There are many legitimate criticisms voiced about Keith Olbermann,
but he deserves substantial credit for his coverage [Wednesday] night of a
story that is as self-evidently significant as it is under-covered: Barack
Obama's assassination program aimed at American citizens. He not
only led off his show with this story, but devoted the first two
segments to it, and made many of the key observations and asked
virtually all of the right questions. The videos of those two segments,
worth watching, are below.
What's most striking to me about all of this is that -- as I noted
yesterday (and as Olbermann stressed) -- George Bush's decision merely
to eavesdrop on American citizens without oversight, or
to detain without due process Americans such as Jose
Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, provoked years of vehement, vocal and intense
complaints from Democrats and progressives. All of that was disparaged
as Bush claiming the powers of a King, a vicious attack on the
Constitution, a violation of Our Values, the trampling on the Rule of
Law. Yet here you have Barack Obama not merely eavesdropping on or
detaining Americans without oversight, but ordering them killed
with no oversight and no due process of any kind. And the reaction
among leading Democrats and progressives is largely non-existent, which
is why Olbermann's extensive coverage of it is important. Just imagine
what the reaction would have been among progressive editorial pages,
liberal opinion-makers and Democratic politicians if this story had been
about George Bush and Dick Cheney targeting American citizens for
due-process-free and oversight-less CIA assassinations.
Republicans are not going to object to any of this. With
rare exception, they believe in unlimited executive authority and
denial of due process. They see Obama's
adoption of the core Bush/Cheney approach as a vindication of what
they did for eight years (and also see it, not unreasonably, as proof
that progressive complaints about Bush's "shredding of the Constitution"
were not genuine but rather opportunistic, cynical and motivated by
desire for partisan gain). As a result, even the most
Obama-hating right-wing extremists will praise
him and cheer for what he's doing. At the same time, the people
who spent eight years screaming about things like this (when Bush/Cheney
were doing them) are now mostly silent if not finding
ways to justify and defend it (we don't need due process
because the President said this is an American-Hating Terrorist).
As White House servant Richard Wolffe said in the second Olbermann
segment below (and Wolffe's commentary was actually fairly good),
the White House is "very proud" of its presidential assassination
program, which is likely why they decided to leak it to the NYT
and the WP yesterday.
Here again, we see one of the principal and longest-lasting effects
of the Obama presidency: to put a pretty, eloquent, progressive face
on what (until quite recently) was ostensibly considered by a large
segment of the citizenry to be tyrannical right-wing extremism (e.g.,
indefinite detention, military commissions, "state secrets" used to
block judicial review, an endless and always-expanding "War on Terror,"
immunity for war criminals, rampant corporatism -- and now unchecked
presidential assassinations of American citizens), and thus to transform
what were once bitter, partisan controversies into
harmonious, bipartisan consensus:
UPDATE: Here's the segment I did yesterday
on Al Jazeera -- along with The Weekly Standard's
Bill Roggio and GWU Professor of Media and International Affairs Steven
Livingston -- regarding the WikiLeaks/Iraq video:
UPDATE II: The
American Prospect's Adam Serwer has an interesting post
reporting that civil rights groups have issued a joint letter opposing
the closing of Guantanamo if it means -- as the Obama administration has
suggested -- that Guantanamo and its defining injustices will simply be
re-located to U.S. soil. As part of his reporting, Serwer writes this:
[B]road assertions of executive power haven't even been limited
to the last administration. Instead, we've seen the powers of
the president expand, with the Obama administration asserting
the right to assassinate American citizens without any due process or
finding of guilt whatsoever.
From a civil libertarian point of view, we're in a much
worse place than we were during the Bush administration, when
Democrats were willing to oppose Bush's expansive claims of executive
authority. Now we have only muted criticism from Democratic legislators
and hysterical cries from Republicans that Obama isn't going far enough.
As far as I'm concerned, that's the point that cannot be stressed
enough. And it's particularly good to see its being highlighted in a
liberal publication like the Prospect (though Serwer has been
pointing out such things there for quite some time).