The View From 1776

Through the office of Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama actively supported a witch-hunt aimed at destroying the careers of Bush administration attorneys who provided legal advice about the limits upon interrogating captured Islamic terrorists.  Hating President Bush wasn’t enough.  It was necessary figuratively to spill some blood.

Between 1936 and 1938 Stalin staged public trials of of Soviet military and political leaders whom he regarded as rivals.  All of the trials resulted in convictions and executions for alleged treason. 

American liberal-progressives at the time applauded the show trials as necessary to stop opposition to socialistic progress toward perfection of human nature and political society.  In fact, liberal-progressives continued to defend the trials until after the fall of the Soviet Union and revelation of KGB documents. 

The common good, an abstraction called “humanity,” as defined by Stalin or American intellectuals, always trumps individual rights.

Parenthetically, this appears to be Obama’s attitude as he renews the effort to force passage of National Socialistic Healthcare, in the face of voters’ revulsion.  Liberal-progressives, it seems, still believe fervently in the superiority of their own minds and in their right to rule the rest of us, precisely the mindset of liberal-progressives during the 1930s.

What became widely known only after the fall of the Soviet Union was that the Moscow show trials were staged in the same way as the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility’s attack against Bush administration lawyers.  There wasn’t even the pretense of objectivity.  Defendants were first judged guilty, then evidence was rigged to portray guilt, and exculpatory evidence was suppressed.

Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility is a direct descendant of the Stalin regime.

In the following op-ed article from the Wall Street Journal, one of Justice’s targets rebuts the Office of Professional Responsibility’s Moscow-show-trial tactics.

FEBRUARY 24, 2010
My Gift to the Obama Presidency
Though the White House won’t want to admit it, Bush lawyers were protecting the executive’s power to fight a vigorous war on terror.

By JOHN YOO
Barack Obama may not realize it, but I may have just helped save his presidency. How? By winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe.

He sure didn’t make it easy. When Mr. Obama took office a year ago, receiving help from one of the lawyers involved in the development of George W. Bush’s counterterrorism policies was the furthest thing from his mind. Having won a great electoral victory, the new president promised a quick about-face. He rejected “as false the choice between our safety and our ideals” and moved to restore the law-enforcement system as the first line of defense against a hardened enemy devoted to killing Americans.

In office only one day, Mr. Obama ordered the shuttering of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, followed later by the announcement that he would bring terrorists to an Illinois prison. He terminated the Central Intelligence Agency’s ability to use “enhanced interrogations techniques” to question al Qaeda operatives. He stayed the military trial, approved by Congress, of al Qaeda leaders. He ultimately decided to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attacks, to a civilian court in New York City, and automatically treated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, as a criminal suspect (not an illegal enemy combatant). Nothing better could have symbolized the new president’s determination to take us back to a Sept. 10, 2001, approach to terrorism.

Part of Mr. Obama’s plan included hounding those who developed, approved or carried out Bush policies, despite the enormous pressures of time and circumstance in the months immediately after the September 11 attacks. Although career prosecutors had previously reviewed the evidence and determined that no charges are warranted, last year Attorney General Eric Holder appointed a new prosecutor to re-investigate the CIA’s detention and interrogation of al Qaeda leaders.

In my case, he let loose the ethics investigators of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) to smear my reputation and that of Jay Bybee, who now sits as a federal judge on the court of appeals in San Francisco. Our crime? While serving in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the weeks and months after 9/11, we answered in the form of memoranda extremely difficult questions from the leaders of the CIA, the National Security Council and the White House on when interrogation methods crossed the line into prohibited acts of torture.

Rank bias and sheer incompetence infused OPR’s investigation. OPR attorneys, for example, omitted a number of precedents that squarely supported the approach in the memoranda and undermined OPR’s preferred outcome. They declared that no Americans have a right of self-defense against a criminal prosecution, not even when they or their government agents attempt to stop terrorist attacks on the United States. OPR claimed that Congress enjoyed full authority over wartime strategy and tactics, despite decades of Justice Department opinions and practice defending the president’s commander-in-chief power. They accused us of violating ethical standards without ever defining them. They concocted bizarre conspiracy theories about which they never asked us, and for which they had no evidence, even though we both patiently—and with no legal obligation to do so—sat through days of questioning.

OPR’s investigation was so biased, so flawed, and so beneath the Justice Department’s own standards that last week the department’s ranking civil servant and senior ethicist, David Margolis, completely rejected its recommendations.
Attorney General Holder could have stopped this sorry mess earlier, just as his predecessor had tried to do. OPR slow-rolled Attorney General Michael Mukasey by refusing to deliver a draft of its report until the 2008 Christmas and New Year holidays. OPR informed Mr. Mukasey of its intention to release the report on Jan. 12, 2009, without giving me or Judge Bybee the chance to see it—as was our right and as we’d been promised.

Mr. Mukasey and Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip found so many errors in the report that they told OPR that the entire enterprise should be abandoned. OPR decided to run out the clock and push the investigation into the lap of the Obama administration. It would have been easy for Mr. Holder to concur with his predecessors—in fact, it was critical that he do so to preserve the Justice Department’s impartiality. Instead the new attorney general let OPR’s investigators run wild. Only Mr. Margolis’s rejection of the OPR report last week forced the Obama administration to drop its ethics charges against Bush legal advisers.

Why bother fighting off an administration hell-bent on finding scapegoats for its policy disagreements with the last president? I could have easily decided to hide out, as others have. Instead, I wrote numerous articles (several published in this newspaper) and three books explaining and defending presidential control of national security policy. I gave dozens of speeches and media appearances, where I confronted critics of the administration’s terrorism policies. And, most importantly, I was lucky to receive the outstanding legal counsel of Miguel Estrada, one of the nation’s finest defense attorneys, to attack head-on and without reservation, each and every one of OPR’s mistakes, misdeeds and acts of malfeasance.

I did not do this to win any popularity contests, least of all those held in the faculty lounge. I did it to help our president—President Obama, not Bush. Mr. Obama is fighting three wars simultaneously in Iraq, Afghanistan, and against al Qaeda. He will call upon the men and women serving under his command to make choices as hard as the ones we faced. They cannot meet those challenges with clear minds if they believe that a bevy of prosecutors, congressional committees and media critics await them when they return from the battlefield.

This is no idle worry. In 2005, a Navy Seal team dropped into Afghanistan encountered goat herders who clearly intended to inform the Taliban of their whereabouts. The team leader ordered them released, against his better military judgment, because of his worries about the media and political attacks that would follow.

In less than an hour, more than 80 Taliban fighters attacked and killed all but one member of the Seal team and 16 Americans on a helicopter rescue mission. If a president cannot, or will not, protect the men and women who fight our nation’s wars, they will follow the same risk-averse attitudes that invited the 9/11 attacks in the first place.

Without a vigorous commander-in-chief power at his disposal, Mr. Obama will struggle to win any of these victories. But that is where OPR, playing a junior varsity CIA, wanted to lead us. Ending the Justice Department’s ethics witch hunt not only brought an unjust persecution to an end, but it protects the president’s constitutional ability to fight the enemies that threaten our nation today.

Mr. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was a Justice Department official from 2001-03. He is the author, among other books, of “Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush” (Kaplan, 2010).

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The following op-ed piece from the Wall Street Journal spotlights Vice President Biden’s completely false claim.  Should we cut him slack and assume that this is just another of the endless string of verbal gaffes for which he is notorious?  Or is he deliberately endeavoring to mislead the American people?

***********************************
FEBRUARY 17, 2010, 10:36 P.M. ET
Joe Biden’s Iraq ‘Achievement’
The vice president claims credit for the success of the surge he opposed.

By OMAR FADHIL AL-NIDAWI AND AUSTIN BAY

The defeatists have finally acknowledged that Iraq is well on its way to establishing a peaceful democracy. But that recognition comes with a catch: The public is asked to forget everything these strategically benighted cads said and did—or didn’t do.

We are referring, of course, to Vice President Joe Biden’s recent comments on CNN. “This could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government,” he said in an interview with Larry King.

Less than three years after Sen. Harry Reid (D., Nev.) declared the war lost, less than three years after then-Sen. Barack Obama—with the usual fierce moral urgency—opposed the Bush administration’s military surge, and within three years of Mr. Biden’s own recommendation that Iraq be divided into three parts, these Democrats are laying claim to Iraq’s extraordinary victory.

The vice president wisely made his victory assertion in the television studio of a left-leaning network experienced in fudging Iraqi history. CNN, by its own admission, muted coverage of Saddam Hussein for over a decade.

In the past, American liberals have relied on a sympatico press and leftist academics to obscure or whitewash their grievous historical errors. President George W. Bush, pursuing the global war on terror, encountered the same personal slander Ronald Reagan faced as he fought and won the last major political battles of the Cold War. Both were branded “cowboys” and “warmongers.” Now, Reagan’s victorious Cold War legacy is claimed by all Americans.

Honest historians will eventually discover signs of victory in Iraq during the worst moments of media-driven doubt. But some of us refused to be swept up in the faddish pessimism and reported what was actually happening on the ground.

In a piece from June 2005, one of us, Austin Bay, wrote that “the Baghdad of June 2005 is not the Baghdad I left in September 2004,” going on to detail the country’s progress. In March 2007, Omar Al-Nidawi and his brother Mohammad wrote in these pages about the stunning victory in Iraq: “the addition of more troops and the tough words of Prime Minister Maliki are doing the job.”

The defeatists in the media damned any such success. When President Bush said the surge was working, his critics labeled him out of touch. They charged that front-line observations like those made by the Al-Nidawi brothers were paid propaganda. Three years later, these same individuals are weaving victory laurels for politicians who promoted defeat for their own short-term political advantage.

Mr. Biden, here are the facts. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which former President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki signed, orchestrated the homecoming of U.S. troops. Mr. Obama didn’t do it.

The Bush plan called for a phased transition from “more” coalition security operations to “fewer,” based on the demonstrated improvement in the capabilities of Iraq’s military and police forces. “Rheostat” warfare is the term Gen. David Petraeus used in 2007, after the device that varies the strength of electrical currents. Securing and extending the authority of Iraq’s national government was an integral part of the process. Mr. Biden pushed his partition plan and relentlessly opposed the tough decisions and heroic efforts that created the conditions for SOFA.

Victory has a thousand fathers and Mr. Biden is but one of the many phonies. Historians may credit the Obama administration with a degree of reluctant follow-through on SOFA. But even this is a change from Mr. Obama’s own 2008 cut-and-run campaign platform, which, if implemented, would have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Mr. Nidawi is an Iraqi commentator and political analyst. He blogs at iraqthemodel.blogspot.com. Mr. Bay served with the U.S. Army in Iraq in 2004. His latest book is “A Quick and Dirty Guide to War: 4th Edition” (Paladin Press, 2008).

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit http://www.djreprints.com

The Washington Times reports that Chinese see U.S. debt as weapon in Taiwan dispute:

China’s military stepped up pressure on the United States on Monday by calling for a government sell-off of U.S. debt securities in retaliation for recent arms sales to Taiwan…

“The Chinese military now believes that China has tremendous economic and financial leverage, especially over the United States, and they are giving fair warning to the world that they will use it when they can..."

See also China Puts Us on Notice and China Warns Us Again, two posting from a year ago.

The colossal cost of holding a KSM trial in New York City is evidently the primary motivation for moving the trial elsewhere.

More worthy of reassessment is the liberal-progressive idea that terrorists should be dealt with as if they were ordinary criminals entitled to Miranda rights and the host of additional constitutional protections that go with ordinary criminal trials.

Worthy of reassessment, as well, is the administration’s repeated assurances that KSM will be found guilty and will be executed.  This gives the appearance of a show trial in which the conviction is rigged beforehand.  One wonders why Obama is willing to create this appearance, given his craven urges to kow-tow to overseas public opinion.

The answer perhaps may lie in liberal-progressives’ readiness to support any measure by a collectivist, socialistic government - in the proposed KSM trial and in the 1930s Moscow show trials - in the belief that liberal-progressives are pure of heart and can commit no wrong. 

After all, Obama, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, David Axelrod, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid are endangering our homeland security and the nation’s economic survival in service to the grand designs of social justice and socialistic perfection of future generations.  At any rate, that was the liberal-progressive justification here in the United States for Stalin’s murdering tens of millions of people during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

Add to the rationale John Dewey’s pragmatic dogma that Darwinian evolution has made “value judgments” about right and wrong passé.  Under Dewey’s pragmatism, the only thing that counts is getting what you wish to have, which, by the way, also explains Nancy Pelosi’s determination to cram socialized health care down the throats of a revolted public.