Obamanation II: The Honeymoon Is Over

[matthew]

Noam Chomsky on Obama's Foreign Policy:

"A sensible guess right now would be that he'll probably be like the second Bush Administration."
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/hVVDNIeQ77I" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/hVVDNIeQ77I</a>

"With regard to Iraq he's described, even by people on the left, as having a "principled opposition" to the war. That's simply false. His only critique of the war was that it was what he called a "strategic blunder". You know, that's no more principled than a Nazi general after Stalingrad who said that a two front war was a strategic blunder. In fact you can read things like that in Pravda in the nineteen eighties, where commentators argued that it was a strategic blunder for the Russians to invade Afghanistan. We didn't call that a principled stand. Totally un-principled, in fact. I find it pretty hard to find a principled stand on anything." - Chomsky *

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/O39KKeueQCY" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/O39KKeueQCY</a>

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I take pride in the fact that he touches on something which I wrote about on a political message board back in February 2008:

Obama's speech against the war in 2002 was far from the admirable denunciation it often painted as. It was only slightly more daring than what he says today, which not saying much. He took issue with the neoconservative's specific mission, not imperialism or even war. He made no mention of its ambition or its nature, nor did he even mention its victims. It was the wrong war and a distraction from what he saw as America's foreign policy goals (more on that below). Between that speech, his keynote address, his election in 2004 and his presidential campaign his complaints have taken issue largely with the execution of the war, regularly blaming the victims (the Iraqi people) for the ongoing violence. - me

[matthew]

Published on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 by Inter Press Service
Despite Obama’s Vow, Combat Brigades Will Stay in Iraq

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Despite President Barack Obama's statement at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina Feb. 27 that he had "chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months," a number of Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), which have been the basic U.S. Army combat unit in Iraq for six years, will remain in Iraq after that date under a new non-combat label.

A spokesman for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Lt. Col. Patrick S. Ryder, told IPS Tuesday that "several advisory and assistance brigades" would be part of a U.S. command in Iraq that will be "re-designated" as a "transition force headquarters" after August 2010.

But the "advisory and assistance brigades" to remain in Iraq after that date will in fact be the same as BCTs, except for the addition of a few dozen officers who would carry out the advice and assistance missions, according to military officials involved in the planning process.

Gates has hinted that the withdrawal of combat brigades will be accomplished through an administrative sleight of hand rather than by actually withdrawing all the combat brigade teams. Appearing on Meet the Press Mar. 1, Gates said the "transition force" would have "a very different kind of mission", and that the units remaining in Iraq "will be characterized differently".

"They will be called advisory and assistance brigades," said Gates. "They won't be called combat brigades."

Obama's decision to go along with the military proposal for a "transition force" of 35,000 to 50,000 troops thus represents a complete abandonment of his own original policy of combat troop withdrawal and an acceptance of what the military wanted all along - the continued presence of several combat brigades in Iraq well beyond mid-2010.

National Security Council officials declined to comment on the question of whether combat brigades were actually going to be left in Iraq beyond August 2010 under the policy announced by Obama Feb. 27.

The term that has been used internally within the Army to designate the units that will form a large part of the "transition force" is not "Advisory and Assistance Brigades" but "Brigades Enhanced for Stability Operations" (BESO).

Lt. Col. Gary Tallman, a spokesman for the Joint Staff, confirmed Monday that BESO will be the Army unit deployed to Iraq for the purpose of the transition force. Tallman said the decision-making process now underway involving CENTCOM and the Army is to determine "the exact composition of the BESO".

But the U.S. Army has already been developing the outlines of the BESO for the past few months. The only change to the existing BCT structure that is being planned is the addition of advisory and assistance skills rather than any reduction in its combat power. The BCT is organized around two or three battalions of motorized infantry but also includes all the support elements, including its own artillery support, needed to sustain the full spectrum of military operations.

Those are permanent features of all variants of the BCT, which will not be altered in the new version to be deployed under a "transition force", according to specialists on the BCT.

They say the only issue on which the Army is still engaged in discussions with field commanders is what standard augmentation a BCT will need for its new mission.

Maj. Larry Burns of the Army Combined Arms Center at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, told IPS that Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey directed the Combined Arms Center, which specializes in Army mission and doctrine, to work on giving the BCTs the capability to carry out a training and advisory assistance mission.

The essence of the BESO variant of the BCTs, according to Burns, is that the Military Transition Teams working directly with Iraqi military units will no longer operate independently but will be integrated into the BCTs.

That development would continue a trend already begun in Iraq in which the BCTs have gradually acquired operational control over the previously independent Military Transition Teams, according to Maj. Robert Thornton of the Joint Center for International and Security Force Assistance at Fort Leavenworth.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the commander of Army Training and Doctrine Command, has issued Planning Guidance calling for further refinement of the BESO. After further work on the additional personnel requirements, Casey was briefed on the proposed enhancement of the BCT for the second time in a month at a conference of four-star generals on Feb. 18, according to Burns.

Other names for the new variant that were used in recent months but eventually dropped made it explicitly clear that it is simply a slightly augmented BCT. Those names, according to Burns, included "Brigade Combat Team-Security Force Assistance" and "Brigade Combat Team for Stability Operations".

The plan to deploy several augmented BCTs represents the culmination of the strategy of "relabeling" or "remissioning" of BCTs in Iraq that was developed by U.S. military leaders in the wake of the surge of candidate Barack Obama to near-certain victory in the presidential election last year.

Late last year, Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM chief, and Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, were unhappy with Obama's pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat brigades within 16 months. But military planners quickly hit on the relabeling scheme as a way of avoiding the complete withdrawal of BCTs in an Obama administration.

The New York Times revealed Dec. 4 that Pentagon planners were talking about "relabeling" of U.S. combat units as "training and support" units in a Dec. 4 story, but provided no details. Pentagon planners were projecting that as many as 70,000 U.S. troops would be maintained in Iraq "for a substantial time even beyond 2011".

That report suggested that the strategy envisioned keeping the bulk of the existing BCTs in Iraq as under a new label indicating an advisory and support mission.

Secretary Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen discussed a plan to re-designate U.S. combat troops as support troops at a meeting with Obama in Chicago on Dec. 15, according a report in the Times three days later.

Gates and Mullen reportedly speculated at the meeting on whether Iraqis would permit such "re-labeled" combat forces to remain in Iraqi cities and towns after next June, despite the fact that the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement signed in November 2008 called for all U.S. combat forces to be withdrawn from populated areas by the end of June 2010.

That report suggests that Obama was well aware that giving the Petraeus and Odierno a free hand to determine the composition of a "transition force" of 35,000 to 50,000 troops meant that most combat brigades would remain in Iraq rather than being withdrawn, as he ostensibly promised the U.S. public on Feb. 27.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

[matthew]

Obama Administration quietly expands Bush's legal defense of wiretapping program
John Byrne
Published: Tuesday April 7, 2009

In a stunning defense of President George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, President Barack Obama has broadened the government's legal argument for immunizing his Administration and government agencies from lawsuits surrounding the National Security Agency's eavesdropping efforts.

In fact, a close read of a government filing last Friday reveals that the Obama Administration has gone beyond any previous legal claims put forth by former President Bush.

Responding to a lawsuit filed by a civil liberties group, the Justice Department argued that the government was protected by "sovereign immunity" from lawsuits because of a little-noticed clause in the Patriot Act. The government's legal filing can be read here (PDF).

For the first time, the Obama Administration's brief contends that government agencies cannot be sued for wiretapping American citizens even if there was intentional violation of US law. They maintain that the government can only be sued if the wiretaps involve "willful disclosure" -- a higher legal bar.

"A 'willful violation' in Section 223(c(1) refers to the 'willful disclosure' of intelligence information by government agents, as described in Section 223(a)(3) and (b)(3), and such disclosures by the Government are the only actions that create liability against the United States," Obama Assistant Attorney General Michael Hertz wrote (page 5).

Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing the government over the warrantless wiretapping program, notes that the government has previously argued that the government had "sovereign immunity" against civil action under the FISA statute. But he says that this is the first time that they've invoked changes to the Patriot Act in claiming the US government is immune from claims of illegal spying under any other federal surveillance statute.

"They are arguing this based on changes to the law made by the USA PATRIOT Act, Section 223," Bankston said in an email to Raw Story. "We've never been fans of 223--it made it much harder to sue the U.S. for illegal spying, see an old write-up of mine at: http://w2.eff.org/patriot/sunset/223.php --but no one's ever suggested before that it wholly immunized the U.S. government against suits under all the surveillance statutes."

Salon columnist and constitutional scholar Glenn Greenwald -- who is generally supportive of progressive interpretations of the law -- says the Obama Administration has "invented a brand new claim" of immunity from spying litigation.

"In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad 'state secrets' privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they 'willfully disclose' to the public what they have learned," Greenwald wrote Monday.

He also argues that the Justice Department's response is exclusively a product of the new Administration, noting that three months have elapsed since President Bush left office.

"This brief and this case are exclusively the Obama DOJ's, and the ample time that elapsed -- almost three full months -- makes clear that it was fully considered by Obama officials," Greenwald wrote. "Yet they responded exactly as the Bush DOJ would have. This demonstrates that the Obama DOJ plans to invoke the exact radical doctrines of executive secrecy which Bush used -- not only when the Obama DOJ is taking over a case from the Bush DOJ, but even when they are deciding what response should be made in the first instance."

"Everything for which Bush critics excoriated the Bush DOJ -- using an absurdly broad rendition of 'state secrets' to block entire lawsuits from proceeding even where they allege radical lawbreaking by the President and inventing new claims of absolute legal immunity -- are now things the Obama DOJ has left no doubt it intends to embrace itself," he adds.

Both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union say the "sovereign immunity" claim in the context of the case goes farther than any previous Bush Administration claims of wiretap immunity.

Writing about the changes to the Patriot Act last year, the EFF asserted that revisions to the Act involved troubling new developments for US law.

"Unlike with any other defendant, if you want to sue the federal government for illegal wiretapping you have to first go through an administrative procedure with the agency that did the wiretapping," the Foundation wrote. "That means, essentially, that you have to politely complain to the illegal wiretappers and tip them off to your legal strategy, and then wait for a while as they decide whether to do anything about it before you can sue them in court."

Moreover, they said, "Before PATRIOT, in addition to being able to sue for money damages, you could sue for declaratory relief from a judge. For example, an Internet service provider could ask the court to declare that a particular type of wiretapping that the government wants to do on its network is illegal. One could also sue for an injunction from the court, ordering that any illegal wiretapping stop. PATRIOT section 223 significantly reduced a judge's ability to remedy unlawful surveillance, making it so you can only sue the government for money damages. This means, for example, that no one could sue the government to stop an ongoing illegal wiretap. At best, one could sue for the government to pay damages while the illegal tap continued!"

The Obama Administration has not publicly commented on stories that revealed their filing on Monday.

[Doctor Rock]

A lexicon of disappointment

Naomi Klein doesn't do satire very well, but she gets the point across, even if it's not very funny. 

[Jeff]

Surprise! Nader is not so impressed with Obama.

[matthew]

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/01/the-annotated-obama.html#more

[matthew]

Oh, I did post a Bageant article before.

Anyway, here's an impressive compilation of Barack Obama's appalling record from 2002-2010:

http://www.examiner.com/human-rights-in-national/obama-fact-sheet-a-call-to-consciousness

[matthew]

March 16, 2011
A Call for Resistance
Is Obama Even Worse Than Bush?

By DAVID SWANSON

When I advocated the impeachment of George W. Bush, I did so despite, not because of, all the animosity it fueled among impeachment supporters. I didn't want retribution. I wanted to deter the continuation and repetition of Bush's crimes and abuses. Specifically, and by far most importantly -- and I said this thousands of times -- I wanted to deny all future presidents the powers Bush had grabbed. One-time abuses can be catastrophic, but establishing the power to repeat them can multiply the damage many fold, especially when one of the powers claimed is the power to create new powers.

There's a common tendency to confuse politics with reality television shows or to imagine that politicians are, even more than fictional heroes, your own personal friends. This tendency is only compounded by the partisan framework in which we are instructed to imagine half the politicians as purely evil and the other half as essentially good. So, let's be clear. There's very little question that Barack Obama speaks more eloquently than Bush, and that Obama at times (and more so as a candidate than as a president) expresses far kinder and wiser sentiments than Bush. It seems quite likely to me that had Obama been made president in 2000 he would have done far less damage than Bush by 2008. Obama is probably a fun guy to play basketball with, while Bush might be expected to throw elbows, kick opponents, and pull your shorts down. But I'm interested in something more important than the spectacle of personality here. I think Obama would make a wonderful powerless figurehead, and I dearly wish that were what he was. I think Americans clearly need one.

Three rough ways of looking at a president might be as follows. First, in the unimaginable circumstance in which a president encountered a homeless person on the street, would he invite him to live in the White House, or help him find a home, be nice and give him $1, ignore him, shout at him to get a job, kick him in the guts, or help him into a van and take him off to be tortured? I don't care about that way of looking at presidents. Second, do the policies the president pursues lead to massive numbers of people becoming homeless or worse? Third, do the policies the president pursues empower all future presidents to make unfathomable numbers of people suffer horribly? My contention is that Obama has not yet done as much damage as Bush in the second view but has, in a certain sense, done worse in the third view.

Richard Nixon's White House Counsel John Dean, while Bush was president, predicted that Bush's successor would be one of two things, either the best or the worst president in history. He, or she, would either undo the damage and prosecute the crimes, or protect the criminals and continue the abuses. Obama has protected the criminals, continued many of the abuses, more firmly established the power to commit those abuses, and expanded abusive powers beyond what Bush ever attempted. I'm not trying to quantify and determine whether Obama has grabbed "more" new abusive powers than Bush did. I'm simply pointing out that, as with previous presidents, Obama has retained the powers bequeathed him and added some.

Whether the third way of looking at presidents (the powers they leave their successors) is more important, and how much more important, than the second way (the immediate damage they do to the world) involves speculation. When William McKinley sent troops abroad without congressional approval, people died. But a lot more people died when later presidents did the same thing. Most of the killing and torturing done by the CIA has occurred long after Harry Truman left office. The pattern is that powers, once established, are augmented, not curtailed; and they are used, not neglected. A pattern doesn't predict the future, but it can establish potential dangers.

U.S. political debate, chattering, organizing, activism, and campaigning focuses most heavily on domestic issues -- even in discussions of a federal budget that devotes more than half our money to the military. And it is on domestic issues that the biggest differences can be found between the two parties and their leading members (which is why the debate tends to stay there). Obama appears to have appointed less crazy justices than Bush to the Supreme Court, more sane individuals to the National Labor Relations Board, etc. Obama's healthcare bill may have been disappointing, but at least there was one. However, that's a very charitable view. Presidents controlling the drafting of legislation in accordance with their secret negotiations with corporate cartels is a bad precedent to be entrenching, the health insurance reform bill arguably does more damage than good (including through the requirement to purchase a corporate product), and the bill makes it very difficult for states to put serious healthcare solutions in place as Vermont is attempting to do -- and the impediments were insisted upon by Obama.

The Education Department pushes corporatization, privatization, and testing. The trade agreements are all corporate. Obama has promoted the development of nuclear energy and "clean coal." The damage of Hurricane Katrina has been left in place, but been compounded by the BP oil gusher, during which disaster the White House's priority seems to have been deceiving the public about the extent of the damage. The environment may be more than a domestic issue, but it is also one where disaster looms. As we march forward into worse weather and more frequent "natural" disasters, one might reasonably place ever greater blame on each successive president who declines to make any attempt at survival (much less one who goes to international conferences and sabotages possible global accords, as Obama did in Copenhagen). And this is all before we look at the budget.

President Obama is taking the budget from the Bush years, adding to the military, and cutting or freezing everything else. The budgetary crisis in state governments and in people's homes continues to worsen. The Wall Street and corporate bailouts that Obama helped Bush impose on us have only escalated since Obama moved to the White House. But Obama wants everything non-military that might divert money anywhere other than the richest of the overlords to be frozen, cut, or eliminated. When Bush tried to cut off poor people's heat in the winter, ACORN raised hell and stopped him. When Obama did the same, ACORN had already been eliminated. Obama now wants to eliminate what's left of taxes on corporations.

Obama has not added as much to the military budget as Bush did, but he has added to Bush's largest military budget, enlarging it further each year -- and with activist groups and news reports tending to falsely report that he's cutting it. This leads to more money for wars, less money for people, and less activism protesting these policies at the very moment when much of what remains of the peace movement has chosen to focus on budgetary issues rather than on ending wars. Bush's budgets were worse than they appeared because he used off-the-books supplemental bills to add more money to wars. Obama campaigned against that practice. Since becoming president, Obama has done just as Bush did, establishing off-the-books war spending as a normal practice favored by both parties, and establishing campaign lying as the norm as well.

For a time, Obama had more troops and mercenaries in the field than Bush had ever had. Now he doesn't, as a result of a partial withdrawal from Iraq. But Obama has embraced the myth that a 2007 escalation in Iraq caused a reduction in violence there, and he has applied that myth to Afghanistan with escalations in each of the past two years leading predictably to increased violence. Obama has taken a low-scale war in Afghanistan and dramatically worsened it. He has ignored, covered-up, and passed the buck on endless war crimes. He has radically expanded the use of drones, including into Pakistan. He has sent troops into Pakistan and at one point, according to news reports, into 75 nations, 15 more than Bush. Whether you count small-scale death squads as "wars" or not, the drone bombing of Pakistan certainly looks warlike, and that has happened without even the pretense of congressional authorization, and in the face of United Nations condemnation of illegality. Obama has added more U.S. military bases in more foreign nations, boosted weapons sales to nations we may some day have the opportunity to fight wars against, and continued the privatization of the military and the employment of the most notorious corporations of the Bush era -- helping to establish their immunity.

"Well, well, yeah, but he closed Guantanamo!"

Obama never intended to free prisoners or put them on trial. He always intended to keep people in prison without any due process. He just thought he might do some of it in Illinois instead of Cuba. He's been unable to make that move, but frankly who cares? The question is not how many people we're lawlessly imprisoning in Afghanistan and how many in Virginia. The question is whether we will lawlessly imprison people. Apparently we will. Secret abuses under Bush have become public formal policies under Obama. Whether to lock someone up, and even whether to torture them, has become a matter of policy preference, not of law. Even the power to assassinate anyone, including Americans, has now become -- by Obama's decree -- a matter purely of presidential whim, with no authorization from any other person or court or legislature required.

Obama announced the end of torture, not its prosecution in court. But he continued to claim the privilege to torture if he chose to, as Leon Panetta and David Axelrod made clear. And he openly claimed the power of extraordinary rendition, that is, the power to kidnap people and send them off to be secretly tortured in other countries. We don't know if this has happened. But we wouldn't. We do know that torture has continued in Guantanamo, in Bagram, and in the US-backed Iraqi government. Warrentless spying, likewise, continues and grows, while Obama has assured corporate co-conspirators of immunity.

In fact, Obama has publicly instructed the Justice Department not to prosecute torturers at the CIA, and his Justice Department has worked night and day to protect the architects of countless war crimes, including through the establishing of privileges of secrecy and immunity that Bush never even sought. This Justice Department and our courts are establishing the right of powerful officials to immunity from criminal or civil suits that might expose what they have done while employed by our government. Obama has also pressured a number of European nations not to prosecute the crimes of his predecessor. And much of this has gone almost unremarked. The outrage at crimes committed by Bush becomes vague disinterest upon learning that Obama has badgered Spain not to prosecute those very crimes.

This is the magic, the disastrous magic, of having a president of the other political party pick up the baton. Obama gave a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in which he glorified war. He gave a speech on wars from the Oval Office in which he embraced a whole series of lies about Iraq. He stood in front of the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives and tossed habeas corpus into the trash bin. Can you imagine the raging inferno of outrage had Bush done any of those things? The process of normalizing crimes is not purely one of repetition and expansion. It's also one of fading the crimes into the background, making them part of the national furniture, forgetting collectively that we ever got along without them.

I mentioned the power to create new powers. This is where we risk exponentially worse damage -- to our system of government and to the world -- in the coming years. We don't guarantee it, but we do risk it. Avoiding it would require unprecedented steps of restraint and reversal. Obama came into office advertising himself as the president of sunshine, transparency, and openness. The age of secrecy was at an end! I'm not measuring Obama against the standard of his campaign promises, although it seems fair to do so. I'm measuring Obama against the standard of Bush, and noting that part of how Obama operates is through deceptive propaganda. Obama has refused to release White House visitor logs from the period when he met with health insurance corporations, has maintained the right to hide any others he chooses, but released some and announced this as a breakthrough. Meanwhile, he sends staff to meet with lobbyists just off the White House grounds in order to avoid writing anything in the visitors' logs.

This is Bush-Cheney-level secrecy with the pretense that it isn't. And it's worse. Obama has set records for rejecting Freedom of Information Act requests and for prosecutions of whistle blowers -- not to mention the lawless imprisonment and torture of alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning, a policy Obama has defended by reference to unnamed secret standards set by the military. Just as Obama escalates wars when and how the military publicly tells him to, he takes responsibility for torturing a prisoner on the military's say-so. This rhetoric is not just rhetoric. It threatens civilian rule.

Obama campaigned on the constitutional idea that the legislature makes laws. He denounced Bush's practice of altering laws with signing statements. As president, Obama, for a while, used signing statements just as Bush had, to claim more powers for the president (and every future president), including this power to claim more powers. Then Obama established the practice of assuming that prior signing statements or executive orders or secret legal memos could be used in place of new signing statements. This is even worse and more secretive than Bush's practice of announcing which laws he would violate. Obama announced that he would review Bush's signing statements and decide which ones to keep, but not whether those decisions would be public, and with no explanation of how that process was any more constitutional than Bush's. Obama also began making law, including "law" on lawless imprisonment by executive order. Congressional Republicans like Buck McKeon want that particular law to be even worse, and so have objected to its imperial announcement. But they won't push that balance-of-powers fight very far.

Both parties have now established as flawless heroes people who engage in some of the same abuses. And whoever's next will be hard pressed to even call those abuses abuses, should he or she miraculously want to. The U.S. Supreme Court accepts powers used without opposition by multiple presidents as established presidential powers. Signing-statementing laws is now one of those powers.

So is secret and imperial war-making. John Kerry and John McCain want Libya bombed. John Yoo, not yet prosecuted for having "legalized" aggressive war, agrees with them. Obama, to his great credit, has not yet taken that step. But the debate is over policy choices, not laws. The fact that bombing another country is illegal is no longer considered a fact in Washington, D.C. It's a fringe opinion. And that is what scares me.

So why not impeach Obama? I clamored for the impeachment of Bush. I say Obama is as bad or worse. Why am I such a corrupt hypocrite that I haven't built a movement to impeach Obama? Well, I'll tell you, as I've told people more times than I can count. Obama should be impeached and convicted and removed from office. Obama should be prosecuted for his crimes. So should his subordinates. So should his predecessor, his subordinates, and all corporate co-conspirators. The reason I can't get 20 people into the streets to demand Obama's impeachment (and if I did, they'd want him impeached for being born in Africa to aliens from Planet Socialism) is that nobody in Congress is even pretending to give a damn. We were able to produce a sizeable movement for impeachment when Bush was in office, because a lot of Democrats in Congress, especially in 2005 and 2006, pretended they were on our side. I say "pretended" as a way to indicate not that they didn't agree with us, but that they were not committed to trying very hard.

The abolition of slavery started with one person saying it was wrong and demanding change. We have to do that when it comes to the matter of ending the imperial presidency and establishing a representative republic. I want anyone who engages in the abuses discussed above impeached, prosecuted, voted out of office, and shamed. We have to pursue justice for 4 or 8 years with liberals resenting us and 4 or 8 years with rightwingers resenting us, and so on, back and forth. That means pushing where we spot a little bit of give in the machinery. It means exposing the torture of Bradley Manning and supporting anything Congressman Dennis Kucinich does to expose it and anything any other congress members do if any ever join him. It means demanding a complete end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan. And it means building viable movements of resistance at the state level as Wisconsin is doing. Join us at the White House at noon on March 19th. Get involved here: http://warisacrime.org/content/upcoming-events

David Swanson is the author of "War Is A Lie."