The Editorial Board at The New York Times belatedly says the Obama administration should Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses:
Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down. […]
No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and independent criminal investigation. […]
The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.
But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.
Paul Rosenberg at
Salon writes
Put the evil bastards on trial: The case for trying Bush, Cheney and more for war crimes:
We’ve seen it in Ferguson, Missouri, with Darren Wilson getting off scot-free for killing Michael Brown. And we’ve seen it again in Staten Island, with Daniel Pantaleo getting off scot-free for killing Eric Garner. So why shouldn’t scores of CIA agents, contractors, higher-ups and other government officials—including former President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney—get off scot-free for torturing hundreds of detainees, including some complete innocents? That, apparently, is the reigning logic following the release of the Senate torture report. […]
While there’s no doubt that Nuremberg-style trials would be difficult for us as a nation, those trials would not be all doom and gloom. Heroes such as these would also play a part in the proceedings. Their voices would be heard, their stories would be told, their shining examples of fidelity to America’s highest values under the most difficult of conditions would provide us with exactly the sort of heroes that we need to write the next chapter of America’s ongoing quest for perfection. They are the ones who will help us craft a mythos that’s in harmony with the logos of the underlying facts, not twisted and distorted in direct contradiction of them. They are one more powerful reason that we as a nation need to hold Nuremberg-style trials—not just to exorcise the demons we have allowed to grow in our midst, but also to affirm and empower those who fight against them—and to ensure that their numbers will grow in the days that lie ahead.
There are more pundit excerpts below fold.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times looks at the case of 14-year-old George Stinney in Pursuing Justice for All:
That day, June 16, 1944, Stinney became the youngest person executed in America in the 20th century. This unconscionable cruelty — the execution of children — used to be routine. As The Times pointed out in 2005, in the 1940s juveniles were executed at a pace of “nearly once every two months.” […]
It’s not clear whether Stinney saw the faces of anyone who loved him when he was marched into that execution chamber and strapped into that chair. His sister, Aime Ruffner, told The Guardian this year that the family was run out of town the day her brother was taken away. She is quoted as saying: “I never went back there. I curse that place. It was the destruction of my family and the killing of my brother.”
Last week, a South Carolina judge threw out the conviction, saying “I can think of no greater injustice than a violation of one’s constitutional rights, which has been proven to me in this case” and finding “by a preponderance of the evidence standard, that a violation of the defendant’s procedural due process rights tainted his prosecution.”
This was a victory of sorts: a 70-years-too-late admission that the justice system failed that black child, and that the failure culminated—in short order—in the taking of his life. Yet something about it feels hollow and discomforting, like the thunder that rolls long after the lightning has cracked the sky and split the tree.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post has praise with caveats for
The duck that roared:
In the short run, Obama has demonstrated that the term “lame duck” has its limits. Over the seven weeks since the Democrats’ pummeling in November’s midterm elections, the president has moved forcefully to show he will use all the power he still has. […]
Thus did Obama’s good mood at his news conference on Friday defy the political obituaries that proliferated after the election. “My presidency is entering the fourth quarter,” he said brightly. “Interesting things happen in the fourth quarter.”
But in that quarter, Republicans will control both houses of Congress, and Obama will have to work with them just to keep the government running. He will also have to pick his fights. A senior administration official said the president would lay out bottom lines — one imagines especially on health care and financial reform — where he cannot compromise with the GOP and will count on congressional Democrats to uphold potential vetoes. […]
Obama has shown he can still accomplish a lot on his own. The harder test will be whether he can advance ideas and arguments that strengthen the ability of his allies to sustain his policies beyond the life of his presidency.
Hadley Freeman at
The Guardian declares that
The US may have no queen, but it has more royal families than it knows what to do with:
Last week, when Prince William and his wife, Princess Elsa from Frozen, visited the United States, Piers Morgan—the self-appointed British commentator on America—proved how little he understands the US when he wrote an article saying that the royals’ popularity with its citizens proves America should have its own monarchy.
In fact, the US already has more monarchies than it knows what to do with, from the faded glories of the House of Kennedy to the glittering Court of Clinton and the defiant Dynasty of Bush. […] Here are families who, with varying degrees of merit, exist in a world of gilded celebrity, who consider power and money their God-given right, purely because of their surname—the very definition of a monarchy.
This perfectly obvious fact was underlined yesterday when—like President James Madison taking his feather quill to stress an article in the US constitution—Jeb Bush wrote on Facebook: “I am excited to announce that I will actively explore the possibility of running for president of the United States.” You really do have to love that distinctly Bushian use of English—“actively explore the possibility … ” You could take out 15 words in that sentence and it would still mean the same thing.
Boyd Tonkin at
The Independent writes
The Interview cancelled: From supporting the Ku Klux Klan to appeasing the Nazis, Hollywood has a rich history of caving in:
In theory, American freedom may not back down in the face of anonymous menaces. In practice, Sony Pictures has. Perhaps the studio, unlike the grandstanding celebs, knows a little of the local history. Hollywood has hardly ever taken a lonely stand for liberty. Quite the opposite. From D W Griffiths’s endorsement of Ku Klux Klan racism in Birth of a Nation a century ago, through the escapist Thirties, the McCarthy witch-hunts and the timidly belated response to epoch-making events such as the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, it by and large keeps schtum, plays safe and cheerleads for the status quo. Fearful of vested interests and keen to walk slowly down the middle of the road, Hollywood turns up late to the feast of freedom. That goes for its genuine classics as much as its routine potboilers. In 1962, To Kill a Mockingbird depicted the Alabama not of that strife-torn moment in the South but of Harper Lee’s brilliantly reimagined, yet hygienically remote, mid-1930s.
Often it takes imported mischief-makers to inject some backbone into social satire, LA-style. Today’s textbook example, Sacha Baron Cohen, is British. True, trouble-stirring documentarist Michael Moore hails from the heartland: Flint, Michigan. But Hollywood has hardly clasped him to its corporate bosom. For all its nuclear sabre-rattling, Kim Jong-un’s regime no doubt struck the studio as a relatively risk-free target, about as realistic to its home audience as the bellicose planets that invade America in sci-fi blockbusters.
As for Rob Lowe’s invocation of Neville Chamberlain, it should wrench a hollow laugh from anyone acquainted with the studios’ track record of conformity. For Hollywood itself was the great appeaser of the pre-war Third Reich. In a bewildering twist of history, studio bosses who were sometimes themselves Jewish migrants—and could still feel like barely tolerated outsiders—bent over backwards to meet the demands of Hitler’s Germany. It began in 1930, before the Nazis came to power, when Goebbels made a rabble-rousing speech against the film of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front. Once in control, the Nazis—who governed a vital overseas market for American films—dictated their terms.
James K. Boyce at the
Los Angeles Times asks
Amid climate change, what's more important: Protecting money or people?
A thought experiment illustrates the choices we face. Imagine that without major new investments in adaptation, climate change will cause world incomes to fall in the next two decades by 25% across the board, with everyone's income going down, from the poorest farmworker in Bangladesh to the wealthiest real estate baron in Manhattan. Adaptation can cushion some but not all of these losses. What should be our priority: reduce losses for the farmworker or the baron? […]
Conventional economic models would prescribe spending more to protect the barons than the farmworkers of the world. The rationale was set forth with brutal clarity in a memorandum leaked in 1992 that was signed by Lawrence Summers, then chief economist of the World Bank. The memo asked whether the bank should encourage more migration of dirty industries to developing countries and concluded that “the economic logic of dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” Climate change is just a new kind of toxic waste.
The “economic logic” of the Summers memo—later said to have been penned tongue-in-cheek to provoke debate, which it certainly did—rests on a doctrine of “efficiency” that counts all dollars equally. Whether it goes to a starving child or a millionaire, a dollar is a dollar. The task of economists, in this view, is to maximize the size of the total dollar pie. How it's sliced is not their problem.
The Editorial Board at the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune takes a stab about
How to build a new future for American Indian schools:
President Obama had the right reaction after meeting Indian students during his trip to a North Dakota Indian reservation in June. Saying he and the first lady were “shaken” by the kids’ pessimism about their futures, Obama returned home and took action. […But]
An effort to help Indian youths that does not include an overhaul of these 63 BIE schools cannot be taken seriously. At least $1.3 billion is required for rebuilding or renovation. What’s needed is a swift commitment to secure funding, not lightweight initiatives.
Beginning Nov. 23, a Star Tribune Editorial Board series called “Separate and Unequal” documented the shameful state of BIE school buildings across the nation, as well as the growing gap between them and U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) schools, the other federally funded K-12 system.
Northern Minnesota’s Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig High School is housed in a deteriorating pole barn. In Arizona, two BIE schools have been on a “priority waitlist” for a decade. In South Dakota, BIE schools are overcrowded and have sections of buildings that have been closed off or condemned.
At the same time, Department of Defense schools, which serve children of military families and civilian defense employees, are in the midst of a $5 billion, decadelong project to rebuild 134 schools and set a new national design standard for the future.
Yohuru Williams at
The Progressive writes
What We Really Need To Learn From Malala: On Valuing Education In America:
Since her horrific shooting at the hands of the Taliban in October of 2012 simply for attending school, Malala Yousafzai has become an international symbol of student activism and the power of education. Even before becoming the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize, her story was shared widely. She continues to be held up as a symbol of the power of youth to challenge oppression and injustice.
Yousafzai even had a private audience at the White House when she visited Washington, in October of 2013. She sat with president Obama, firmly advising him that the use of drones fueled terrorism. In a subsequent interview, she revealed how she “thanked President Obama for the United States' work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees.” […]
In reality, Yousafzai has much in common with many American students who are speaking out powerfully and passionately in defense of public education in the United States. While they may not be facing down guns, they are endangered by policies and practices ushered in by corporate education reformers like former DC School Chancellor Michelle Rhee that not only deny their access to education but also their human dignity and worth.
Students across the nation have borne the brunt of top down policies that reinforce economic inequality, label them, their teachers, and their schools as failures, force school closures, and encourage outright segregation while limiting curriculum choices and subjecting them to high stakes testing.
Students have been speaking out about these polices from Providence, Rhode Island and Denver, Colorado to Newark, New Jersey and Chicago, Illinois. They were not rewarded with visits to the White House but rather face hostility, indifference, and in some cases, even violence.
Ben Adler at
Grist writes
Obama sounds like he’s about to reject the Keystone pipeline:
Speaking at his end-of-the-year press conference on Friday afternoon, President Obama sounded very much like he’s poised to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. He gave his sharpest assessment to date of its potential costs and benefits — lots of costs and few benefits. […]
It has been a source of aggravation to climate hawks that Obama has often pandered to the economic ignorance of the American public when it comes to gas prices. Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy falsely asserts that increased domestic production of oil will reduce “our dependence on foreign oil,” as if there really were any such thing. Oil is a global commodity. Prices are set by global supply and global demand. Whether the oil we buy happens to be drilled in the U.S., Canada, Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, or Libya makes no difference. We are subsidizing our adversaries who produce oil as long as we are filling our gas-guzzlers with it. More oil production in the U.S., or oil importation from Canada, will not inoculate us against the price shocks caused by supply disruptions in the Middle East or elsewhere.
The whole American debate around energy policy has been perverted by the public’s failure to understand this basic concept. Republicans, of course, eagerly fan the flames of economic illiteracy. Obama’s approach has usually been to try to split the difference between this foolishness and smart energy policy by promising to increase domestic production of both renewables and fossil fuels. But now Obama has confronted these public misperceptions and tried to educate the public so that energy policy can be decided on a more rational basis.