Watching Obama Morph Into Dick Cheney

Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars
May 21, 20099

A despairing country elected a president who promised change. Americans arrived from every state to witness in bitter cold Obama’s swearing-in ceremony. The mall was packed in a way that it has never been for any other president.

The people’s good will toward Obama and the expectations they had for him were sufficient for Obama to end the gratuitous wars and enact major reforms. But Obama has deserted the people for the interests. He is relying on his non-threatening demeanor and rhetoric to convince the people that change is underway.

The change that we are witnessing is in Obama, not in policies. Obama is morphing into Dick Cheney.

Obama has not been in office four months and already a book could be written about his broken promises.

Obama said he would close the torture prison, Guantanamo, and abolish the kangaroo courts known as military tribunals. But now he says he is going to reform the tribunals and continue the process, but without confessions obtained with torture. Getting behind Obama’s validation of the Bush/Cheney policy, House Democrats pulled the budget funding that was to be used for closing Guantanamo.

The policy of kidnapping people (usually on the basis of disinformation supplied by their enemies) and whisking them off to Third World prisons to be interrogated is to be continued. Again, Obama has substituted a “reform” for his promise to abolish an illegal policy. Rendition, Obama says, has also been reformed and will no longer involve torture. How would anyone know? Is Obama going to assign a U.S. government agent to watch over the treatment given to disappeared people by Third World thugs? Given the proclivity of American police to brutalize U.S. citizens, nothing can save the victims of rendition from torture.

Obama has defended the Bush/Cheney warrantless wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency and broadened the government’s legal argument that “sovereign immunity” protects government officials from prosecution and civil suits when they violate U.S. law and constitutional protections of citizens. Obama’s Justice Department has taken up the defense of Donald Rumsfeld against a case brought by detainees whose rights Rumsfeld violated.

In a signing statement this month, Obama abandoned his promise to protect whistleblowers who give information of executive branch illegality to Congress.

Obama is making even more expansive claims of executive power than Bush. As Bruce Fein puts it: “In principle, President Obama is maintaining that victims of constitutional wrongdoing by the U.S. government should be denied a remedy in order to prevent the American people and the world at large from learning of the lawlessness perpetrated in the name of national security and exacting political and legal accountability.”

Obama, in other words, is committed to covering up the Bush regime’s crimes and to ensuring that his own regime can continue to operate in the same illegal and unconstitutional ways.

Obama is fighting the release of the latest batch of horrific torture photos that have come to light. Obama claims that release of the photos would anger insurgents and cause them to kill our troops. That, of course, is nonsense. Those resisting occupation of their land by U.S. troops and NATO mercenaries are already dedicated to killing our troops, and they know that Americans torture whomever they capture. Obama is fighting the release of the photos because he knows the barbaric image that the photos present of the U.S. military will undermine the public’s support for the wars that enrich the military/security complex, appease the Israel Lobby, and repay the campaign contributions that elect the U.S. government.

As for bringing the troops home from Iraq, this promise, too, has been reformed. To the consternation of his supporters, Obama is leaving 50,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The others are being sent to Afghanistan and to Pakistan, where on Obama’s watch war has broken out big time with already one million refugees from the indiscriminate bombing of civilians.

Meanwhile, war with Iran remains a possibility, and at Washington’s insistence, NATO is conducting war games on former Soviet territory, thus laying the groundwork for future enrichment of the U.S. military/security complex. The steeply rising U.S. unemployment rate will provide the needed troops for Obama’s expanding wars.

Obama can give a great speech without mangling the language. He can smile and make people believe his rhetoric. The world, or much of it, seems to be content with the soft words that now drape Dick Cheney’s policies in pursuit of executive supremacy and U.S. hegemony.

Obama's Foreign Policy Is Very Much A Continuation Of The Bush Policies

By Michael Barone

Apr 8, 2009

(US News)  Barack Obama's foreign policy is beginning to take shape. Semantically, it's a sharp repudiation of the policies of the George W. Bush administration. In reality, it's something like a continuation of Bush policies. Or, if you want to distinguish between the allegedly confrontation-minded policies of Bush's first term and the more accommodationist policies of his second term--a distinction that I think is exaggerated but has something to it--then it's something like the second Bush second term. With, of course, some differences. 

On Iraq, for example, Obama has agreed to maintain large numbers of troops there for 19 months--longer than he promised during the 2008 campaign--and many for some indefinite time after that. That has gotten a few antiwar protesters marching and must have left many of those Democratic voters who ached to see America defeated in "Bush's war" feeling frustrated--or inclined for the moment to change the subject. On Afghanistan, Obama has ordered 21,000 more American troops to the theater--including 4,000 troops announced last month--and is continuing unmanned aerial vehicle strikes on unfriendly forces in Pakistan. This is consistent with his long insistence that Afghanistan is the "good war" and with his surprising comment during the campaign that he would strike enemies in Pakistan. But his decision also makes Afghanistan Obama's war and imposes on him the political necessity of securing favorable results within what voters consider a reasonable time, which Bush failed to do in Iraq.

And then there are those semantic changes. We are no longer fighting a "war on terror." We are instead conducting "overseas contingency operations" and, as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said, responding to "mancaused disasters." (Napolitano might have used the gender-neutral "human-caused disasters.") We are no longer holding for indefinite periods "enemy combatants." But we will keep holding indefinitely those we catch on the battlefield who do not obey the laws of war (which is the definition of enemy combatants). We are closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay and releasing some of those held there. But the Bush administration released some of those held there, and we will keep holding those deemed dangerous somewhere or other. We haven't quite determined where that is yet. But the town fathers of heavily pro-Obama Alexandria, Va., have let it be known that they don't want any held in their jail for trial in the local federal court.

On some matters, the Obama administration is trying to make substantive as well as semantic changes, some out of an impulse, common in most new administrations, to renounce the darn-fool ideas of the jerks in the previous administration. Vice President Joseph Biden promised to push the "reset button" on Russia, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented the Russian foreign minister with a big, red reset button. Wrong word, the Russian said, in what I'd guess was a bit of disinformation. The president himself in a video saluted the Islamic Republic of Iran--not words Bush used--on the occasion of a (non-Islamic) new year's holiday and has ordered diplomatic approaches to that nation. None of this has evoked even a grunt of emollience from the leaders of those countries. But, as Obama said in his news conference, he didn't expect that, and he believes that in time, persistence will pay off. Well, maybe.

In the meantime, an administration of a party that called for respecting our allies has shown disrespect to some and is not getting much respect from others. The administration, at the behest of U.S. labor leaders, is not pushing the free-trade pact with Colombia, the third-largest nation in Latin America. It has banned Mexican trucks from the United States, in violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. It has waffled on installing the antimissile batteries in Poland and the Czech Republic, which those nations accepted, risking the wrath f Russia. It gave a frosty reception (and some nonplayable-in-the-United Kingdom DVDs) to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and granted a quick Saturday meeting with Brazilian President Lula da Silva. It sent a policy letter to the president of Italy, a head of state who plays no role in policymaking, thus ignoring the pro-American prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

These are rookie mistakes, perhaps, and probably mendable in time. But as Obama embarked on his first presidential tour in Europe, he seemed to face a reception considerably less enthusiastic than he got from the ecstatic crowd in the Tiergarten in Berlin last summer. Economic stimulus packages like America's? Most European leaders are not interested. Military assistance in the "good war" in Afghanistan? Sorry, our troops are occupied elsewhere, and many of those already there must observe rules of engagement considerably more restrictive than those of the NYPD.

So this new administration, like others, is running into reality. Much of the Obama foreign policy seems sensible, and, well, every administration makes some mistakes. But I wonder whether it will turn out to be a political asset. Continued military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan could disillusion left-wing antiwar voters who flocked to the polls in 2008. And to the extent that the Obama term is the second Bush second term, recall that after his confrontationist first term, Bush won re-election, while after his accommodationist second term, his party got clobbered. But prediction in these times is perilous, though not as perilous as the unknown dangers we may face ahead. Good luck, Mr. President.

Fannie, Freddie Bonuses Total About $210 Million

In a compensation program that has drawn angry protests from lawmakers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac expect to pay about $210 million in retention bonuses to 7,600 employees over 18 months, according to a letter from the mortgage companies' regulator.

The maximum retention bonus for any individual executive under the plan will total $1.5 million during the 18 months ending in early 2010, according to the letter to Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, which provides previously undisclosed details about the bonuses.

Not very much news on is bonus payout... not like AIG.  I guess Obama and his adimistration gets to pick and choose.