The Constitutional Crimes of Barack Obama
by DAVE LINDORFF
As
we slog towards another vapid, largely meaningless exercise in pretend
democracy with the selection of a new president and Congress this
November, it is time to make it clear that the current president,
elected four years ago by so many people with such inflated expectations
four years ago (myself included, as I had hoped, vainly it turned out,
that those who elected him would then press him to act in progressive
ways), is not only a betrayer of those hopes, but is a serial violator
of his oath of office. He is, in truth, a war criminal easily the equal
of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and perhaps even of Bush’s regent,
former Vice President Dick Cheney.
Let me count the ways:
*
For starters, in vowing to “preserve, protect and defend the US
Constitution of the United States,” President Obama, upon taking office,
had a sacred obligation to prosecute the people who had gravely wounded
that document prior to his assuming office. It was clear, as I wrote in
my book The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing
President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), that
Bush and Cheney had ordered and condoned and covered up torture of
captives in their so-called “War” on Terror, as well as in the very real
wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, committing grievous war crimes that
are not only violations of international law, but of the US Criminal
Code, given that the US is a leading author and signatory of the Geneva
Accords). They also were war criminals of the first degree for
orchestrating, through lies to both the UN Security Council and the US
Congress and the American people, about the alleged threat and imminence
of any threat by Iraq to the US or its allies. President Obama, under
the UN Charter and under US law, as the president, commander in chief
and top law officer in the nation, was bound to investigate and
prosecute those crimes. Instead, he ordered that there would be no
prosecutions.
* A federal court also ruled that President Bush
had committed a felony in using the National Security Agency and several
complicit telecommunications companies to spy on massive numbers of
Americans with no warrants. Again, instead of prosecuting the president
once he replaced him, President Obama said there would be no
prosecution, and he went on to expand that spying program exponentially,
effectively shredding beyond recognition the Fourth Amendment against
unreasonable searches and seizures, which had been a leading rallying
issue for the revolutionists of 1776.
* President Obama, on his
own initiative, has moved beyond the illegal wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, launching illegal wars against Libya, Yemen and Pakistan,
largely through the use of American military aircraft, cruise missiles
and especially pilotless drones. In addition to being illegal acts of
war against nations that pose no imminent threat to the US, these clear
acts of war have caused vastly disproportionate civilian deaths —
reportedly as many as 40 civilians, including many children, are being
killed by drone strikes inside Pakistan for each of the supposed
targeted “terrorists.” Jist the disproportionality of such “collateral
damage” is a heinous war crime, even leaving aside the illegality of
such strikes being conducted by the US within the border of a sovereign
nation not at war with the US.
* The president and his
surrogates, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have committed
one of the gravest of crimes in the world, a Crime Against Peace under
the UN Charter (which as a signed and Senate-ratified treaty is the law
of the land under our Constitution), by threatening a war of aggression
against the nation of Iran. Under the Charter’s terms, it is the number
one war crime to attack a nation that does not pose an imminent threat
to the attacker, and a nearly equally grievous crime to threaten such a
crime, as the president and his secretary of state have done on multiple
occasions, warning Iran that “all options are on the table” should Iran
not halt its (totally legal) nuclear fuel enrichment program. Beyond
just words, the President as Commander in Chief has moved several fully
armed, Tomahawk Cruise-missile-equipped aircraft battle groups to
positions off the coast of Iran, sent squadrons of new F22 stealth
fighter bombers to airfields directly across the Persian Gulf from Iran,
and positioned troops and missile-equipped submarines in invasion-ready
locations, as well as providing specialized bombs and refueling aerial
tankers to Israel, which itself is preparing for an attack on Iran. Yet
even the most hawkish Israeli and US military and intelligence experts
concede that Iran is years away from having an operational nuclear
weapon even if it were to begin a bomb-development program, which there
is no evidence of at present. Obama has already ordered an ongoing
campaign of terrorist attacks and bombings inside of Iran, which has led
to the deaths of many Iranians, including civilians.
* President
George W. Bush committed an impeachable crime when he had Jose Padilla,
an American citizen born in New York, arrested, held without charge on a
military base in South Carolina a for years and tortured mercilessly to
the point of madness, before he was finally ordered released to a
civilian prison where he faced trial in a civilian court. But President
Obama has moved well beyond that travesty by issuing, in April 2010, and
then acting on an Executive Order that he claims allows him, on his
sole authority, to declare American citizens to be “terrorists” and to
have them killed anywhere in the world. Under this clearly
unconstitutional order, there is no trial, no judicial ruling. Just an
execution order. At least two citizens have been killed in this way,
including the wholly innocent young son of an American-born target,
Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by a Predator drone in Yemen. President Obama
has also, short of killing them, signed an order authorizing the arrest
and secret detention indefinitely of American citizens, again on his own
authority, without trial or legal recourse.
* He has also
continued to claim the right to rendition and to torture captives that
he on his own authority declares to be terrorists.
* President
Obama, as president, is responsible for a program organized out of his
Department of Homeland Security last year, to coordinate and help
finance a nationwide violent crackdown on the Occupy Movement which
swept the country in a wave of popular anger at the crimes of the US
financial industry and the massive corruption of the political process.
Hundreds if not thousands of people who were peacefully exercising their
First Amendment rights to assemble, speak and seek redress were
battered, shot, gassed, pepper-sprayed, beaten, arrested and jailed by
local, state and sometimes federal police urged on by the central
government’s internal security agencies. Participants in these
legitimate protests have been photographed, investigated, spied on,
subjected to the deceits of agents provocateur, and now are in data
bases in federal, state and local computer systems, where they are
classified as national security threats, making a mockery of the claim
that America is still a free, democratic society.
* As a special
category of crime, this repression, orchestrated by the White House
through its Homeland Security (sic) and Justice (sic) Departments,
targeted the press, with clearly identified reporters, even including
those from major corporate news organizations, being subjected to
arrest, having their cameras snatched or destroyed, or at a minimum
being forcibly removed from the scene of repressive police actions
against demonstrators.
* The president, initially lying to the
American public about the goals of the raid, ordered the slaying –not
the capture — of Osama Bin Laden, the alleged mastermind behind the 9-11
attacks on the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon in 2001, thus
continuing the cover-up of the truth about that event which
precipitated the current crisis of American democracy. With Bin Laden
located and easily trapped within his compound in Pakistan, the
president sent a US Navy Seal team in under cloak of night with the
express goal of killing Bin Laden, thereby assuring that he would never
be interrogated or put on the stand where he could potentially have
revealed what really happened on 9-11, who knew about the plans, and how
he was able to pull off such an improbable attack on the most powerful
nation in the history of the world.
* Corruption: There is so
much corruption in this administration that it can hardly be tallied up.
There is clear evidence that officials appointed by the administration
from the banking industry, including Treasury Secretary Timothy
Geithner, presidential economic advisor Lawrence Summers, and “Jobs
Czar” Jeffrey Immelt, are guilty of frauds, crimes and coverups in the
financial crisis that since 2008 have allowed them and their financial
industry patrons and compatriots to steal literally trillions of dollars
from American citizens and the US treasury. Only criminal prosecutions
or a no-holds-barred Congressional investigation could lay out these
crimes, but neither is remotely likely. There is similar corruption, on a
smaller scale in dollars, but perhaps more devastating in its long-term
impact, in the Education Department, where the private charter school
industry is gradually taking over education policy with the connivance
of Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
* President Obama has
violated the Posse Comitatus Act barring the use of federal troops on
American soil, creating a domestic military command and using federal
troops to bar the media and environmental activists from inspecting the
damage from the BP Gulf oil spill, and later helping to try to break a
strike at port facilities at Pacific coast ports by the International
Longshoremen and Warehouse Union.
* There has been an abject
failure by President Obama to protect the United States from the
terrible looming threat of climate change. Although his own Pentagon has
declared that climate change poses far greater threats to US national
security than terrorism, the president has over four years in office not
only done almost nothing to try and combat this threat; he has actively
undermined diplomatic efforts to achieve some kind of international
coordinated action, even punishing those countries, like Bolivia and the
Maldives, that have sought to do something concrete, and has adopted
policies domestically, like approving more offshore oil drilling in the
Arctic Ocean, that only make the crisis worse.
When I was writing
my book about the impeachable crimes of the Bush/Cheney administration,
there was at least a hope that Congress, then in the hands of the
Democratic Party, might actually act and impanel an Impeachment
Committee in the House. In the end, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
nixed that idea and strong-armed Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) into never
seriously investigating that administration’s crimes, much less
impaneling an impeachment committee.
I have no illusions that the
current even more craven and spineless Congress, even with the House in
the hands of Republicans, would seek to impeach this president. Indeed,
many of the crimes listed above involve activities that the Republicans
in Congress themselves actively support and are thus also guilty of,
such as threatening Iran with war, supporting the ongoing theft of the
nation’s wealth by the financial industry, or ignoring the threat of
climate change.
It is nonetheless important, I believe, to
publicly announce this bill of particulars, so that it is clear that we
continue in the United States to be led by a gang of thieves and
sociopaths.
The election of 2008 proved yet again that voting in
the US is simply for show, at least as long as the public continues to
be suckered into accepting the fake limitation of choice to the two
parties, which actually compete only for the right to the patronage and
financial spoils that come with winning. The real politics must be in
our communities and in the street.
Dave Lindorff is a founder of
This Can’t Be Happening and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and
the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. He lives in
Philadelphia.
____________________________________________
Note:
Anyone who votes for either of these corrupt corporate clowns, Obama
or Romney, is wasting their vote and putting this nation at risk. Now,
during this revolutionary crisis, we must reach out to third parties and
put real progressives in office who support peace, constitutional
integrity, restoration of human rights, universal non-profit health
care, effective schools, and jobs with justice. No fear, no compromise,
and no surrender.
in solidarity, Tim Flanagan
“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”
― Emma Goldman
