Obama on Afghanistan: Will the Public Tune him Out?
By Fubara David-West.
When President Obama ends his address on a new strategy for the "war" in Afghanistan tonight, one group that will be beaming with pride will be those in the corner of the former Vice President Dick Cheney, who have been opining that the president is handling national security rather poorly.
Vice President Cheney, in particular, should be a credible voice, if he now accuses the president of endangering the lives of American soldiers and the overall mission in Afghanistan. The argument will be that he has wasted too many valuable weeks, making up his mind on whether to accept his general's recommendation or not. General McChrystal reportedly asked for 40,000 troops. The president wants to send 34,000.
The argument that he has wasted time and endangered the troops will be given more credibility, by the fact that the president, after all of that time, holding his well-publicized meetings with his war council, has basically made a decision that he could have made weeks ago.
There is no credible way to dress up the message that President Obama needed all of those high-powered meetings, all of these weeks, just to shave off a few hundred soldiers from the number General McChrystal wanted. That is why the public will be quite justified, if it tunes the president out tonight.
This writer does not think that the difficulties, which the President Obama has put himself into will be overcome, with one of his great speeches. It will also be surprising if both his allies in the Democratic Party and Republicans, who in a few weeks will smell blood in the water, as this president staggers badly with this bad call on Afghanistan, do not recognize the writing on the wall.
The message will become ever more jarring, if members of the Congress start insisting upon a "war tax" to pay for this mission. Such a tax will push back the prospects for any quick recovery from the current recession. By the mid-term elections the unemployment rate might be 15 percent.
The latest word on the president's anticipated speech is that he will present a program to quickly have the troops in there, and ensure that this is not a long drawn-out program. That suggests that the president might also be seeing the writing on wall. If he does not decipher its every political code with some wisdom, his popularity will drop precipitously in a year, and with that much of the influence he might have in the Congress will disappear. A second presidential term might become an unrealistic goal.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Decision on Terrorists: A triumph Over Hysterical Lehgalisms
Decision on Terrorists: A triumph Over Hysterical Legalisms
Saturday, November 14, 2009 12:05 PM
The decision by the Obama administration to try these terrorism suspects in the Federal Court in New York is a great triumph of a fidelity to American values: a movement towards the values of constitutionalism and rights as inalienable quantities, over the hysterical legalisms of the Bush administration and others who easily bought into those.
The Bush administration seems to have moved in the direction it did, in order to skirt the normal processes of law, with a full belief that the horror of the 9/11 attacks, justified whatever lengths the administration went to punish both those who were responsible for the attacks and their accomplices. Thus, people accused of a terrible crime could be detained indefinitely without trial, in violation of the constitution of the United States. They could also be tortured, in violation of international conventions, for what the former Vice President Cheney has called valuable intelligence.
That move betrayed a lack of confidence in the American judicial system. A result of all of that is the decision to try the terrorists in military tribunals for "war crimes." In fact, the terrorist acts were not committed by belligerent forces against civilian targets during a war. Moving in the direction set by the Bush administration, would have left the world with a precedent that encouraged all sorts of governments and regimes around the world, to try foreigners accused of terrible crimes in extra-judicial settings.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
9/11 Trial Poses Unparalleled Legal Obstacles for Both Sides
Twitter
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and BENJAMIN WEISER
Published: November 13, 2009
WASHINGTON — How do you defend one of the most notorious terrorist figures in history?
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Associated Press
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, after his capture in 2003.
The Best Way to Try Terrorists
Is federal court the right place to prosecute the 9/11 defendants? Join the Discussion »
Related
Accused 9/11 Mastermind to Face Civilian Trial in N.Y. (November 14, 2009)
Trial Venue Leaves 9/11 Families Angry or Satisfied (November 14, 2009)
How New York May Tighten Security Vise (November 14, 2009)
Times Topics: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Sept. 11, 2001
One step, legal analysts say, may be to ask for a change of venue.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s lawyers, whoever they are, will no doubt question whether he can get a fair trial from a jury sitting, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. noted, in a Manhattan courthouse “just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood.�
Then will come the inevitable challenges to interrogation methods used on Mr. Mohammed during more than six years in detention. The government has acknowledged waterboarding him 183 times to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks, which he eventually admitted planning.
Finally, if Mr. Mohammed is convicted, defense lawyers will most likely plead for jurors in New York, historically more cautious about capital punishment than much of the rest of country, to spare the sentence of execution and send him to prison for the rest of his life instead.
The Obama administration’s decision to try Mr. Mohammed and four other terrorism suspects in a civilian court provoked sharp debate among politicians and lawyers about whether American courtrooms are the proper place for so-called enemy combatants, whose suspected crimes were hatched overseas and who viewed themselves as participants in a war against the United States. Both sides agreed that defense lawyers and prosecutors would face unique problems in what is likely to be a hugely complex and emotion-laden case.
Whatever the case, if it actually makes its way before a jury, it promises to be a trial like no other in memory, an extraordinary clash involving the morality of torture, due process rights of foreign terrorist operatives, and the ability of civilian courts to handle national security cases.
Mr. Mohammed and his four co-defendants in military custody have admitted their active involvement in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks and have boasted of their success in killing 3,000 people.
Once the Justice Department brings formal terrorism charges against him, Mr. Mohammed could seek to enter a guilty plea, just as he has tried to do in military custody.
But legal analysts were not convinced that he would go that route and said that he might instead seek to martyr himself in the eyes of Muslim extremists through a grand and lengthy trial.
“There’s reason to believe he will try to take advantage of a public platform — more public than Guantánamo afforded him — to publicize his jihadist views,� said David H. Laufman, a Washington lawyer and former federal terrorism prosecutor.
In fact, one question will be how a judge will prevent a trial from turning into a forum on the American war on terrorism, including the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. Terrorism defendants in lesser-known trials have given rambling speeches condemning the government.
The government may also want to avoid having its own interrogation tactics put on trial. To lessen the impact of the coercive measures used against the men, the F.B.I. has used “clean teams� of investigators to collect information independently and do reviews that it says have not been tainted by rough interrogation techniques. Still, any defense lawyer will try to present evidence, including photographs and the testimony of interrogators, to show Mr. Mohammed and his co-defendants were mistreated.
Prosecutors will counter that Mr. Mohammed’s statements in the last few years should be admissible at trial because they were voluntary and came long after the government stopped waterboarding him in 2003.
But Steven Wax, a federal public defender in Oregon who has represented seven Guantánamo defendants, said that “if I’m the defense attorney, I would say ‘this was the product of torture’ � and should be thrown out of court.
If the Justice Department does try to introduce evidence that the defense lawyers argue was coerced by torture, “I think that we’re going to shine a light on something that a lot of people don’t want to look at,� said Denny LeBoeuf, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who led the group’s efforts in Guantánamo capital cases.
Mr. Holder did not comment directly Friday on the torture accusations but said he was “quite confident� that the Justice Department could produce enough evidence, including some not yet revealed publicly, to get convictions. Indeed, legal analysts said the Justice Department appeared to have a strong case based on Mr. Mohammed’s recent statements at Guantánamo as well as e-mail and Internet communications involving the accused plotters.
Mr. Holder said that if the men were convicted, “ultimately they must face the ultimate justice�—meaning the death penalty.
But one challenge in seeking the “ultimate justice� is New York’s jury pool, which is generally perceived by prosecutors and defense lawyers to be more liberal than other places.
For example, a Manhattan federal jury twice deadlocked in 2001, resulting in life sentences for two Qaeda operatives who confessed to helping bomb the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, attacks that killed more than 200 people.
It was in part because of the concern about New York juries that the Justice Department brought its prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui in Alexandria, Va., where jurors were believed to be more likely to vote for the death penalty, according to law enforcement officials. But Mr. Moussaoui also received a life sentence.
Indeed, the last executions in federal cases in Manhattan occurred in the 1950s, most notably the case of the Rosenbergs.
If the Sept. 11 defendants do face death penalty proceedings, their lawyers will almost certainly cite as a mitigating argument against capital punishment their clients’ treatment in detention, including the claims of coercive interrogation and in the case of Mr. Mohammed, the 183 instances of waterboarding.
“I think that’s certainly on everybody’s radar screen,� said David A. Ruhnke, a civilian lawyer who represented one of the five Sept. 11 detainees, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, before the military commissions, and a separate capital defendant in the embassy bombings trial.
“The fact that defendants have already been subjected to cruel and likely illegal punishment,� Mr. Ruhnke said, “becomes a powerful argument against inflicting the ultimate punishment.�
While the defense may consider a motion to move the trial out of New York because it was the epicenter of the attacks, some legal analysts said that might be difficult to do. Such requests have been approved — in the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh’s trial was moved to Denver — but they are rare and prosecutors are likely to argue that the entire country was gravely affected by the Sept. 11 attacks.
Sign in to RecommendNext Article in US (2 of 32) » A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2009, on page A13 of the New York edition.
__._,_.___
Saturday, November 14, 2009 12:05 PM
The decision by the Obama administration to try these terrorism suspects in the Federal Court in New York is a great triumph of a fidelity to American values: a movement towards the values of constitutionalism and rights as inalienable quantities, over the hysterical legalisms of the Bush administration and others who easily bought into those.
The Bush administration seems to have moved in the direction it did, in order to skirt the normal processes of law, with a full belief that the horror of the 9/11 attacks, justified whatever lengths the administration went to punish both those who were responsible for the attacks and their accomplices. Thus, people accused of a terrible crime could be detained indefinitely without trial, in violation of the constitution of the United States. They could also be tortured, in violation of international conventions, for what the former Vice President Cheney has called valuable intelligence.
That move betrayed a lack of confidence in the American judicial system. A result of all of that is the decision to try the terrorists in military tribunals for "war crimes." In fact, the terrorist acts were not committed by belligerent forces against civilian targets during a war. Moving in the direction set by the Bush administration, would have left the world with a precedent that encouraged all sorts of governments and regimes around the world, to try foreigners accused of terrible crimes in extra-judicial settings.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
9/11 Trial Poses Unparalleled Legal Obstacles for Both Sides
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and BENJAMIN WEISER
Published: November 13, 2009
WASHINGTON — How do you defend one of the most notorious terrorist figures in history?
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Associated Press
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, after his capture in 2003.
The Best Way to Try Terrorists
Is federal court the right place to prosecute the 9/11 defendants? Join the Discussion »
Related
Accused 9/11 Mastermind to Face Civilian Trial in N.Y. (November 14, 2009)
Trial Venue Leaves 9/11 Families Angry or Satisfied (November 14, 2009)
How New York May Tighten Security Vise (November 14, 2009)
Times Topics: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Sept. 11, 2001
One step, legal analysts say, may be to ask for a change of venue.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s lawyers, whoever they are, will no doubt question whether he can get a fair trial from a jury sitting, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. noted, in a Manhattan courthouse “just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood.�
Then will come the inevitable challenges to interrogation methods used on Mr. Mohammed during more than six years in detention. The government has acknowledged waterboarding him 183 times to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks, which he eventually admitted planning.
Finally, if Mr. Mohammed is convicted, defense lawyers will most likely plead for jurors in New York, historically more cautious about capital punishment than much of the rest of country, to spare the sentence of execution and send him to prison for the rest of his life instead.
The Obama administration’s decision to try Mr. Mohammed and four other terrorism suspects in a civilian court provoked sharp debate among politicians and lawyers about whether American courtrooms are the proper place for so-called enemy combatants, whose suspected crimes were hatched overseas and who viewed themselves as participants in a war against the United States. Both sides agreed that defense lawyers and prosecutors would face unique problems in what is likely to be a hugely complex and emotion-laden case.
Whatever the case, if it actually makes its way before a jury, it promises to be a trial like no other in memory, an extraordinary clash involving the morality of torture, due process rights of foreign terrorist operatives, and the ability of civilian courts to handle national security cases.
Mr. Mohammed and his four co-defendants in military custody have admitted their active involvement in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks and have boasted of their success in killing 3,000 people.
Once the Justice Department brings formal terrorism charges against him, Mr. Mohammed could seek to enter a guilty plea, just as he has tried to do in military custody.
But legal analysts were not convinced that he would go that route and said that he might instead seek to martyr himself in the eyes of Muslim extremists through a grand and lengthy trial.
“There’s reason to believe he will try to take advantage of a public platform — more public than Guantánamo afforded him — to publicize his jihadist views,� said David H. Laufman, a Washington lawyer and former federal terrorism prosecutor.
In fact, one question will be how a judge will prevent a trial from turning into a forum on the American war on terrorism, including the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. Terrorism defendants in lesser-known trials have given rambling speeches condemning the government.
The government may also want to avoid having its own interrogation tactics put on trial. To lessen the impact of the coercive measures used against the men, the F.B.I. has used “clean teams� of investigators to collect information independently and do reviews that it says have not been tainted by rough interrogation techniques. Still, any defense lawyer will try to present evidence, including photographs and the testimony of interrogators, to show Mr. Mohammed and his co-defendants were mistreated.
Prosecutors will counter that Mr. Mohammed’s statements in the last few years should be admissible at trial because they were voluntary and came long after the government stopped waterboarding him in 2003.
But Steven Wax, a federal public defender in Oregon who has represented seven Guantánamo defendants, said that “if I’m the defense attorney, I would say ‘this was the product of torture’ � and should be thrown out of court.
If the Justice Department does try to introduce evidence that the defense lawyers argue was coerced by torture, “I think that we’re going to shine a light on something that a lot of people don’t want to look at,� said Denny LeBoeuf, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who led the group’s efforts in Guantánamo capital cases.
Mr. Holder did not comment directly Friday on the torture accusations but said he was “quite confident� that the Justice Department could produce enough evidence, including some not yet revealed publicly, to get convictions. Indeed, legal analysts said the Justice Department appeared to have a strong case based on Mr. Mohammed’s recent statements at Guantánamo as well as e-mail and Internet communications involving the accused plotters.
Mr. Holder said that if the men were convicted, “ultimately they must face the ultimate justice�—meaning the death penalty.
But one challenge in seeking the “ultimate justice� is New York’s jury pool, which is generally perceived by prosecutors and defense lawyers to be more liberal than other places.
For example, a Manhattan federal jury twice deadlocked in 2001, resulting in life sentences for two Qaeda operatives who confessed to helping bomb the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, attacks that killed more than 200 people.
It was in part because of the concern about New York juries that the Justice Department brought its prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui in Alexandria, Va., where jurors were believed to be more likely to vote for the death penalty, according to law enforcement officials. But Mr. Moussaoui also received a life sentence.
Indeed, the last executions in federal cases in Manhattan occurred in the 1950s, most notably the case of the Rosenbergs.
If the Sept. 11 defendants do face death penalty proceedings, their lawyers will almost certainly cite as a mitigating argument against capital punishment their clients’ treatment in detention, including the claims of coercive interrogation and in the case of Mr. Mohammed, the 183 instances of waterboarding.
“I think that’s certainly on everybody’s radar screen,� said David A. Ruhnke, a civilian lawyer who represented one of the five Sept. 11 detainees, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, before the military commissions, and a separate capital defendant in the embassy bombings trial.
“The fact that defendants have already been subjected to cruel and likely illegal punishment,� Mr. Ruhnke said, “becomes a powerful argument against inflicting the ultimate punishment.�
While the defense may consider a motion to move the trial out of New York because it was the epicenter of the attacks, some legal analysts said that might be difficult to do. Such requests have been approved — in the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh’s trial was moved to Denver — but they are rare and prosecutors are likely to argue that the entire country was gravely affected by the Sept. 11 attacks.
Sign in to RecommendNext Article in US (2 of 32) » A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2009, on page A13 of the New York edition.
__._,_.___
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Public Option, Health-Care and Opposing Obama
Public Option, Health Care and Opposing Obama
By Fubara David-West
President Obama and the Democrats should handle the ongoing political and legislative battle over health-care reform like battle-tested generals, who know the difference between tactics and strategy, and understand that you do not negotiate away your strategic objective for tactical advantage. Otherwise, they will all deserve to be met with a deluge of political rejection in two years and in four, which should give all of the political advantages the Democrats now have, including controlling the White House and the Congressional chambers, to the Republicans. The
Democrats must act as if they understand the meaning of the last election, which gave them control over the Senate, the House, and the White House. The voters did not vote for bipartisanship, which I think President Obama unwisely introduced into his operational agenda, after the public gave him an overwhelming mandate to lead. The public option and how it is finessed in the pulling and hauling that is the legislative process will be quite decisive in that regard.
If the Democrats give up on the public option, they must pass a piece of legislation that basically keeps its strategic focus in place. They may do so, for instance, by putting in the legislative language, all of the elements of the public option, may be, by shoring up the notion of an insurance exchange, or cooperative. In that respect, the insurance exchange (cooperative) should be set up after the fashion of community credit unions, which anybody could join, by agreeing to a set of bylaws. In order to make the cooperatives viable, they should be allowed to enroll nation-wide.
Furthermore, the Democrats must make sure that such aspects of the new health-insurance infrastructure, as putting an end to the practice of denying health insurance to people with pre-existing conditions, also survive any legislative and political bargains. This issue is going to be particularly important to the future of the Obama presidency, because unless he manages this political battle effectively, and gets the nation to a genuinely new day in health insurance and health-care, he will deserve a Democratic challenger from his Left, in four years.
__._,_.___
By Fubara David-West
President Obama and the Democrats should handle the ongoing political and legislative battle over health-care reform like battle-tested generals, who know the difference between tactics and strategy, and understand that you do not negotiate away your strategic objective for tactical advantage. Otherwise, they will all deserve to be met with a deluge of political rejection in two years and in four, which should give all of the political advantages the Democrats now have, including controlling the White House and the Congressional chambers, to the Republicans. The
Democrats must act as if they understand the meaning of the last election, which gave them control over the Senate, the House, and the White House. The voters did not vote for bipartisanship, which I think President Obama unwisely introduced into his operational agenda, after the public gave him an overwhelming mandate to lead. The public option and how it is finessed in the pulling and hauling that is the legislative process will be quite decisive in that regard.
If the Democrats give up on the public option, they must pass a piece of legislation that basically keeps its strategic focus in place. They may do so, for instance, by putting in the legislative language, all of the elements of the public option, may be, by shoring up the notion of an insurance exchange, or cooperative. In that respect, the insurance exchange (cooperative) should be set up after the fashion of community credit unions, which anybody could join, by agreeing to a set of bylaws. In order to make the cooperatives viable, they should be allowed to enroll nation-wide.
Furthermore, the Democrats must make sure that such aspects of the new health-insurance infrastructure, as putting an end to the practice of denying health insurance to people with pre-existing conditions, also survive any legislative and political bargains. This issue is going to be particularly important to the future of the Obama presidency, because unless he manages this political battle effectively, and gets the nation to a genuinely new day in health insurance and health-care, he will deserve a Democratic challenger from his Left, in four years.
__._,_.___
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Iran and North Korea: Challenges to the US?
During the U.S presidential campaign Democratic candidate, Barack Obama's running mate, Joe Biden opined that soon after innauguration, President Obama would be tested by some foreign political actors. The ongoing crisis surrounding the election in Iran and the growing belligeraency of North Korea might be seen as the crystalization of such a test, but is it?
The answer is that it is not. Both Iran and North Korea are for the most part, moved forward by internal dynamics, not international factors, including the likely reaction of the United States. North Korea sees its basic relevance as an international political factor, as being inextricably tied to its efforts at developing nuclear technology and long-range ballistic missisles. It has no other materials or consumer goods to export, which means that without these kinds of moves, North Korea will actually be understood for what it really is: a Third World country in the same category as a Zimbabwe, whose future is absolutely bleak, unless it changes in ways that makes it a credible player in the international political economy.
Iran has been propped up by its oil wealth and a factitious homogeneity of cultural and political purpose, since the 1970s. What the tumult over the recent election results shows is that the Islamic Republic sits on top of a volcanic political reality, which is fundamentally contradictory to the myth of homogeneity. That should not be surprising, because the religious leaders who run Iran are at best a medieval presence, in a country with a young population, which is media savvy, highly educated, and plugged in to the rest of the world. That is why the religious leaders could not understand the dimensions of the ongoing protests in Iranian cities; why they think that they could use outdated authoritarian tactics to stamp out the protests.
The United States has so far responded deftly to the developing political drama in Iran , while reacting to North Korea in predictable, and unwise ways. Senator McCain is quite wrong in assuming that the United States could do more than it has for the people of Iran, who are protesting in the streets, and on the Internet. Actually, any attempt to become overly engaged on the Iranian protests, could endanger the credibility of the protesters amongst the masses of he Iranian people.
The statements of support for democratic process from the Obama White House are enough, both to reassure the Democratic forces in Iran, and to warn the Iranian government that a broad and violent crackdown on the masses of demonstrators will be roundly condemned and sanctioned by the international community. That awareness might explain why the Iranian establishment has so far not frontally attacked the protesters with violent reprisals.
In the final analysis both the Iranian and the North Korea regimes will be brought down by forces internal to the states, not by the United States.
The answer is that it is not. Both Iran and North Korea are for the most part, moved forward by internal dynamics, not international factors, including the likely reaction of the United States. North Korea sees its basic relevance as an international political factor, as being inextricably tied to its efforts at developing nuclear technology and long-range ballistic missisles. It has no other materials or consumer goods to export, which means that without these kinds of moves, North Korea will actually be understood for what it really is: a Third World country in the same category as a Zimbabwe, whose future is absolutely bleak, unless it changes in ways that makes it a credible player in the international political economy.
Iran has been propped up by its oil wealth and a factitious homogeneity of cultural and political purpose, since the 1970s. What the tumult over the recent election results shows is that the Islamic Republic sits on top of a volcanic political reality, which is fundamentally contradictory to the myth of homogeneity. That should not be surprising, because the religious leaders who run Iran are at best a medieval presence, in a country with a young population, which is media savvy, highly educated, and plugged in to the rest of the world. That is why the religious leaders could not understand the dimensions of the ongoing protests in Iranian cities; why they think that they could use outdated authoritarian tactics to stamp out the protests.
The United States has so far responded deftly to the developing political drama in Iran , while reacting to North Korea in predictable, and unwise ways. Senator McCain is quite wrong in assuming that the United States could do more than it has for the people of Iran, who are protesting in the streets, and on the Internet. Actually, any attempt to become overly engaged on the Iranian protests, could endanger the credibility of the protesters amongst the masses of he Iranian people.
The statements of support for democratic process from the Obama White House are enough, both to reassure the Democratic forces in Iran, and to warn the Iranian government that a broad and violent crackdown on the masses of demonstrators will be roundly condemned and sanctioned by the international community. That awareness might explain why the Iranian establishment has so far not frontally attacked the protesters with violent reprisals.
In the final analysis both the Iranian and the North Korea regimes will be brought down by forces internal to the states, not by the United States.
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