Why Did Obama Join Reactionaries in Dumping on ACORN?

Originally posted at Daily Kos

I was reading a great posting by powwow at FDL's The Seminal this morning. It reviewed David Cole's remarks on President Obama's refusal to apologize for the U.S. government kidnapping/rendition to torture of Canadian Maher Arar. Daphne Evitar and Something the Dog Said already diaried on that, to little notice here at Daily Kos.

But farther down powwow's article I discovered something initially reported last April, but appears to have gone without comment or notice here: that after all the verbiage about how the right went after ACORN, how ACORN was unfairly set-up by right-wing operatives, complete with doctored video... when a U.S. judge ruled that Congress's bill of attainder attacking ACORN was unconstitutional, the Obama administration backed up Congress, and defended the attack on ACORN.

Who would have thought Obama, the vaunted one-time community organizer, would join with the right to attack community organizers?

We know now that the whole ACORN video incident was a setup and a scam, and that ACORN employees did nothing illegal. Just earlier this month a Congressional report cleared ACORN of any wrongdoing (after ACORN had dissolved itself to reform under a new name). A diary noting the courage of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in not voting for the illegal bill of attainder against ACORN hit the recommended list here at Daily Kos as recently as January 28 of this year. See also this highly recommended April 9 diary asking "ACORN exonerated: The tapes were edited. Will the media retract and apologize?"

But when, after Federal District Judge Nina Gershon struck down the illegal ban on funding for Acorn on March 12, the Obama administration appealed this decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. I have never seen this reported at Daily Kos.

Here's how it was reported at Law.com back on April 21 (emphasis added):

A federal appeals court was asked Tuesday to allow enforcement of legislation stripping the embattled activist group ACORN of government funding....

Tuesday, Stern was asking the circuit for an emergency stay pending appeal of a March decision by Eastern District Judge Nina Gershon, who granted a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the funding restrictions.

Gershon found that the legislation was an unconstitutional bill of attainder, a rarely litigated bar in the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 9) on legislation punishing a single person or group.

She denied the government's motion for a stay pending appeal on March 31 and [Mark] Stern headed for the 2nd Circuit, where he argued Tuesday before Judges Roger J. Miner, Jose A. Cabranes and Richard C. Wesley in ACORN v. United States, 10-992.

Stern claimed that Congress had the right to instruct agencies to withhold funding from ACORN amid "indisputable reports of ACORN mismanagement nationwide."

"This is a case of taking steps on the appropriation of federal funds," Stern said. "And if Congress sees widespread mismanagement, it says 'time out.'"

WTF? ACORN had already been cleared by this time. What is Stern and the Obama DoJ talking about? And, btw, don't tell me Stern is a right-wing Bush left-behind. Stern's years at DoJ go back to the Clinton administration, and he received a DoJ special commendation award in 2007 for his work in the U.S. v Philip Morris landmark case.

What's worse is that the role of the Obama administration in perpetuating the right-wing attacks on ACORN goes unremarked by the Daily Kos community. That smacks of hypocrisy to me, though more likely it is simply a willful blindness to the bad policies of the Obama administration, a blindness born of misplaced loyalty and a deep wish for change.

So what say you, Obama loyalists? How can you alibi this betrayal? More nice pictures of the First Family?

I'm getting tired of Obama's lies: on secret prisons, on torture, on supporting community organizers, on FISA, on indefinite detention, on transparency. Jon Stewart captured some of the hypocrisy of the Obama administration the other day in a brilliant routine at The Daily Show.

The Circuit Court, by the way, reserved decision on the ACORN appeal from the Obama DoJ, and in the meantime left the ban on funding in place, until the appeal was decided.

Jon Stewart Skewers Obama Hypocrisy on Torture, War, Surveillance

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H/T twolf1 at FDL/The Seminal

Liberal "Hero" Jon Stewart Cozies Up to War Criminal Myers

As even a commenter at The Daily Show's website put it, Jon Stewart's interview tonight with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush, General Richard Myers, was "one of the most fawning, sycophantic interviews I have ever seen Jon Stewart do."

There is no transcript or link to the interview yet. It's too fresh. From my memory, the interview began with Stewart lauding the sacrifice of U.S. troops, and it also ended the same way. A few days after electrifying much of the blogosphere with a critical interview with MSNBC CNBC financial host Jim Cramer, Stewart showed how he can cower when faced with someone with real power, and not a small-time media crony like Cramer.

General Myers was promoted to the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs only two weeks before 9/11, after having served as vice chair under President Clinton. As a loyal military man under the evil Bush/Cheney regime, he helped organize the "shock and awe" invasion of Iraq that produced hundreds of thousands of deaths and a million or more refugees, all under the guise of a bogus search for supposed weapons of mass destruction.

But that's not all. As Mark Benjamin reported in Salon.com last summer, General Myers was singled out by witnesses for Senator Levin's Senate Armed Services Committee investigation of how torture occurred under Department of Defense sponsorship. Prior to this investigation, faced with Abu Ghraib and other torture scandals, Myers pleaded being out of touch, claiming he had failed to read the military report on the investigation into Abu Ghraib. Later, Myers hoodwinked author Phillipe Sands, who in his book Torture Team, told Myers' tale how he had been hoodwinked by a cabal within the Bush administration, who fooled him into thinking the torture by DoD was actually the application of techniques allowed by the Army Field Manual, and therefore consistent with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. (See this April 2008 article in the UK Guardian.)

But Myers' narrative broke down under the documentary evidence unearthed by the SASC and the testimony of key witnesses at a 2008 hearing of Levin's Armed Services committee. The "plans" under consideration in the quoted selection below concerns a set of "Counter-Resistance Strategy techniques", which were initially discussed at a meeting of military psychologists, high-level Guantanamo officials, and representatives of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency in October 2002, the minutes for which I reproduced at this site some weeks ago. The "techniques" included clear abusive and torture techniques, including hooding, nudity, light/auditory deprivation, "wet towel treatments" (waterboarding), isolation, stress positions, 20 hour interrogations, and other horrifying ways to break down an individual.

From Mark Benjamin's fascinating account at Salon.com (emphases added):

According to written correspondence that came to light during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17, various military leaders balked at the plans in a series of memos produced during the first week of November 2002. In addition to the criticisms raised by the Army, the Air Force leadership cited "serious concerns regarding the legality" of the list of proposed techniques. The Navy also called for further legal review, and the Marine Corps stated that the techniques "arguably violate federal law."

Because of these concerns, Myers' legal counsel, Rear Adm. Jane Dalton, began a fresh evaluation of the legality of the interrogation tactics. "My recollection is that all four of the [military services] suggested that there needed to be further legal and policy review," Dalton testified. The legal review, she told the committee, would have included further input from the military services and provided for a full airing of their concerns.

But such an analysis threatened to undermine Rumsfeld's agenda -- and that's when Myers stepped in. Dalton testified that Myers ordered her to stop that review because of a request from Pentagon general counsel William Haynes. Haynes was spearheading Rumsfeld's efforts to set up a harsh-interrogation program at the Pentagon. "The best of my recollection as to how this occurred is that the chairman called me aside and indicated to me that Mr. Haynes did not want this broad-based review to take place," Dalton testified. "When I learned that Mr. Haynes did not want that broad-based legal and policy review to take place, then I stood down from the plans."

Dalton said Myers was aware that the military services believed the interrogation techniques might be against the law. "It is my recollection that he was aware of these concerns and that I made him aware of those concerns," she said.

This is war crimes material, and along with Myer's command of the atrocity that was the invasion of Iraq, he shall have to stand in the dock of justice someday, if there is to be accountability for these crimes. Benjamin noted this in his article:

"He is rarely referenced as one of the usual suspects," noted Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington Law School who is following the continuing Senate investigation. "He did play a much more central role" than previously known, Turley said. "The minute the military lawyers expressed concern, they were shut down."

And what did these concerns look like?

On October 28, 2002, Mark Fallon, Deputy Commander at Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) sent a memo to a colleague. He was uneasy about what he had read in the Counter Resistance Strategy Meeting Minutes. He told his colleague the comments of Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver and others at the meeting "looks like the kinds of stuff Congressional hearings are made of." The techniques "seem to stretch beyond the bounds of legal propriety."

Quotes from LTC Beaver regarding things that are not being reported give the appearance of impropriety.... Talk of "wet towel treatments" which results in the lymphatic gland reacting as if you are suffocating, would in my opinion; shock the conscience of any legal body looking at using the results of the interrogations or possibly even the interrogators. Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.

To return for a moment from the serious to the somewhat mundane, maybe Jon Stewart, who wants to portray himself as some kind of conscience for America, will want to think about history will look back at his shameless performance of fawning obsequiance before a genuine war criminal.

Perhaps Stewart didn't know this history. If not, he should have. That's what he has a staff for. Instead, he promoted Myers book, asking shyly at one point if anyone had spoken up in any administration meetings pre-war with Iraq and said it was "a bad idea." Myers' assertion that the war in Iraq was turning out positive passed without comment by the supposedly assertive and combative, if respectful, Stewart.

I never liked listening to the accolades given Jon Stewart, whose comedy I enjoy, over the Cramer episode, because I had seen him too often cave in before the most reactionary figures. And sure enough, he couldn't wait but a few days before proving me right.

Shame on you, Jon Stewart. And shame on America, which allows war criminals to go on fancy book tours while the people whose lives they destroyed remain in exile, crippled, or for those whose torture Myers cavalierly overlooked, in dark prison cells awaiting some kind of justice.