I read this article by Glenn Greenwald today and hurried over here to right a diary about how strikingly misleading it was only to find that there were already a couple of diaries flogging Greenwald's story and holding it up a Courageous Exercise in Truth Telling.
For readers who trust Greenwald to observe minimum levels of honesty and objectivity, I can understand why you would be upset by what you read this morning and by what you regularly find in Greenwald's columns. But please understand, Greenwald's postings on the Obama DoJ are hopelessly biased at best and deliberately misleading at worst. Here's a little sample of what you will find in the linked article:
The Bush DOJ treated the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game -- fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process. Put another way, you just close Guantanamo, move it to Afghanistan, and -- presto -- all constitutional obligations disappear.
Back in February, the Obama administration shocked many civil libertarians by filing a brief in federal court that, in two sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this issue -- the Obama DOJ argued, as The New York Times's Charlie Savage put it, "that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team."
Greenwald follows up by quoting at length statements made by Barack Obama regarding the importance to the right of habeus corpus, which statments are followed by this "withering" riposte delivered with classic Greenwaldian "wit":
My, what a ringing and inspiring defense of habeas corpus that was from candidate Barack Obama. So moving and eloquent and passionate. And that George W. Bush sure was an awful tyrant for trying to "create a legal black hole at Guantanamo" -- apparently, all Good People devoted to a restoration of the rule of law and the Constitution know that the place where the U.S. should "create a legal black hole" for abducted detainees is Bagram, not Guantanamo. What a fundamental difference that is.
Greenwald concludes his article with the following exhortation to Brainwashed Obamabots to wake up and smell the hypocrisy before President Obama consigns anyone else to the American Gulag:
So that Barack Obama -- the one trying to convince Democrats to make him their nominee and then their President -- said that abducting people and imprisoning them without charges was (a) un-American; (b) tyrannical; (c) unnecessary to fight Terrorism; (d) a potent means for stoking anti-Americanism and fueling Terrorism; (e) a means of endangering captured American troops, Americans traveling abroad and Americans generally; and (f) a violent betrayal of core, centuries-old Western principles of justice. But today's Barack Obama, safely ensconced in the White House, fights tooth and nail to preserve his power to do exactly that.
I'm not searching for ways to criticize Obama. I wish I could be writing paeans celebrating the restoration of the Constitution and the rule of law. But these actions -- these contradictions between what he said and what he is doing, the embrace of the very powers that caused so much anger towards Bush/Cheney -- are so blatant, so transparent, so extreme, that the only way to avoid noticing them is to purposely shut your eyes as tightly as possible and resolve that you don't want to see it, or that you're so convinced of his intrinsic Goodness that you'll just believe that even when it seems like he's doing bad things, he must really be doing them for the Good. If there was any unanimous progressive consensus over the last eight years, it was that the President does not have the power to kidnap people, ship them far away, and then imprison them indefinitely in a cage without due process. Has that progressive consensus changed as of January 20, 2009? I think we're going to find out.
While Greenwald links to several documents critical of the Obama administration's actions in this case and in other Bagram related matters, what he fails to do is link to any document actually prepared by any department of the Obama administration. Apparently it would have been too much trouble to link to the DoJ's motion for certification of its appeal. I guess he didn't think that the very document he was complaining of merited a link.
Nor did Greenwald bother to mention that the brief that he failed to link to contained the following passage:
Finally, any potential for harm to petitioners in continued detention during appellate proceedings does not outweigh the need for a stay. First, the Government intends to seek expedited appellate review of the jurisdictional ruling in the April 2, 2009 Order. Second, the President has established, by Executive Order, a deliberative process to address questions concerning Executive detention authority and options. See Executive Order 13,493: Review of Detention Policy Options, 74 Fed. Reg. 4901 (Jan. 22, 2009). That Executive Order commands the creation of a Special Interagency Task Force to "conduct a comprehensive review of the
lawful options available to the Federal Government with respect to the apprehension, detention, trial, transfer, release, or other disposition of individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counter-terrorism operations, and to identify such options as are
consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice." Id. ¶ (e). The Task Force is scheduled to provide preliminary reports to the President and a final report by July of this year. Id. In particular, the Task Force will be
reviewing the processes currently in place at Bagram and elsewhere, and will makrecommendations to the President regarding those processes.
In other words these policies are all under review and the final product of the review should be available in approximately three months. To meet the minimum standards of honesty all Greenwald had to do was include a link to the brief and include a throw away caveat sentence along the lines of: "To be sure, the Obama administration claims these policies are under review pursuant Executive Order, but...". But I guess Glenn decided that even a slight nod toward the possibility of the existence of evidence that might mitigate or even justify the actions of the Obama DoJ would destroy the Purity of his Vision.
Naturally, having decided that he would not meet the minimum standards of honesty, Glenn could not be expected to put things in perspective for his readers by providing a larger context and pointing out the fact that "the CIA is decommissioning the secret overseas prisons where top al Qaida suspects were subjected to interrogation methods, including simulated drowning, that Attorney General Eric Holder , allied governments, the Red Cross and numerous other experts consider torture." What possible relevance could that two day old story have to an article about the seamless transition from Bush to Obama with respect to detention policies?
Here's my bottom line: Greenwald and several other lefty civil libertarians are absolutely unwilling to give the Obama administration the slightest benefit of the doubt and desperately want to hold the administration's feet to the fire. That is all well and good. But it has become clear that Greenwald and his ilk are not honest critics of the administration but rather fierce, partisan advocates against the administration who will draw every possible negative inference against the administration and elide any exculpatory evidence.
When you read an article by Greenwald you should not treat it like an honest piece of journalism but rather with the skepticism with which you would read a brief on global warming by a lobbyist for Exxon.