so that Americans and our allies remember why we have systems of due process and justice.
Something along those lines early on would have changed the whole conversation – maybe coupled with a release of the Aug 2002 CIA analyst’s memo informing Bush/Addington/Cheney et al of their many mistakes accumulating at GITMO. It’s not Republican obstructionism that is keeping Obama for resolving GITMO – the Dems run the show and quite a few of them have been equally adamant about obstructionism, but that is bc of Obama’s failures – failure to claim the narrative, failure to claim the truth, failure to claim the leadership slot, failure to ante up with our allies (although admittedly, some of them only publically want up to ante up, privately they have quite different concerns).
Now, we are where we are – it’s not Lindsey Graham who is single-handedly destroying the options for closing GITMO (good lord quite feeding that guy’s ego). It’s Obama’s failures. And Obama’s election to just rebrand Bagram as GITMO and put more American lives on the line to keep the executive perogative of walking away from crimes that include murder without any real concerns.
Mary,
Well said. If the Obama we thought we elected had opened a national conversation on the war on terror and the constitution it would have torn the congress to shreds , as it should. There are war criminals in congress who sat silent after they learned about torture. The health care change would have been easy after the dust settled as compared to what we have now after a year of chasing our tail.
Well, Mary, that puts things in a whole new light for me.
Yes. Apparently Obama used full up his meager allotment of nouns and verbs for accountability on the proles when he was seeking their votes and is just plum out now.
Obama “no one is above the law”
Holder “no one is above the law”
Uh that is until Rahm says they are. What the hell is going on?
Except for “looking forward” on past war cimes.
Last night here in Boulder Colorado saw and listened to Jim Hightower speak at a fundraiser for KGNU the local independent radio station here. Asked him if he thought it was worthwhile to push for the Bush administration being held accountable for creating, cherry picking and dessiminating false pre war intelligence since hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people have been killed, injured and millions displaced as a direct result? I also asked him at what point did holding people accountable for very seriuos crimes started being defined by the Obama administration and many others as “retribution, vengeance, witch hunts” instead of what it is application of the rules of law and justice.
He was very serious when he answered. “Push Hard, very very hard” He also mentioned that “the whole world is watchingand waiting for Americans to apply their own laws and standards to themselves and their leaders”
He is a laugh every minute. What a remarkable man. Some of his lines last night that made me laugh so hard I thought I would choke.
When Senator Franken cut Liebermann off when he had asked for more time.
“he looked as confused as a goat on astroturf”
Hightower said that Sarah Palin had really come around. That “when Sarah left Alaska for Fox News that she had raised the I.Q. of both places”
In regard to political activism Hightower said “wearing political buttons is not enough”
Long list of one liners that had me almost on the floor
So happy to learn you saw and heard Hightower. I just love him to pieces.
so serious, so funny
Marcie: “Dysfunction on this issue…”?
How about dysfunction on EVERY fucking issue???
The DOJ can choose in which jurisdiction it wishes to file its case. It is hard, nevertheless, to see how the 9/11 case would not be filed in New York. But once filed, as Cynthia Kouril has noted, it is up to the court, not the DOJ to decide where the case will be tried. The DOJ and defense can enter motions but it is the court that is the final arbiter.
I don’t see any good guys in this, Obama, Axelrod, Emanuel, Brennan, or Holder. These are all bad guys. They just disagree on this particular issue.
1)Mirandizing undie bomber was the only thing to do. And it made us MORE safe, by giving him (undie bomber) the confidence to spill his guts. If he was terrified , he wouldn’t talk.
2) Rahm and Axelrod should really STFU about DOJ internal business. So should Gibbs. They should go micro manage some other cabinet agency for a while. Political concerns should not drive DOJ decisions.
Have we learned nothing fromt he Rove fiasco?
3) Hugh is correct. Where in the district the court sits, is up to the court.
All these loudmouths should just back off.
Yeah, this is getting closer and closer to Rovian behavior, on the part of Rahm and Axe. And it needs to start being described as such.
While it sounds like–from Mayer’s piece–that the firewalls that Whitehouse put back into place are working to some extent, that is not preventing Rahm and Axe from trying to manipulate DOJ behavior by manipulating the press.
I half wonder whether the announcement last week was just a leak from one of these two slugs saying that the trial had been moved, and a reporter believing since Rahm is all-powerful, it had been moved.
Weighing in with agreement about the similarities between Rove and Axelrod/Emanuel. The subject was different, but I think the principle is still the same.
Comments from 8/2009 and 9/2009:
And now Holder will owe Brennan.
@14/15 – if there’s one thing I have particularly resented about the Obama admin, it is how happy they are to put judges in the cross hairs of crazies. Sitting back and stirring the pots on lots of crazy crap, never popping up with any leadership, then dropping the hottest of potatoes in the laps of the judges who have spent 8 years bending over backwards to keep the damned DOJ lawyers out of jail and still licensed.
@7 “When KSM’s defense brings up the torture – and they will – that will run right back to Brennan’s office” I think that what we’ve seen from the cases to date, Padilla, al-Marri, Siddiqui, Saleh,el-Masri, Arar etc. – is that torture will be a non-issue for US courts. Torture and coercion as a basis for assassination – equally so.
Horrible law has already been quietly made.
Rahm is wrecking this administration.
We need some way to demand his ouster with a full-throated roar from the general populace.
Any ideas?
Speaking of our de facto state religion (as opposed to our espoused denial thereof), Scott Horton has posted this quote of Tolstoy:
That’s exactly what I’m on about.
O/T, with apologies for I know this will shock all of you.
Senate Report Finds U.S. Banks Support Corrupt Regimes Through Offshore Accounts
Saturday, February 06, 2010
“American banks, real estate and law firms have been assisting foreign governments to hide or launder stolen money, according to an investigation by a U.S. Senate committee. Even though federal law requires financial institutions to reject so-called “dirty money,” some banks have continued to accept funds from offshore accounts that were used to buy homes and other property.”
Link.
Responsible journalism would dictate that Anne Kornblut avoid the metonymy of “White House” here, as it obscures whether this is just Axe and Rahm working the press as they do, or Obama as well.
i confess that i had to look up the ten dollar word bolded above – lol
Metonymy ( pronounced /mɨˈtɒnɨmi/ ) is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept. For instance, “London,” as the capital of the United Kingdom, could be used as a metonym for its government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy
I’ve heard it explained as using the thing contained for the container.
Eating the menu instead of the meal, mistaking the map for the territory, the “conventional wisdom” for a narrative with any healing virtues whatsoever. See also Korzybski.
And that implicit power, called maya in Sanskrit: the simultaneously revealing and concealing power of thought we Westerners call “myth-making,” I’m dead certain, has been weaponized, and is being used against us self-sovereign citizens by our so-called public servants in the form of “strategic domestic disinformation campaigns.”
Our myth-makers our nucking futs with power, the ungodly power of our nukes and military machine, that’s why we find ourselves so effed in the head in this effing Waste Land. It’s the mythology!
I am a devotee of the school of thought built around the concept of perception. A ‘the perception is the reality’ kind of guy.
This characteristic has made it easy for the political class to develop memes that have widespread popularity, despite their lack of founding in ‘reality’. To the extent, even, that people believe in these abstractions more than the truth , again of reality, quite literally staring them in the face. And this is in our own country.
If we can’t, as a nation, perceive the true situation in our own land, in our own experience, there isn’t a hope of understanding the rest of the world enough to be able to interact with it constructively.
And although I am not a Buddhist, one element of it, similar to the comments you quoted from Tolstoy, strikes me. And that is the de-emphasis of the concept of self. Selfishness, even ‘countryness’ is the root cause of many of our problems.
Signed, not overly philosophical really, so don’t take it too seriously
In reply to Mary @ 21Ah so, now I see more clearly the interest of Brennan’s overlords in rebranding him as anti-torture, thanks. And it’s about as convincing as re-tatooing a new love’s name over the old flame’s. Do they so believe their own cover stories that they can’t imagine, much less see, how easy it is to see through them?
I think that’s the inherent weakness in depending on the power of myth-making from the Bully Pulpit, to fool all the people all the time. Eventually, the marks start seeing through the con, and then there’s some righteous, if not helpful, hell to pay.
“Eventually, the marks start seeing through the con”
The US marks are losing their retirement savings, but many are losing much much more.
From Obama still not having a plan for Afghanistan
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/83843.html#none
To Obama taking the most somber of moments and turning it into a political opportunity to channel The Gipper and conflate ball games, wars and covert assassination operations.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/afghanistan-pakistan/story/83823.html
So much, so wrong, so now to-be-expected.
Book Salon up at the Mothership with John Perkins’s Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded–and What We Need to Do to Remake Them hosted by Marcy
Saw him speak in D.C. at the Green Fest last fall. Am not able to put a question up over at the mother ship. (RBG banned me a couple of years ago for not letting go of the I/P issue no personal insults not cursing anyway
Anyone willing to put this up over there for me?
John was great to hear you speak live at the Green Fest in D.C. last fall.
Can you describe at what point you decided not to participate in this world of deception and fraud? Was it after one of the leaders of a South American country you were working over was assassinated? Or did the reality and brutality of the business you were in slowly gnaw at you over time? Can you describe this process of conscienceness growing inside of you?
Another question for John Perkins.
Naomi Klein and others have warned that the “disaster capitalist” are circling the potential profit making machine if the World Bank and the IMF have their way with Haiti? Could he address the potential economic disaster that could be fueled if this is allowed to take place in Haiti?
How does that Declaration of Independence go?
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”
8 long years of such abuses
So, Brennan is going on the teevee? I suppose it is too much to hope that someone would ask him about his own role in rationalizing and authorizing torture.
Bob in AZ
The political spinning obscures the law. The Attorney General is OBLIGATED to make decisions. According to the law, he should do so without presidential approval. Since Rahm ‘lost’ here, it’s clear that Obama’s not going to go the George Bush route of having a puppet AG. If Obama does not like Holder’s decisions on prosecution, he should fire Holder. I know that HOlder is popular here but he’s being a idealogue with his prosecution of terrorists. Once he found out the price tag and “exposure” for NYC, he should NEVER had decided to try to prosecute KSM in Manhattan. If he never did that, this underwear bomber debate would have been a non-issue. Obama should let Holder to continue to chart his course without interference. This would restore the integrity to the AG role, which has been lost since Bobby Kennedy was AG for his brother, the President.
This is an incredibly naive, stupid and weak meme. New York will be a target irrespective of where Mohammed is tried; removing the trial from there will not remove their vulnerability and may lead to less protection and a false sense of security that is unwarranted. And, by the way, by law, it is the court that should have decision of where the trial proceeds, not the AG. The thought that Constitutional principals of separation of powers and due process rights are somehow subject to “the price tag” is morally and intellectually repugnant. Hope the truth doesn’t hurt too much….
Last Tuesday, Directors of the CIA, FBI and National Intelligence declared that an attack by Al Qaeda in the next 3 to 6 months “is certain!” Leon Panetta, CIA Director announced, “The biggest threat is not so much that we face an attack like 9/11. It is that Al Qaeda is adapting its methods in ways that oftentimes make it difficult to detect.”
Panetta’s statement does not take into account the ability to identify any terrorist whose goal it is to give up their life for a cause. Only when you are observing measurable emerging aggression can you identify a terrorist before they effect their violence.
The Center for Aggression Management discovered 15 years ago that there were two kinds of aggression: adrenaline-driven Primal Aggression and intent-driven Cognitive Aggression. The Primal Aggressor, in the extreme, is “red-faced and ready to explode,” the Cognitive Aggressor (the terrorist) is not. When a person, regardless of the culture, gender, education or position, rises to the level where their goal is to give up their life for a cause, their body looses animation and we see the “thousand-yard stare.” But it is more than this, the whole body and behavior looses animation and this is how we can identify them. The problem is that security and law enforcement are still looking for the Primal Aggressor (red-faced and ready to explode). Of course they are finding it difficult to detect these terrorist; a terrorist is a Cognitive Aggression; they are looking for the wrong person!
As our Government analyzes what went wrong regarding Abdulmatallab’s entrance into the United States, you can be assured that Al Qaeda is also analyzing how their plans went wrong. Who do you think will figure it out first . . . ?
You can read more at http://blog.AggressionManagement.com