Bill Moyers and Michael Winship write: Facing the truth is hard to do, especially the truth about ourselves. So Americans have been sorely pressed to come to terms with the fact that after 9/11 our government began to torture people, and did so in defiance of domestic and international law. Most of us haven’t come to terms with what that meant, or means today, but we must reckon with torture, the torture done in our name, allegedly for our safety.

It’s no secret such cruelty occurred; it’s just the truth we’d rather not think about. But Memorial Day is a good time to make the effort. Because if we really want to honor the Americans in uniform who gave their lives fighting for their country, we’ll redouble our efforts to make sure we’re worthy of their sacrifice; we’ll renew our commitment to the rule of law, for the rule of law is essential to any civilization worth dying for.

After 9/11, our government turned to torture, seeking information about the terrorists who committed the atrocity and others who might follow after them. Senior officials ordered the torture of men at military bases and detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe, and in other countries – including Libya and Egypt — where abusive regimes were asked to do Washington’s dirty work.

The best known of all the prisons remains Guantanamo on the southeast coast of Cuba. For years, the United States naval base there seemed like an isolated vestige of the Cold War – defying the occasional threat from Fidel Castro to shut it down. But since 9/11, Guantanamo – Gitmo – has been a detention center, an extraterritorial island jail considered outside the jurisdiction of US civilian courts and rules of evidence. Like the notorious Room 101 of George Orwell’s “1984,” the chamber that contains the thing each victim fears the most to make them confess, Guantanamo’s name has become synonymous with torture. Nearly 800 people have been held there. George W. Bush eventually released 500 of them, sometimes after years of confinement and cruelty. Barack Obama has freed 67, but 169 remain, even though the president pledged to close the Guantanamo prison within a year of his inauguration. Now, forty-six are so dangerous, our government says, they will be held indefinitely, without trial.

Yes indeed, on Memorial Day Americans should face the truth about the legacy of the last decade — that in the name of security this country abandoned so many of the principles of the rule of law.

But why talk about torture and ignore presidentially authorized murder?

There is in this commentary no mention of drones and remote warfare, yet when President Obama committed his administration to shun the use of torture he failed to explain the alternative he would put in its place: that in order to avoid the legal quagmire of detaining and interrogating so-called enemy combatants he would implement a de facto take-no-prisoners policy.

This policy might not have been enshrined in documents, speeches, or slogans, but it is clear that from Obama’s perspective, the best way to treat someone suspected of terrorism is simply to kill them. Indeed, Obama is so pleased that he could claim the most popular trophy of all — Osama bin Laden’s corpse — that his finest kill is now central to his re-election campaign.

The Financial Times‘ Anna Fifield has lunch with Cornell West:

West says he lost faith in Obama when the president brought people with close ties to Wall Street and the financial crisis into his administration. West names the president’s former economic adviser Larry Summers, his current Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, and his budget chief, now chief of staff, Jack Lew.

The Obama administration has concentrated the power of both government and the financial sector, West says, in ways that have been good for banks and bad for common people. “I’m a Main Street brother and I’m very critical of all forms of concentrated power, be it in government or be it in the private sector,” he says, seeing little difference between the political parties.

Though conceding that liberals by far prefer Obama to the presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, West describes the president’s neo­liberalism – citing the deregulation of markets, social services cuts and the slashing of wages of government workers – as “morally bankrupt”.

“You’ve got some decent people there who know that the greed is running amok,” West says, referring to Gregory Smith, a former Goldman Sachs executive who wrote a highly critical opinion piece about the bank in the New York Times in March. “My brother Gregory Smith is a decent brother who says, ‘Look, this culture of greed and avarice is getting out of control. I can’t take it, my moral conscience is violated.’ We’re going to see many more people like Gregory Smith, even inside of the big banks, saying we’ve gone much too far in terms of spiritual emptiness and moral constipation.”

He believes that last year’s Occupy movement came up with a language for discussing these issues – one that will endure regardless of whether or not people are camping in public squares. “We have to come up with a democratic way of talking about it because it’s not a matter of hating oligarchs or taking revenge on the moneyed class, it’s a matter of hating injustice. That’s the [Martin Luther] King legacy.”

Yves Smith writes: Barack Obama swept into office on a tide of giddy enthusiasm. His “Hope and Change” was a pledge to reverse Bush era policies, including socialism for the rich, adventurism in the Middle East, and attacks on civil liberties. He announced his intention to serve as a transformational leader, invoking Abraham Lincoln, FDR and Ronald Reagan as role models. Despite the frigid temperatures, people poured into Washington, DC to hear his inauguration speech, wanting to be part of a remarkable passage.

It wasn’t simply that Obama was the first black president, but also that the economic devastation of the financial crisis opened up a historic opportunity to remake the social contract, to punish the reckless and greedy, no matter how lofty, and to build new foundations and safeguards for ordinary citizens. Obama, with his youthful vigor, his technocratic command of policy details, his “no drama” steadiness, his mastery of oratory, seemed uniquely suited to this time of need. His personal history of repeatedly breaking new ground fed optimism that he could do so for the nation as a whole.

Those times of heady promise are now a cruel memory. Again and again, Obama has shown his true colors. It isn’t simply that Obama lied. Politicians lie. But there are norms for political lying. The depth and dependability of Obama’s misrepresentations constitute a difference in kind.

His pattern of grand promises producing at-best-in-name only and at worst outright bait and switch was well established by his 2008 campaign. Some close observers pointed out his past legerdemain, for instance, his misleading account of his years in New York, his record of fronting for finance and real estate interests in Chicago, his promise to bring a state-wide health care program to Illinois, which in the end was walked back to a mere study. And there were more decisive tells in 2008: the high level of Wall Street funding for his campaign, the inclusion of neoliberal “Chicago boys” in his economics team, his reversal on FISA after promising to filibuster it, which gave retroactive immunity to telecoms for aiding and abetting illegal wiretapping, and his whipping for TARP.

Obama didn’t make compromises necessary to lead effectively. He entered office with majorities in both houses and a country eager for a new direction. He has repudiated or retraded every pledge he made. He promised transformational leadership, and instead emulated Wall Street, devising complex programs that to sell average Americans short and reap his funders handsome rewards in the process. Rather than elevate his fellow citizens, Obama’s transactional focus and neoliberal philosophy have kicked the struggling middle class down the road greased by the right. [Continue reading…]

Conor Friedersdorf points out that, contrary to the reporting of the New York Times, President Obama does not straddle “the precarious line between hawk and dove” — he’s a hawk.

• Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, adding tens of thousands of troops at a cost of many billions of dollars.
• He committed American forces to a war in Libya, though he had neither approval from Congress nor reason to think events there threatened national security.
• He ordered 250 drone strikes that killed at least 1,400 people in Pakistan.
• He ordered the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.
• He ordered the killings of multiple American citizens living abroad.
• He expanded the definition of the War on Terrorism and asserted his worldwide power to indefinitely detain anyone he deems a terrorist.
• He expanded drone attacks into Somalia.
• He ordered a raid on pirates in Somalia.
• He deployed military squads to fight the drug war throughout Latin America.
• He expanded the drone war in Yemen, going so far as to give the CIA permission to kill people even when it doesn’t know their identities so long as they’re suspected of ties to terrorism.
• He’s implied that he’d go to war with Iran rather than permitting them to get nuclear weapons.

Since President Obama made it known his views on same-sex marriage have “evolved” and he now supports it, not surprisingly he’s won praise. But the idea that this was a courageous act is questionable for many reasons, not the least of which, that on this particular issue Obama would become a risk-taker when on so many other issues he displays caution.

“Doctor Science” argues persuasively that Obama’s “evolution” in this case may have more to do with winning financial support from Wall Street and baiting Republicans to turn their attention away from the economy.

Obama is not in front of the pack on this issue — his statement today could be seen as following the populace, not leading.

It will definitely fire up “the Democratic base”, especially younger people, who are already strongly in favor of SSM. The Obama campaign really needs the younger generation to do a lot of the campaign drudgework, and to vote and get their friends to vote.

But it also, IMHO, addresses a particular issue for the Obama campaign: needing to keep deep-pocket Wall Street donors who backed him in 2008. These guys are Mitt Romney’s natural constituency if the campaign focuses on economic issues, and they aren’t feeling very happy with Obama right now.

But a lot of them also strongly support marriage equality. Same-sex marriage was legalized in New York because Republican hedge fund types wanted it — and you have to figure that Democratic financiers are even more pro-SSM.

For instance, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, vocally supports SSM. So far, Goldman Sachs employees have been supporting Romney more than Obama — though they were a rich mine for Obama donations in 2008. At the very least, Obama’s announcement is going to make a lot of people at Goldman Sachs think twice about whether they want to continue backing Romney. The Obama campaign received $1 million in spontaneous contributions — and the bundlers and Super-PACs haven’t begun to work this angle yet.

There’s also the fact that the primaries have proved that Republicans can no more resist going after “social” issues than a bull can resist a red flag. It doesn’t matter that the economy is where they’re strongest relative to Obama, and that their virulent attacks on LGBT rights, women’s rights, and not-conservative-Christian religious rights put off moderate voters. They can’t help it, they’ll charge that flag every time.

Vanity Fair shares some of the revelations from Barack Obama’s youthful love life. Nothing here that would interest National Inquirer, but this caught my attention from the recollections of Alex McNear, a young woman from Occidental College, California, who had enchanted the 20-year-old Obama:

Obama was obsessed with the concept of choice, she said. Did he have real choices in his life? Did he have free will? How much were his choices circumscribed by his background, his childhood, his socio-economic situation, the color of his skin, the expectations that others had of him? How did choice influence his pres­ent and future? Later, referring back to that discussion, he told Alex in a letter that he had used the word “choice” “as a convenient shorthand for the way my past resolves itself. Not just my past, but the past of my ancestors, the planet, the universe.” His obsession with the concept of choice, he said in a later interview at the White House, “was a deliberate effort on my part to press the pause button, essentially, and try to orient myself and say, ‘Okay, which way, where am I going?’ ”

Prior to his election, a philosophically inclined president sounded, at least to some of us, like a good idea — especially when contrasted against a president who expressed such disdain for the intellect. But in place of The Decider, we ended up with a president who perpetually maneuvers in accordance with the dictates of circumstance.

Free will might be an illusion, but if so, it’s an illusion I would prefer a president to believe in.

Conor Friedersdorf writes: Four years ago, the last time the Democrats adopted a platform, their presidential candidate championed civil liberties, insisted that closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay would make us safer from terrorists, and righteously denounced the expansive Bush-Cheney understanding of executive power. Said the official 2008 platform contemporaneously adopted by Democratic delegates (links added):

We will restore our constitutional traditions, and recover our nation’s founding commitment to liberty under law. We support constitutional protections and judicial oversight on any surveillance program involving Americans. We will review the current Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. We reject illegal wiretapping of American citizens, wherever they live. We reject the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime … We reject sweeping claims of “inherent” presidential power. We will revisit the Patriot Act and overturn unconstitutional executive decisions issued during the past eight years. We will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine duly enacted law. And we will ensure that law-abiding Americans of any origin, including Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans, do not become the scapegoats of national security fears.

Another section is also pertinent:

We will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools to hunt down and take out terrorists without undermining our Constitution, our freedom, and our privacy … we will lead in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. We will not ship away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, or detain without trial or charge prisoners who can and should be brought to justice for their crimes, or maintain a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law. We will respect the time-honored principle of habeas corpus, the seven century-old right of individuals to challenge the terms of their own detention that was recently reaffirmed by our Supreme Court.

We will close the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, the location of so many of the worst constitutional abuses in recent years. With these necessary changes, the attention of the world will be directed where it belongs: on what terrorists have done to us, not on how we treat suspects.

If you click through to the links I’ve embedded above you’ll quickly get a sense of how thoroughly President Obama has betrayed the words and spirit of his candidacy and his party’s platform.

Jonathan Turley writes: On Monday, March 5, Northwestern University School of Law was the location of an extraordinary scene for a free nation. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder presented President Barack Obama’s claim that he has the authority to kill any U.S. citizen he considers a threat. It served as a retroactive justification for the slaying of American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki last September by a drone strike in northeastern Yemen, as well as the targeted killings of at least two other Americans during Obama’s term.

What’s even more extraordinary is that this claim, which would be viewed by the Framers of the U.S. Constitution as the very definition of authoritarian power, was met not with outcry but muted applause. Where due process once resided, Holder offered only an assurance that the president would kill citizens with care. While that certainly relieved any concern that Obama, or his successor, would hunt citizens for sport, Holder offered no assurances on how this power would be used in the future beyond the now all-too-familiar “trust us” approach to civil liberties of this administration.

In his speech, Holder was clear and unambiguous on only one point: “The president may use force abroad against a senior operational leader of a foreign terrorist organization with which the United States is at war — even if that individual happens to be a U.S. citizen.” The use of the word “abroad” is interesting because senior administration officials have previously asserted that the president may kill an American anywhere and anytime, including within the United States. Holder’s speech does not materially limit that claimed authority, but stressed that “our legal authority is not limited to the battlefields in Afghanistan.” He might as well have stopped at “limited” because the administration has refused to accept any limitations on this claimed inherent power.

Holder became highly cryptic in his assurance that caution would be used in exercising this power — suggesting some limitation that is both indefinable and unreviewable. He promised that the administration would kill Americans only with “the consent of the nation involved or after a determination that the nation is unable or unwilling to deal effectively with a threat to the United States.” He did not explain how the nation in question would consent or how a determination would be made that it is “unable or unwilling to deal” with the threat. [Continue reading…]

David Carr writes: Last Wednesday in the White House briefing room, the administration’s press secretary, Jay Carney, opened on a somber note, citing the deaths of Marie Colvin and Anthony Shadid, two reporters who had died “in order to bring truth” while reporting in Syria.

Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News, pointed out that the administration had lauded brave reporting in distant lands more than once and then asked, “How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistle-blowers to court?”

He then suggested that the administration seemed to believe that “the truth should come out abroad; it shouldn’t come out here.”

Fair point. The Obama administration, which promised during its transition to power that it would enhance “whistle-blower laws to protect federal workers,” has been more prone than any administration in history in trying to silence and prosecute federal workers.

The Espionage Act, enacted back in 1917 to punish those who gave aid to our enemies, was used three times in all the prior administrations to bring cases against government officials accused of providing classified information to the media. It has been used six times since the current president took office.

Setting aside the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who is accused of stealing thousands of secret documents, the majority of the recent prosecutions seem to have everything to do with administrative secrecy and very little to do with national security.

In case after case, the Espionage Act has been deployed as a kind of ad hoc Official Secrets Act, which is not a law that has ever found traction in America, a place where the people’s right to know is viewed as superseding the government’s right to hide its business.

In the most recent case, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who became a Democratic staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged under the Espionage Act with leaking information to journalists about other C.I.A. officers, some of whom were involved in the agency’s interrogation program, which included waterboarding.

For those of you keeping score, none of the individuals who engaged in or authorized the waterboarding of terror suspects have been prosecuted, but Mr. Kiriakou is in federal cross hairs, accused of talking to journalists and news organizations, including The New York Times.

Discussion featuring Eyal Press’ new book, Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding The Voice Of Conscience In Dark Times.