...Glenn, you've listed, in some of your prior letters, a few of the reasons you believe POTUS*! to be a distinct improvement (policy-wise) to his predecessor, and wholly distinct from his campaign opponent.

No snark intended, but will you please remind me of those reasons? (I really need reminding. Or something)

No, I didn't vote for him (or McCain, either, that's for sure!). However, I've lost confidence in candidates who project warmth and hope and generally good fuzzy feelings after Bill Clinton snookered me into voting for him, then gave us NAFTA. I want a candidate with a specific program for transforming the American Empire back into a Constitutional Republic. Obama is showing time-and-time again that he is heavily invested in the Empire, so nothing he does to help maintain it surprises me anymore.

If you actually read the Constitution, Congress, not the President, is given authority to make rules concerning "captures on land and water". Congress needs to take the lead in this area and take the heat if their decision contravenes treaty obligations or ethics.

That the current Administration is salvaging, as opposed to scrapping, a good many of its immediate predecessor's tools doesn't really shock or surprise anymore. Indeed, blunt realpolitik dictates they'd be fools not to keep those tools at hand; the morality and efficacy of them likewise doesn't enter into it.

What I'm pondering is what's the thinking behind keeping them to begin with, just on a practical level. Okay, so we now have 'kinder, gentler military commissions' in play. Given the controversy surrounding the words 'military commissions' to begin with, I'm wonder who is supposed to be "tried" by them in the first place. What big names does the administration hope to attach to them to give them legitimacy?

I honestly don't want to think the Obama Administration isn't going to at least give lip-service to the concept of 'legitimacy' in this context. It may be inevitable at this point and given its recent moves concerning detainee abuse/torture, but one still clings to the hope that our better angels will prevail.

the case against Bush's system was that military commissions in general are a dangerous perversion of justice.

...when Obama does it, it is manifestly not perverse. Do you not trust our leader? We voted for him to bring us out of the wilderness, and he won, so we are out of the wilderness. So shut up about it already.

Seriously, I won't say I saw this coming because (a) it's annoying and (b) I didn't. Not really. I thought Obama would at least make a better show of not totally betraying his campaign rhetoric, for at least a little while longer. The rapidity and completeness with which he's embracing pretty much the whole superstructure of the Bush imperial Presidency is, frankly, stunning... even to me.

And herein lies the crisis. A far wiser man than me wrote, more than a year ago:

An Obama victory will kill much of the possibility for meaningful political opposition for good -- that is, opposition that might significantly alter the existing system without destroying it (if that is at all possible, which I am almost entirely convinced it is not). But the resentments, the anger and possibly even the hatred will remain, and they may grow. What happens then?

It hardly bears thinking about.

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2008/09/no-there-are-many-things-about-it-that.html

It's time to think about it. Long and hard.

It's time to think about it. Long and hard.

The other aspect of it, and you hinted at this the other day, is this: Under Bush, half the country was trained to recite all sorts of dangerous propositions about how important it is to vest The President with all sorts of powers to keep us safe, how vital it is that he keep things secret to protect us from the Terrorists, how we can trust in our leaders to exercise in ways we don't understand because we know he's good at heart.

And now, with Obama, a significant portion of the other half of the country is being trained to recite the same things.

Considering the alternative, I still can't say I regret voting for him. I never really saw it as a choice between eating a bowl of ice cream and eating a great big pile of shit. It was more like a choice between eating a great big pile of shit and eating a little pile of shit.

I picked the little pile.

Yeah, I'd much prefer to not eat any shit at all, but "shit-free" wasn't on the menu.

Quite a day, today and yesterday, for OS Barack Obusha, torture, and extra-judicial "military commissions" for our extra-judicial detainees. Definitely reminds one of Howard Zinn's admonition: "Never trust a president or Congress to make the changes our country needs. Only when citizens organize and demand change will real change happen" (paraphrase).

Today's post by Glenn lacked the sizzling outrage and rhetorical cresendoes of yesterday's and many that came before. I wonder if he is feeling as sick at his stomach as I am.

My nausea started last night for real when I saw, rather than read about, on Rachel Maddow the former UN Weapons Inspector and an investigative producer for NBC news telling us it is highly likely that Dick Cheney ordered the use of interrogation techniques designed to elicit false confessions on an Iraqi national in order to elict a false confession about the Al Qaeda-Iraq connection in order to make war.

Yesterday that story brought to light another story that former NBC investigative producer Robert Windrem had reported in January 2008 on NBC's Deep Background website (http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/30/624314.aspx) that:

"much of what was reported about the planning and execution of the terror attacks on New York and Washington was derived from the interrogations of high-ranking al-Qaida operatives. Each had been subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Indeed, this mainstream journalist (writing on a mainstream media site) had also reported this stunner:

"most of the information in Chapters 5, 6 and 7 of the [9/11 Commission] Report came from the interrogations. Those chapters cover the initial planning for the attack, the assembling of terrorist cells, and the arrival of the hijackers in the U.S. In total, the Commission relied on more than 100 interrogation reports produced by the CIA. The second round of interrogations sought by the Commission involved more than 30 separate interrogation sessions."

Oh, my. The officially published version of the official story based in large part on information obtained by torture? That's not good.

Add to that some other recent nuggets:

Cynthia Howard, M.Arch from Harvard and MIT, Past President of New England Chapter of AIA, wrote last week: ""I believe that it is physically/scientifically impossible for the heat from the burning planes to have caused the collapse . . . I demand a truly independent investigation."

One of Project Censored's ("Top Censored Stories of 2009" was Japan's main opposition party, Japan Democratic Party, which controls Japan's upper-house, voting down a bill that would restart a mission to refuel U.S. military ships because the party's official position is that the U.S. official story is false and it demands a new investigation.

(http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/24-japan-questions-9-11-and-the-global-war-on-terror/)

Former Chief of NIST's Fire Science Division, James Quintiere, calls for rejection of the NIST reports and a new, independent investigation. (And, alert omooex, Quintiere is a tenured professor at the Univ. of Maryland.) (http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_alan_mil_070820_former_chief_of_nist.htm)

And there there is that troublesome little article published in The Open Chemical Physics Journal, "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe" (http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM) that caused the journal's editor-in-chief to resign because she was "unaware" it was going to be published in the journal she was editor of. She never questioned the science in the article, nor has any scientist or academic, only the Randi-type debunkers.

Today and yesterday--don't know if a shark has been jumped or a watershed crossed, but it just feels over in some important way.

Today it seems like the only folks left defending the official 9/11 story are going to sound awfully like our brothers and sisters on the right who still claim:

Saddam had WMD.

U.S. torture was legal and justified.

Military commissions serve the American idea of justice.

Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda carried out 9/11.