This is an early report from today's action in DC:

It began with a gathering at the Capitol with approximately 150-200 people all in orange jumpsuits. They marched in a silent procession to Lafayette Park across from the White House. There were speakers from Amnesty, ACLU, WAT and Torture Abolition & Survivors Support Coalition International.

Then Debra's group, representing the 61 (who are supposed to have been released but haven't, including five who have died there), marched to the sidewalk in front of the White House and lined up facing the White House with a banner reading "Justice Delayed is Justice Denied."

The others stood on the opposite side of the street in rows of 10 with banners saying: "100 Days, Close Guantanamo" and "Waterboarding is Torture."

There was a very powerful reading of the names and the stories of the 61 people represented by Debra's [Debra Sweet, Nat'l Director of World Can't Wait who was arrested in this action] group -- including, as recounted by Frida Berrigan, the story of a boy, taken to Guantanamo at the age of 16 who died there at the age of 21. As she said, extremely poignantly, he will remain at Guantanamo forever.

Berrigan also said waterboarding is torture as Obama said at his press conference this week but, she added, those who ordered it and did it must be indicted.

The ACLU speaker said there needs to be a criminal investigation of those responsible starting at the top and pointed at the White House.

The Amnesty speaker called for mass action everywhere.

I believe we can alleviate all of this. Those who took part in the torture should turn themselves in voluntarily. They should admit they violated international laws of human rights, they are willing to take whatever discipline given to them.

Here's the thing:

I know killing and vengeance is wrong. But if someone killed my child, I would probably kill them if given the chance. However, I would fully understand that I must pay for my actions and welcome the punishment.

Dennis, I like your description of torture.

I do not share your idea that the current governmental ethos is "neoliberal" primarily because I do not accept your definition of this newly coined term. I think the old labels of liberal and conservative, even the handle "neocon," serve no useful purpose. An "old" classical liberal would have nothing to do with globalization. Nor would a classical conservative.

It is neither here nor there to me but labeling people or movements this or that and then putting your own definition on them serves no useful purpose as far as I am concerned.

What is see happening in DC, and it matters not whether it is Republican or Democrat, is that the governmental powers that be are now totally aligned with wall street, the military industrial complex and the power brokers of old money. The government gives those groups what they want, always. But that is just my take on it.

As for Obama, I think that he can still do some good, and in a world of situational ethics I think that he is an improvement over Bush. I support him on most things.

The big things I think he is failing at are turning over the nation's money to the fat cats on Wall St., moving from one bad war to another, and failure to thoroughly investigate torture and other unconstitutional actions of the Bush Administration. Those are huge things, but are by no means all of the things that the President can do in pushing for education reform, moving toward a green industrial base, improving our infrastructure, getting some form of universal health care, etc. So on those perhaps we can make some progress.

As for the things I think he is failing on, well, I never thought he would tackle them in the first place. I expected him to fail on those, as I define fail. My skepticism is clear in the posts I wrote in October and November, before and after the election.

So why people are so shocked by him is a mystery to me. I voted for him because he was the better alternative, not because he was the liberal messiah. He never was that. He wasn't even a "neoliberal" messiah. ;-)

Monte

Excellent!

Instead of "looking ahead", our legal system should be looking back, and back and back, back over the last eight years, back to Nuremberg, back to the Inquisition, back to a future where we have prosecuted those who refused to look back or take back their defense of torture.

"That is why torturing innocents is part of torture’s purpose: so that the populace will come to believe that there is nothing that they can do that could prevent their being tortured, that who gets selected to be tortured is completely arbitrary and capricious, so that the population will not dare to resist, so that they will live in constant fear."

It sounds like Nazi Gremany, doesn't it?

Thank you for this, Dennis. Another powerful piece of writing.

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Thank you especially describing the activities at the Capitol. I hope that mass actions could help the case.

Good post! I think this is a threat to all of us. Nazi German gov't was not too good to their own people either.
I don't know why libertarians and conservatives can't see why this threatens them too.
Someone on 'big salon' had a good post on why this president can't sheild criminals for political reasons, how corrupt that is.

I liked your post. To me, torture is just pure evil, and the different semantics associated with this evil. We have opened a Pandoras box, that I think will never be closed, ever.

Monte: Thanks for your comments. Those who have been governing in our country and most of the rest of the world are neoliberals which has nothing to do with the classical liberal. It's liberal in the Adam Smith sense of "free markets will solve everything." What Obama represents is the carrying forward of the Bush Doctrine in foreign policy - indeed, carrying it forward even more aggressively and under the fig leaf of "talking." On the domestic front, Obama is pursuing some better policies with respect to the environment and with respect to science, but that's about it.


What is at stake here, as a couple of other posters here have noted (thanks Natalie and Tom) and I would agree, is that a police state is well underway and if Obama doesn't prosecute the torturers, then the country will have been transformed irrevocably, pending a massive, popular uprising to reverse this.

Dennis, I hate to add another question to your to-do list, but are you familiar with Johan Norberg? His research into the benefits of neoliberalism (integration of markets) seems hard to refute. And I mean benefits to developing nations, not to the already industrialized ones (although he admits they benefit as well).

Your piece gave me cold chills and breathlessness. I tried several times to skip over each and every example at the beginning and couldn't. Your style is commanding as is your gift.

Don't you think that Obama & Co. are letting this play out while spacing each step? "Pardoning" the participants was only Step 1 - to give prosecutors a slate of primary eye-witnesses who, with absolution, if you will, can then testify openly and freely without fear?

Releasing the classified documents was Step 2 to insure public support. When those horrors & outrage have been given time to sink in here and around the world, then on to the next step in a deliberate and steady methodology?

I may be horrifyingly naive in saying that, but surely these atrocities will not go untried. How can they not be?

BR

You wrote in your comment:

"a police state is well underway and if Obama doesn't prosecute the torturers, then the country will have been transformed irrevocably, pending a massive, popular uprising to reverse this."

I agree with you that Obama has made it clear that he will continue building a police state. He has already taken more rights to spy the American citizens than Bush' regime did. He has as well sent more troops to Afghanistan to continue 'the war on terrorism'. He has as well clearly started hiding that policy by telling that the name of 'the war on terrrorism' should be changed for something else.

I agree with you that the torturing case is crucial. It is the place to start turning the policy into something better.

It will take time, before people will be awake. It might take a long time, before the torturers are in the law court. During that time the present regime will try building the police state stronger. I think that a big campaign is needed against the surveillance of the people.

Blue Roses: (What a wonderful name!)

Thank you so much. As for Obama's plans - he has been extremely consistent on his attitude and in his actions on torture since his campaign began and through to today. While he has continued to claim that he opposes torture, he doesn't oppose those who did it under Bush and Cheney. If you say that you're against something but you block every effort to hold those accountable who have been doing that which you say you oppose, then in effect you're not against it at all.

If you hope, as many others do, that this is a secret plan on his part to eventually go after these monsters, then why would one who says they are going to run a race keep on digging themselves deeper into a hole? His DOJ's filings in court have all been to not only reiterate the Bush regime's own arguments on torture and detention and rendition and state secrets, but Obama's DOJ has gone even further and claimed even greater powers as the executive - sovereign immunity in which they can't be sued for wrongdoing unless they have been caught deliberately releasing someone's private information.

His DOJ has filed briefs saying that torture of prisoners should not be punished. You don't take positions before the court and then later on reverse yourself and say, "what we said earlier, we didn't mean them." You lose all credibility and will be laughed at.

If he was really against torture, then he wouldn't be expanding Bagram and saying that no one in Bagram has a right to challenge their detention.

ali b: Some conservatives and some libertarians see how this is a threat to them as well, but many of them don't. As to why those can't see it, they are xenophobes and xenophobes never come to good ends.

Noahvose: revenge can be a powerful motivator, it's true, but what the front line soldiers at Abu Ghraib, for instance, have said about their actions in torturing prisoners was that they were ordered to "soften people up," etc. and they weren't really driven by a desire to avenge deaths. Agreed on your overall sentiment here that punishment must happen ...

Vonnia: Thanks!

BBE, Hannu, Bill: Thank you. Bill - Pandora's Box indeed!

Lainey: I haven't read Galtung and will check him out.

Another persuasive, thought-provoking, heart-rending post. Most salient of all, though, is how evident you make it that the pieces don't fit.

Unlike Bush43 or Bush41, and perhaps unlike Clinton, Obama clearly has the native empathy to feel wrenching visceral anguish over the terror, the hypocrisy, and the injustice of these acts and attitudes. He has, after all, spent a lot of time on the other side of the tracks.

We've seen some of his reversals of Bush43 policy. We've seen a new spirit of conciliation and compromise in foreign relations. We've a seen a man who doesn't have to be prompted on what the bottom 95% of the U.S. and the planet need from him.

Yet his recent actions on torture prosecutions and his continuation of certain policies just don't fit with the rest of the picture.

Might we not do well to leave open the possibility that Obama is working behind the scenes on this issue, building up political capital, and biding his time while focusing on economic recovery? Might his resolution be so strong that he wants to be 100% sure that when he finally does strike, he will deal a lethal blow to the torture establishment?

I just can't resolve the massive cognitive dissonance here any other way.

Extragent: Thank you.

As to the question of whether or not Obama really secretly wants to do the right thing, consider this: one's attitude about torture is all of a piece with one's attitude about the continuation and the escalation of these wars on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the continued prosecution of the war/occupation of Iraq.

The drone attacks on Pakistan that are killing innocents are not the actions of someone who is appalled by violence perpetrated upon guiltless parties.

The dissonance that you describe is between the public image that Obama cultivates and his actual attitudes and concrete actions.

I'm afraid what follows is an overly long comment. But it does have the virtue of being on topic and adding, I think, some missing dimensions to the discussion.

I apologize for its length in advance and invite those not disposed to wade through it to skip ahead.

I admire your research, your ardor of expression, and your single-mindedness, Dennis. We no doubt share a desire for the wars and the injustices to end. I have opposed both Iraq wars and the Afghanistan war (or wars, if we include the Soviet one) from day one.

Torture is needless and unforgivable, and has been carried out to sow terror. We agree. The U.S. has set a precedent that can only be offset by the immediate and unconditional cessation of the use of torture.

As much as you have explored other facets of these issues in detail, however, some of your conclusions and assertions stand on shaky ground.

You say that "whether or not Obama really secretly wants to do the right thing" hinges on his "attitude about torture," which is "all of a piece with [his] attitude about ... these wars ...."

Do you really have the kind of access to the Obama Administration that would afford you such certainty about the president's "attitudes"? From what I hear and read, some of the president's closest advisors are hesitant to claim full knowledge of his attitudes.

You say my cognitive dissonance comes from "the public image that Obama cultivates" as it contrasts with "his actual attitudes and concrete actions."

First, shouldn't you be as reluctant as I am to assert that, for example, Obama's move to close Gitmo, to eliminate nuclear weapons, and to enter into talks with Cuba and Iran are mere public-image cultivation? Isn't alleging a lack of bona fides before the fact rather tricky business here?

Second, you refer to his "actual" attitudes, again implying that you are somehow privy to those. Do you, in fact, have access to information about the president's "attitudes" that is beyond conjecture?

My guess is that you are in fact deducing or inferring Obama's attitudes from "concrete actions," primarily because attitudes themselves are unknowable with complete certainty to any but their holder. In fact, any inferences we make about Obama's subjective states of mind can hardly constitute the certainties that you present them as being, can they?

Perhaps your inferences could approach certainty if they were consistently predicting behavior. But after only 100 days, are we really at that point?

Here are some other alternative hypotheses that seem to me to erode the certainty of your assertions:

Is it really impossible, as you maintain, to divorce one's attitude about torture from attitudes about continuing to wage war? Or is it, in fact, entirely possible to wage war in accordance with the Geneva Conventions without torturing prisoners? The U.N. and the World Court think so. It may actually have been done, in fact.

Is it possible that "the drone attacks on Pakistan" are not individually overseen by the president of the United States? Is it possible that that policy is being carried out under (improperly) delegated authority?

Even if the president is ultimately responsible for these acts, might he still be in the dark about them? You may recall that the My Lai massacre of civilians by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, to take but one well-known example, was carried out without the knowledge of the White House or the Secretary of "Defense".

Are you aware that Winston Churchill let Coventry be bombed into oblivion by the Germans during WW II, with his full knowledge, in order not to betray that the British had cracked German signal codes? Is it possible that an analogous event is occurring in Pakistan without your or my knowledge? Is it possible that your certainty about what to do might diminish if you yourself were making that decision?

Is it possible that Obama is being forced into some dark corners by an array of powerful interests at loggerheads with each other, including the Council on Foreign Relations, members of Congress, the World Bank, Wall Street, Russia, China, Israel, Saudi Arabia, et al.? Might he be having to do some very distasteful horse-trading to advance immediate domestic economic and health reform priorities while deferring human rights priorities?

Is it possible that the Taliban are much closer to having seized Pakistani nuclear weapons than either you or I know?

I could generate another hundred or two hypotheses (as no doubt you could do), many of which might even be plausible, and I wouldn't have scratched the surface of what is really going on behind the scenes. This comment is already way, way too long, for which I apologize again.

It has, moreover, been a long, long time since I've advocated giving the benefit of the doubt to a sitting president, Dennis. That's a very troubling act.

But I do shudder to see you weaken the credibility of your own arguments (with whose ends I sympathize) by asserting certainties in instances where the evidence for them is almost exclusively speculative, inferential, or conjectural.

And I suspect, Dennis, that even after only 100 days, a few things may be afoot to which neither you nor (especially) I are privy.

Extragent: Thank you for writing. Debate between folks who are honestly seeking the truth is a fine thing. The questions you raise regard the level of certainty of drawing conclusions here about Obama in two areas, one, the relationship that I assert between his actions on torture and torturers and his foreign policy with respect to the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (as well as Iraq); and two, whether it is possible to look at his statements and actions and deduce his attitudes from that.

Regarding the prosecution of these multiple wars that he inherited to some degree from Bush and has continued and in fact escalated. (I say to some degree because the beginnings of military attacks upon Pakistan that started under Bush were actually advocated for and initiated by Obama as candidate.) -

These wars are each, according to int'l law, war crimes. The supreme war crime, according to the UN Charter, and according to Nuremberg, is launching military attacks on countries that have not first attacked you. These wars are not being carried out according to the Geneva Conventions. There are tons of witnesses and reporters to this effect in all three of these theatres. I can provide some specifics about this if you require. I would in the meantime, refer you to articles by Dahr Jamail (for example, in my book), and his articles at truthout.org, and to articles at worldcantwait.net by various authors.

I do, therefore, stand by my assertion that torture and these wars are all of a piece. This isn't even a stretch of an argument. Obama's not carrying out these wars without knowledge of what he's doing. He personally ordered the drone attacks on Pakistan. A commander in chief sets the overall policy and in some instances makes particular judgments about specifics (some presidents have been very hands on, others not so much). In either instance, the president is responsible. There's no question here that Obama is aware and approving of the policy. He may not like the fact that innocents are being killed here, he has made public statements to this effect, how could he not?, but the policy is being carried out under his leadership.

You are speculating, as you know, when you say that this and that might be the reason this is going on. By comparison, we need not speculate, if we look at what is obviously going on, and match that with his statements on the record from during the campaign through to today. If you want some particulars here, I can also provide that, although I'd prefer to refer you to essays that I've written on this subject at my blog and elsewhere. You can find the links in the links page of my home page here, esp. to my dennisloo.blogspot blog.

As to the second point, whether it's possible to draw reliable conclusions from people's statements and actions and in some way know with some certainty what they really believe:

While this second point isn’t really necessary to prove, since the first point should suffice, I do think it’s worthwhile to discuss this second point and elaborate some upon it. Every individual makes choices everyday – we choose whether to say something about a given topic, and then we choose our words, and tone, and make selections about what aspects to discuss, what to leave out, and how to interpret the aspects we do discuss. We also choose the actions we take. Each of these choices reveals something about us – our attitudes are revealed through our words and our deeds. Max Weber, one of the founders of sociology, called this approach Verstehen – understanding. He meant by this that we can and should look at people’s motives and how they are thinking about or interpreting the world and themselves.

While I certainly don’t claim to know Obama inside and out, I have written a fair amount about Obama’s political philosophy and policy attitudes and in those writings drawn certain conclusions. Yes, you are right, even those people who work with him don’t “know” what he’s going to do or say on any given thing, but I’m not attempting nor do I claim to know him on that particularized a level.

What I said was “The drone attacks on Pakistan that are killing innocents are not the actions of someone who is appalled by violence perpetrated upon guiltless parties.

“The dissonance that you describe is between the public image that Obama cultivates and his actual attitudes and concrete actions.”

I was referring here specifically to his attitudes regarding the prosecution of these wars and their consequences and nature.

If you do a Google search with my name and that of “Obama,” you will find a bunch of stuff. I don’t want to reiterate all of that here. Suffice it to say, that Obama has a clearly thought out take on the world and on foreign policy in particular. This doesn’t mean that we can know his tactical decisions, because even he doesn’t know this ahead of time. But we can know his general philosophy. You might say, but a president doesn’t always reveal everything and so on. And this is true. What I’m talking about is his general outlook on these matters that guides his strategic and tactical decisions. Again, I’ve written more about this elsewhere and I also think about perhaps one of these days writing a more extensive assessment of his philosophy on these matters, but for now let me say this: Obama accepts the validity of the US empire’s dominance over other countries and regions. He accepts the “rightness” of this and the “rightness” of imperialism. He does not believe that non-Americans have the same value as Americans. He wants to “win” these multiple wars. What does that mean? It means that he is carrying forward these wars, which involve, of course, violence, to try to win these wars. The fact that he is willing to engage in talks with various parties merely makes him more of a multilateralist than Bush. It doesn’t mean that he is less willing to use force. As he said many times, I’m not against wars. I’m against dumb wars.

He is very skilled at straddling the fence and does it most of the time on multiple issues such as reproductive rights, religion, torture, rule of law, FISA, impeachment, etc. He tries, and quite skillfully, to appear to be more progressive than his actions actually are.

In conclusion, yes, I do assert that it is possible to confidently say: these are Obama’s attitudes about these subjects – torture, rule of law, imperialist wars. The alternative to this would be to say that one HOPES that he has some other attitudes and that his actions DON’T match his real attitudes. By contrast, I’m arguing here that his actions and his words really do match up if you carefully analyze the entirety of his words (which include the words used by his DOJ in their filings before the court).

Now it is true that LBJ in his memoirs said much after he left the presidency that he didn’t really think that escalating the Vietnam War was going to work and that he did it because the generals kept telling him to do it and he felt that he had no choice. So is it conceivable that Obama is feeling some of that? Sure. But he didn’t have to advocate that we launch military attacks on Pakistan as a candidate. Bush and company came out (this was in August of 07) and said they were shocked at his aggressiveness. Bush said: “He wants to attack Pakistan!” He also could have done a number of other things. But he hasn’t. In the ultimate analysis, what matters is what a president does, not what he might think. We need to look honestly at what Obama is doing.

Thank you for the dispassionate exposition in reply to my earlier comments, Dennis. Couldn't agree more that "debate between folks who are honestly seeking the truth is a fine thing."

Regarding the prosecution of these multiple wars that he inherited to some degree from Bush and has continued and in fact escalated. (I say to some degree because the beginnings of military attacks upon Pakistan that started under Bush were actually advocated for and initiated by Obama as candidate.)

I'm not sure how it would be possible for Candidate Obama to initiate military attacks on Pakistan. It would have been unlikely even had Obama and Bush been close friends and of the same extreme faction of the GOP. That, of course, was hardly the case. What have I missed here?

These wars are each, according to int'l law, war crimes.

Agreed. No need to marshal evidence here.

These wars are not being carried out according to the Geneva Conventions.

Agreed. I did not mean to imply that they were. I intended to illustrate my point that it is possible to wage war and not torture, and it's even possible to wage an illegal war and not torture, which your original comments did not allow.

I do, therefore, stand by my assertion that torture and these wars are all of a piece.

That may be so in this case, but your original comment was broader than that. It implied that if one condition existed, the other condition necessarily ensued, which is simply not so. A polity can wage an illegal war and not conduct torture.

Obama's not carrying out these wars without knowledge of what he's doing.

You seem to be reading things into my comments that weren't there. The question is not whether he's knowingly carrying out the wars; the question is how fully aware he is of all the tactical details, how much authority he may have overdelegated, and also whether incidents will come to his attention later that he should have been aware of earlier.

It is possible (indeed, likely, and essential if we are to indict him for acting counter to U.S. interests) that Obama is aware of the use of drones and their consequences. He is responsible, but that's not the same thing as being aware, is it?

In either instance, the president is responsible.

As you know, Dennis, I stated this very point. Not sure why you're restating it here.

There's no question here that Obama is aware and approving of the policy.

Here you make an assertion without substantiating it. That was my point. If he has said, Yes, our drones repeatedly and intentionally took out civilians not engaged in hostile activities toward us, it would be illuminating to know where that statement is available.

You are speculating, as you know, when you say that this and that might be the reason this is going on.

Of course I was speculating, or rather, in the light of unsubstantiated assertions, counter-speculating. I'm interested in finding out the truth about Obama and Pakistan (if it can be known with a high degree of certainty), and so I'll check out your blog, Dennis.

Often, though, people refer other people to blogs or other sites, and then leave it to them to thread their way to the right post with the right title and the right information. It's a little unrealistic to expect someone to put in 45 minutes looking for and maybe eventually finding 2-3 points of information. If you can link to the specific post(s), that would be much more effective, Dennis. No need to repost the text here, obviously.

As to the second point, whether it's possible to draw reliable conclusions from people's statements and actions and in some way know with some certainty what they really believe: While this second point isn’t really necessary to prove, since the first point should suffice ...

Well, actually it is necessary, Dennis. You're surprisingly dismissive here. It's necessary because it is possible, and commonplace in politics, to make statements and to act in ways that contradict one's beliefs.

Max Weber meant by [das Verstehen] that we can and should look at people’s motives and how they are thinking about or interpreting the world and themselves.

The latter part is obvious. What you miss here is that we cannot "look at people's motives"; we can only look at what they state them to be or at what they are imputed by others (by definition, imperfectly) to be. A "motive" is a consensual semantic abstraction. It cannot be pointed to, picked up, viewed under a lens, etc. Even in a criminal trial, a jury has to be persuaded that motive exists.

If a motive were like a flag lapel pin, it could be pointed to. No persuasion would be necessary then. (FWIW, I am disappointed and circumspect when I see Obama continuing the silly flag lapel pin tradition, as though he would not be recognized or might be thought less patriotic without one.)

I was referring here specifically to his attitudes regarding the prosecution of these wars and their consequences and nature.... But we can know his general philosophy. You might say, but a president doesn’t always reveal everything and so on. And this is true. What I’m talking about is his general outlook on these matters that guides his strategic and tactical decisions.

You are obviously comfortable inferring situation-specific attitudes from "general philosophy" and "general outlook." And yet I'll bet you've been in situations where people have incorrectly induced or deduced your own attitudes based on general statements you've made.

Here we differ in our standards of evidence, Dennis. Here you fail to convince, however much I am in synch with your (apparent) motives and ideals.

for now let me say this: Obama ... does not believe that non-Americans have the same value as Americans.

Here I'd very, very much like to see the evidence for your assertion, Dennis. Obama is one of the few presidents we've had who have actually lived abroad in non-Western cultures. He is no xenophobe.

He understands first-hand in a way that Bush43 was not equipped to that the valuation and commodification of human beings based on nationality is untenable. There are passages in his autobiography that contradict your assertion here, which is a serious one and, if demonstrable, has extensive ramifications. You obviously have definitive sources for making such a sweeping statement. Would you mind sharing them?

He wants to "win" these multiple wars. What does that mean? It means that he is carrying forward these wars, which involve, of course, violence, to try to win these wars.

You're begging the question here, are you not? You define "winning" as trying to "win". In any case, the accepted military wisdom worldwide, as far as i can tell, is that no foreign power has ever been able to win a war in Afghanistan. It is, in fact, far less conquerable and far more culturally diverse than is Iraq.

Obama knows this. He has an economic depression and a potential pandemic to deal with along with everything else, and he needs every cent available to do it. Why would he engage in an expensive, unwinnable war now? Ineptness? Mental illness? Or might there be extenuating factors (cf. below)?

If you're arguing that all wars are wrong or that all violence is wrong, you might do better to state that outright. The statement is a bit muddy as it stands. (I suspect that you will concede that war and violence are necessary and justifiable recourses under certain circumstances. But of course that is only an inference on my part. If that's so, then Obama's reliance on violence is unacceptable to you because of its degree, not its kind. If that's not so and you advocate, say, unconditional pacifism, shouldn't you declare that motive here?)

He is very skilled at straddling the fence and does it most of the time on multiple issues.... He tries, and quite skillfully, to appear to be more progressive than his actions actually are.

Agreed. I, too, wish Obama were truer to values he professed while a community organizer.

But what were you expecting, Dennis? When has this not been true of Democratic candidates appealing to the center and to what passes for a left in the U.S.? Is fence-straddling not a universal political strategy? The French used to say that to be elected to the Assemblée nationale, you had to appear as far to the left as possible while acting as far to the right as acceptable.

Very strong arguments can be made, as you surely know, that anyone wishing to exercise power via elective office in the U.S. will necessarily first have to wend their way through the "two-party system" — which, as Chomsky points out, is really a one-party system that has two wings.

The system is set up so that to attain the presidency, one must drift toward the center and (at least seem to) adopt those values and appease powerful interests that favor stasis. One is at the same time vetted, indebted, suborned, and compromised so that the established power structure believes that it can influence outcomes from behind the scenes.

This is admittedly a sad state of affairs, but hardly a new one. As such, the compromises exacted of Obama are hardly peculiar to him, contrary to what the case you're making implies. Even if, for example, you believe that speed limits should be abolished, you'll still have to demonstrate that you know what they are and how to respect them if you want to get and keep a driver's license.

In conclusion, yes, I do assert that it is possible to confidently say: these are Obama's attitudes about these subjects.... I’m arguing here that his actions and his words really do match up if you carefully analyze the entirety of his words....

And I'm arguing that, given the constraints and realities mentioned above, your approach does not allow for nuance, complexity, and the indirect tacks that must be taken if you manage to win the presidency of the U.S. I'm arguing that if you look closely enough and across a long enough period, you can find statements and other evidence that support unseemly, nefarious beliefs, just as you can show every president to have contradicted himself and to have acted counter to original positions he has taken. That's the nature of the animal and the system.

There are two premises (among others) that underlie your arguments that so far you have not acknowledged, Dennis. First, you seem to believe that the president is the most powerful person in the country. Second, you seem to believe that presidential power is regal and absolute, that a president may do pretty much as he pleases, including implementing campaign promises and acting in the interests of the electorate, if only he would exercise that power.

Neither premise is accurate. What truly powerful person nowadays would want to exercise power in the public eye, having to make tax returns public and have his/her private life examined under a jeweler's loupe? The president's power pales next to the power being exercised just off stage in the wings by a finely oiled, stable but shifting consortium of powers with long-standing arrangements for managing the president and the political system.

The president himself has considerable destructive power at his command, but he operates under a plethora of constraints that it is in his interest not to make known.

Under those circumstances, Obama will attempt to pursue the few personal ideals that he can pursue, which he'll have to purchase by expending political capital that he has built up by selectively pandering to competing powerful interests. A considerable range of his actual "attitudes" will of necessity remain opaque.

So is it conceivable that Obama is feeling some of that? Sure. But he didn't have to advocate that we launch military attacks on Pakistan as a candidate.

Perhaps the situation had deteriorated to the point that Obama thought he did have to advocate that action.

The elephant in the room here, Dennis, is the increasing instability of Pakistan from factionalism and regionalism, which could easily deteriorate to the point that a well-organized insurgency, like the Taliban, could seize power and, with it, nuclear weapons. It could then threaten the whole region, if not the West, to degrees that could lead to conflicts, deaths, and repression that go far beyond the war and illegal cross-border incursions we now see there.

I am, frankly, surprised that you have avoided this central issue, which I mentioned in my previous comment. If there is a cogent counterargument favoring the removal of a countervailing U.S. presence in the region, I would be absolutely delighted if you would make it.

The only thing I favor less than U.S. hegemony is a nuclear-armed Taliban.

He also could have done a number of other things. But he hasn't.

I suspect what you mean here is that so far, in these first 100 days, he hasn't. That's an observation that will be much more persuasive after Obama has been in office for a year or two, will it not?

In the ultimate analysis, what matters is what a president does, not what he might think. We need to look honestly at what Obama is doing.

My point exactly. We'd do best not to infer attitudes or attempt to discern motives or to predict future actions based on our own subjective interpretations. We should look at actions, and their contexts, and posit whose interests are served, in the short and long term.

We should also recognize the limits to presidential power and where the real power lies.

Above all we should recognize that we on the outside simply do not know everything we need to know to make accurate determinations. Our deductions will likely be flawed in some way.

And shouldn't that awareness temper our declarations with a certain humility?

Extragent: I'm afraid that you have misinterpreted quite a number of things that I said and I'm not going to try to untangle that all because it would take a lot of time. The problem here fundamentally is that we are coming from different frames of reference and this then results in different ways of evaluating what is going on.

I'm going to try to hone in on the most important issues here and then leave it at that.

You say: "Above all we should recognize that we on the outside simply do not know everything we need to know to make accurate determinations."

If one were to follow this advice this would mean, as it does in your case and in many other people's cases in evaluating what Obama is doing, that the public is at the mercy of what high officials are doing and must put up with what they are doing because those officials can always say: "trust us, we know what we're doing, we have your best interests in mind." The citizen can always say, as you are saying, that I should trust them because they must have good reasons, secret reasons, why they're doing what they're doing.

“[W]e on the outside do not know everything we need to know to make accurate determinations.” This means that the people cannot judge what our government is doing; we have to leave it to the good will of the governors for our collective fates.

This is related to one of the points of difference that we have here: you want to believe in Obama, you do believe in Obama, and you are willing to conclude at this point that regardless of what he's doing in some areas, such as the wars and letting the torturers off the hook, that he must be doing the right thing.

Since I have been very critical of Obama I have been getting responses of this kind from some people who say that I am showing a lack of "humility" or worse, that I’m a police agent (not your point, but the point of some other very hostile critic of me) because I do not agree that we should take him at his word but insist that he be judged on his actions.

You disagree with me that Obama values Americans’ lives more than non-Americans. Your evidence is the fact that he’s traveled to other countries and the fact that he has said somethings that sound like that. Why then is Obama blocking efforts of detainees who have been unjustly detained and tortured (and in some cases, at least 100 cases, MURDERED in custody) to sue and why is he blocking the proper demands for prosecution of those who have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity? Why has he said, and I note this in a footnote to my posting, that the CIA officials did what they did (i.e., tortured and murdered people) with the best of intentions. What do intentions have to do with it? If these non-Americans’ lives are just as important than Americans, then why say this and why do this?

You say perhaps – and this is a very common refrain among those who are still holding onto the hopes that Obama will do the right thing eventually – this is because he has to wait.

First of all, it’s a war crime to allow war criminals to go unprosecuted. If you know that they are guilty of war crimes, you are obligated as a signatory to international agreements to pursue those guilty of crimes against humanity. There is no higher law. Secondly, if you really intend to go after war criminals, you don’t shore up and build up the opposite case in the meantime, which is what the DOJ is doing.

I’m glad that you say that you agree that the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan are war crimes. But then you say that Obama may be justified in his military attacks on Pakistan to prevent the Taliban from getting a hold of nukes. That is contradictory.

There are two issues here of note. First of all, if it’s a war crime then it’s a war crime. There are no extenuating circumstances. It’s wrong and it needs to be opposed.

Second, the US’s military attacks on Afghanistan and Pakistan have been fostering the development of the Taliban in both countries. If you want to avoid having the Taliban take power, the best policy would be to demand that the US stop its occupation of Afghanistan and its attacks upon both countries. The response in both countries to the US attacks is that even those who despise the Taliban are more alarmed and upset about the US and it’s driving people into the arms of the Taliban. See, for example, this article of mine: http://dennisloo.blogspot.com/2008/09/if-america-bombs-moderate-sensibilities.html

Finally, another place we differ is that you don’t believe that there is such a thing as someone’s worldview and outlook and that one can judge from direct and inferential evidence what that outlook is. Because you don’t think such a thing exists, you think that I am showing a lack of “humility” in making predictions and judgments about Obama on these grounds. (By the way, if I thought that Obama had some kind of regal powers as you assume, then I wouldn’t have cited what I did about LBJ. I’d ask you to take another look at that.)

I can’t convince you that there is coherence to someone’s worldview and that we can determine this. So we’re going to have to disagree, but please don’t say that I’m lacking in humility because I disagree with you about this. Your advice would mean, which brings me back to my first point in this comment, that all of the public should remain “humble” in the face of what our government is doing because it is not possible for us to know what we need to know to make judgments about what our government is doing. That isn’t my idea of a good government or my idea of what a democracy is.

I'm afraid that you have misinterpreted quite a number of things that I said and I'm not going to try to untangle that all because it would take a lot of time.

Ditto for me, Dennis. In your case, though, it's additionally complicated by misquotes or misreadings.

The problem here fundamentally is that we are coming from different frames of reference and this then results in different ways of evaluating what is going on.

I'm not sure it's a problem, actually. But there is a dynamic like that, agreed.

I'm going to try to hone in on the most important issues here and then leave it at that.

(You mean "home in" here, do you not?)

You say: "Above all we should recognize that we on the outside simply do not know everything we need to know to make accurate determinations."

If one were to follow this advice this would mean, as it does in your case and in many other people's cases in evaluating what Obama is doing, that the public is at the mercy of what high officials are doing and must put up with what they are doing because those officials can always say: "trust us, we know what we're doing, we have your best interests in mind." The citizen can always say, as you are saying, that I should trust them because they must have good reasons, secret reasons, why they're doing what they're doing.

What a bunch of nonsense, Dennis. Your crusade obviously keeps you very busy and no doubt involved in many progressive causes, but if you're spread too thinly to think things through adequately, based on what has actually been said, well, sometimes it's better not to respond at all.

We were talking about the first 100 days, which you here so obligingly translate into "forever". Does recognizing that our knowledge about Obama and his cronies is still necessarily incomplete equate to permanent subservience or obeisance?

I'm not asking you to trust anyone, either Obama or me. I am suggesting that you not expect Obama to hit the ground running or to bat 1000 in his first 20 times at bat.

Obama barely has a track record. Some of us are prepared to wait a little more than three months to see what that record looks like when there's adequate evidence from which to draw sound conclusions. Were you in his shoes and at the center of the brand-new Machiavellian fishbowl that's the White House, how long would it take you to get your sea legs?

Instead, you keep wanting to rush into divining his motives by reading tea leaves and basing distance psychology on the results.

you want to believe in Obama, you do believe in Obama, and you are willing to conclude at this point that regardless of what he's doing in some areas, such as the wars and letting the torturers off the hook, that he must be doing the right thing.

A complete (and very convenient, I might add) misstatement of what I've said.

Dennis, do you think the positions you take in your writing here and elsewhere have more, or less, credibility when you engage in making sweeping misrepresentations of positions that you don't agree with?

Do you think people might conclude that all your positions could themselves be founded on hastily conceived and subjectively interpreted premises?

Since I have been very critical of Obama I have been getting responses of this kind from some people who say that I am showing a lack of "humility" or worse, that I’m a police agent (not your point, but the point of some other very hostile critic of me) because I do not agree that we should take him at his word but insist that he be judged on his actions.

No, you're right, that's not my point. Nor was I (I thought) a "very hostile critic". Are people really closing in on you like that, guns blazing, bent on your destruction? You sound pretty tightly wrapped over all this, Dennis. You're the one who crawled out on the limb. Do you think that this kind of victim discourse could eventually erode the cogency of your case even further?

I would guess that what some of your other "very hostile critics" object to (at least in part) is your failure to recognize that Obama has had 100 days as president, plus two years of experience as a Senator. He's still on the steepest part of the learning curve.

If you consider everyone who disagrees with you as "very hostile" (and if I'm representative, that's a huge exaggeration), maybe you need to pull back, take a break, and wait till your perspective returns?

You disagree with me that Obama values Americans’ lives more than non-Americans. Your evidence is the fact that he’s traveled to other countries and the fact that he has said somethings that sound like that.

Yet another misquotation. (It would be more fun to come upon them if there were fewer of them.) No, what I said was that Obama has lived in other countries, which were, moreover, outside the "developed" world.

Can you see how living in developing-world countries for several years continuously might instill a qualitatively different way of seeing things, compared with your notion of "traveling" to them and presumably staying in hotels?

What do intentions have to do with it? If these non-Americans’ lives are just as important than Americans, then why say this and why do this?

Ah, so in fact your unequivocal assertion that Obama values the lives of non-Americans lower than that of Americans was not based on any actual evidence? Nothing more than more tea-leaf reading? Whew. What a relief. And how interesting.

You say perhaps – and this is a very common refrain among those who are still holding onto the hopes that Obama will do the right thing eventually – this is because he has to wait.

It's not as common a refrain as I'd prefer, to be honest. But it's interesting how some of its advocates can look at the evidence and draw conclusions entirely different from yours.

It's more than just waiting. It's political shrewdness. Surely you know of FDR's variant of what Obama may now be doing:

I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt
Comment to a group of reformers

The link below provides a superb illustration specific to Obama. It looks at his seeming kow-towing to Wall Street and bankster interests, as incoherent as that appears to be with his campaign promises and his community-organizing history. It posits that Obama prefers to go for the Achilles heel of a power structure he cannot take on by frontal assaults of the kind you champion:

Obama's Secret Plan

The same principles could be applied to the Afghanistan-Pakistan case we've been discussing: What Obama appears to be doing, and the outcomes he's working toward in the long term, are not necessarily incompatible. Nor are they readily discernible through discourse analysis at this very early stage of the game.

First of all, it’s a war crime to allow war criminals to go unprosecuted. If you know that they are guilty of war crimes, you are obligated as a signatory to international agreements to pursue those guilty of crimes against humanity.

Oh, I agree absolutely.

What I wonder is whether you campaign against all war criminals or just certain war criminals? Lots of them still running free in Bosnia and Serbia. Does your not pursuing them mean that you acquiesce in war crimes? If we follow the accusatory logic you advance here, it does.

And I wonder, too, why you're not campaigning to go after the war criminals who were the bosses of the war criminals you're after, to wit, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al.?

I’m glad that you say that you agree that the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan are war crimes. But then you say that Obama may be justified in his military attacks on Pakistan to prevent the Taliban from getting a hold of nukes. That is contradictory.

Let's see here. On the one hand we have illegal attacks on Pakistan, and on the other, we have the threat of a regional, if not worldwide, nuclear exchange that could kill millions, destroy entire cultures, and lead to chaos, famine, disease, and the rest.

And Dennis Loo can't see which course of action potentially has a greater potential payoff, by several magnitudes, here? Because he can't get around a war crime definition written when the specter of nuclear arms in the hands of religious fundamentalists was extremely improbable, if it was considered at all?

How do you think the people in the region under threat, those who don't enjoy your comfort and remove and who are actually at risk, would vote on this question? Should we all conclude, without asking you, that it's obvious that you value their lives less than your war crimes definition?

First of all, if it’s a war crime then it’s a war crime. There are no extenuating circumstances. It’s wrong and it needs to be opposed.

Ah, surely you realize, Dennis, that when you do this black-and-white, absolute, supreme-authority-of-scripture Calvinist thing that you do, you make my case for me?

Especially when you're so selective about which war criminals you want to go after. If it's "wrong," then they all need to be opposed, don't they? And you need to list all of them as your targets. Or else explain why you're letting some go free.

Second, the US’s military attacks on Afghanistan and Pakistan have been fostering the development of the Taliban in both countries.

Self-evident, but agreed.

If you want to avoid having the Taliban take power, the best policy would be to demand that the US stop its occupation of Afghanistan and its attacks upon both countries.

We kind of have to deal with the situation as it is now, Dennis. U.S. policy under Bush (and Clinton, Bush41, and Reagan) has done irreparable damage. It has taken years to do it; it will take years to undo it. We don't have years, as things stand.

That horse is out of the barn, Dennis. I don't like it anymore than you do. But I'm willing to adapt to that set of circumstances.

Finally, another place we differ is that you don’t believe that there is such a thing as someone’s worldview and outlook .... Because you don’t think such a thing exists....

If the beliefs you're imputing to Obama are as inaccurate as the beliefs you impute to me, your case looks even weaker now than it did a few lines ago.

I can’t convince you that there is coherence to someone’s worldview and that we can determine this. So we’re going to have to disagree

You hardly have to persuade me of that. Coherent worldviews exist and can be determined. You, however, haven't marshalled sufficient evidence to persuade me that your assessment of Obama's worldview demonstrates its coherence in this case, IMHO.

Disagreeing is not a problem for me. And I can still respect your stated intent. Better your set of partially substantiated premises than, say, Donald Rumsfeld's.

but please don’t say that I’m lacking in humility because I disagree with you about this.

You wouldn't need to get offended so often, Dennis, if you slowed down long enough to read what I actually did say.

I didn't say you were lacking in humility because you disagreed with me. I said you were lacking in humility because you think you know things for sure that you don't actually know. You suspect them of being true.

Your advice would mean, which brings me back to my first point in this comment, that all of the public should remain "humble" in the face of what our government is doing because it is not possible for us to know what we need to know to make judgments about what our government is doing. That isn’t my idea of a good government or my idea of what a democracy is.

Again, you completely overlook the time element I've mentioned in each comment to you. (Apparently those comments didn't jibe with your preconceived ideas?) As I've explained to you above and previously, over and over, we should maintain a bit of humility about Obama & Co. that lasts beyond 100 days. More like a year or two, barring some egregious tipping of his hand to confirm the dark, nefarious intent you're finding in the tea leaves.

Then we'll know how committed Obama is and who is really running his show. You don't know that yet, whatever you pretend to have deduced from documents and reading between sound bites, because others, privy to the same evidence, have come to entirely different conclusions.

And as far as anyone's idea of a good government and democracy goes, rushing off to advocate domestic and foreign policy based on speculation, deductions, and hunches doesn't really meet those criteria either.

In the final analysis, you seem to be a bit of a Crusader, Dennis. Crusaderism is exhilarating and soul-cleansing; we've all passed through such phases. But however well-intentioned and however laudable some of your goals are, remember that informing U.S. foreign policy with moralizing Calvinism — in this case, concerning a president with barely four months in office — has never succeeded in doing anything except arousing resistance in allies and enemies alike — unless that be abridging the power of the powerless even more.

Good luck, Dennis.

Extragent:

I'm going to let anyone who wants to take the time to read through both my original posting here and the comments threads between us to let them judge for themselves what was said by both parties.

Your sarcasm is unbecoming. I didn't try to mock you nor did I misquote or misrepresent you. If I did, which, of course, can happen, then it certainly wasn't by design or because I am somehow too full of myself, as you assert, to notice. If I am in error, the record will show.

If you want to give Obama more time than this, fine, that's your decision. Judging what someone is doing isn't a matter of "reading tea leaves" as you so charitably describe my approach. We shall see over the next few years what is true and what is not.

I'm going to let anyone who wants to take the time to read through both my original posting here and the comments threads between us to let them judge for themselves what was said by both parties.

You're going to "let" them? Do you usually do otherwise?

And here I thought your threats on one of your other posts to delete comments you didn't like was an unusual measure.

So then, I should feel lucky?

I had pretty much assumed that that was the point of this and most other OS exchanges: to be available for others to read at their leisure and decide the merit of themselves. That's the way other, analogous sites work.

I have to say that you did not appear as sensitive at first as you've turned out to be. Wish I'd known.

But if people had to choose between (very mild) "sarcasm" and endless exhortations to moral rectitude and attempts to control comment content, my guess is that the sarcasm would win. It, at least, has the virtue of being entertaining now and then.

To reiterate: Good luck, Dennis. (Did you construe this as sarcasm, too?) No need to reciprocate.

Extragent: Wow. You really have no manners at all. Characterizing what I said when I said that I would "let" people make up their minds as somehow nefarious is amazing.

Extragent: "a president with barely four months in office — has never succeeded in doing anything except arousing resistance in allies and enemies alike"

But this man has already sent more troops to expand the war in Afghanistan, made the laws protecting his office for spying the citizens even stronger than the previous infamous president and protected prison torturers of any kind of prosecution... Do you think that he has not succeeded in doing anything?

From my viewpoint Obama's politics looks disastrous.
What do you think?

Extragent also writes: "And here I thought your threats on one of your other posts to delete comments you didn't like was an unusual measure."

If Extragent bothered to follow the history of comments from the person in question, he'd, if he or she were honest, would recognize why I did that.

But then, it has become clear over the course of the comments back and forth between Extragent and myself, that intellectual honesty is not E's strength.

I assumed going into this that E was actually honest. E has, however, misread and distorted what I have said so many times and some many ways that what is clear here is that these misreadings of E don't reflect honest errors, but rather deceit.

Rated for eloquence, linearity, and the ability to stay on topic while under fire.

"We shall see over the next few years what is true and what is not."

I agree, Dennis, that it will take time to truly judge this President. Three months is just not long enough to even lay out the cards, much less evaluate, or even guess, the strategy.

Hannu - thank you.

Mark - thank you.

Blue Roses: I don't believe that it is too early to make judgments about Obama's stance on certain critical questions - e.g., his war policies and his attitudes about prosecuting war criminals. When I said to E that we'll see in a few years, I said it because E scoffed at the idea that one could analyze someone's worldview and so on over the course of Obama's political career. He says 100 days, but I have stated that if one examines Obama's actions and words since he became a US Senator, that his overall outlook comes through very clearly. So, since E's not convinced of this, I said, in effect: "well let's see, shall we?"