Obama continues assault on democratic rights

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Obama continues assault on democratic rights
12 October 2009

Actions taken by President Barack Obama over the past month have
confirmed that he is every bit as committed as his predecessor, George
W. Bush, to the expansion of the police powers of the state.

Last week, Obama moved to significantly weaken a “media shield” bill
advancing through Congress that would give new protection to
government whistle-blowers and journalists in cases involving sources
who speak with reporters on condition of anonymity. It marked yet
another volte-face for Obama, who as a senator championed a similar
measure.

Congressional and media allies were taken by surprise. The two leading
establishment newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post,
published editorials criticizing Obama’s position. “The
administration’s opposition to the core of this bill came as a
complete surprise and doesn’t show much concern for compromise,” said
New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer. “This turns the bill’s
near-certain passage into an uphill fight.”

A version of the shield law that has been passed by the House of
Representatives allows judges to weigh the public’s right to know
against considerations of “national security” in instances where the
government takes reporters to court to force them to reveal their
sources. In opposition to this bill, Obama offered his own version,
which would force reporters to reveal their sources whenever the White
House claims national security to be at stake.

Obama’s transparent aim is to intimidate the press and prevent members
of the intelligence and defense apparatus from revealing government
secrets and crimes. Purported threats to national security “was the
constant cry from the Bush administration as the public
learned—through the unauthorized disclosure of confidential
information—of prisoner abuse, secret CIA prisons for terrorist
suspects and warrantless wiretapping,” the New York Times noted.

In another effort by the Obama administration to suppress information
relating to abuses by the CIA, a federal judge ruled September 30 in
favor of the administration’s bid to suppress hundreds of documents
relating to the intelligence agency’s destruction of 92 video tapes of
detainees undergoing torture.

The American Civil Liberties Union had sued under the Freedom of
Information Act for the release of the documents, which also describe
interrogation methods used at the CIA’s “black sites.” Current CIA
Director Leon Panetta had argued in court papers that revealing any
documentation of agency interrogation methods would threaten national
security.

Last month, the Obama administration announced that it would seek to
extend three provisions of the USA Patriot Act set to expire by year’s
end. The provisions allow the government to operate roving wire taps,
search any individual’s business, personal, and even library records
upon presentation of a national security letter, and spy on so-called
“lone wolf” suspects, i.e., foreign nationals who have no known links
to groups designated as terrorist.

It now appears that Congress will extend the provisions.

The latest moves follow a well-established pattern. Since his
inauguration, the candidate of “change” has consistently upheld the
anti-democratic policies of the Bush administration:

• The administration announced its intention to continue the practice
of rendition, whereby alleged terror suspects are seized and spirited
off to third-party countries that practice torture.

• While announcing his intention to shut down the prison camp at
Guantánamo Bay, Obama has opposed the habeas corpus lawsuits of
prisoners there and rejected habeas corpus rights for prisoners at the
infamous US military prison at Bagram in Afghanistan. The
administration has also indicated its intention to carry on the
practice of indefinite detention without trial.

• Obama has opposed any investigation of high-ranking Bush
administration and CIA officials who ordered and oversaw the torture
and killing of detainees. In response to the court-ordered release of
a CIA inspector general’s report that revealed instances of murder,
Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, announced a token investigation
of a few “rogue agents” who overstepped Bush administration torture
guidelines.

• Obama has suppressed the publication of photos depicting the
torture, murder, and rape of prisoners, as well as other evidence of
Bush administration criminality.

• The White House has invoked the state secrets privilege in an
attempt to quash lawsuits by victims of torture and rendition, as well
as those filed in opposition to warrentless wire-tapping of US residents.

When Obama ran for the presidency, he promised a new era of government
openness and said he would curb or reverse the Bush administration’s
most egregious abuses of democratic rights. He won the election in
part because of public opposition to the Bush administration’s
authorization of police-state methods.

However—as with foreign policy, which has seen the continuation of the
Iraq war and expansion of war and military intervention in Afghanistan
and Pakistan, and economic policy, which has continued and expanded
the government bailout of Wall Street and attacks on the jobs, wages
and benefits of workers—Obama has continued his predecessor’s assault
on democratic rights.

In the space of 10 months in office, the Democratic administration has
confirmed that there remains no serious constituency for the defense
of democratic rights in either party or any section of the American
political establishment.

The continuity between the right-wing policies of the Republican Bush
and Democratic Obama administrations demonstrates that militarism and
social reaction are not fundamentally a question of the individual
traits of presidents, but rather are rooted in the class structure and
historical crisis of American capitalism.

Obama, no less than Bush, represents the interests of the American
financial aristocracy. Internationally, it increasingly employs
military aggression in pursuit of its global economic and strategic
aims in an attempt to offset the decline in its world economic
position. At home, it turns to anti-democratic methods to defend an
economic system that promotes staggering levels of inequality and
growing social misery for broad masses of working people.

The ever more pronounced concentration of wealth at the very top of
society and heightening of class tensions are ultimately incompatible
with democratic procedures and methods of rule. The trampling of the
Bill of Rights and habeas corpus is bound up with an awareness in
ruling circles that their policies must give rise to social
opposition. The police-state framework built up under Bush and Obama
is a response by the ruling elite to a threat not from foreign
terrorists, but from its main enemy—the American working class.

Tom Eley and Barry Grey

Copyright © 1998-2009 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/pers-o12.shtml

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