All Posts Tagged With: "Obama administration"

From Time’s Mark Thompson:

The incoming Obama Administration says it wants to shut down the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. But even if Guantánamo closes, the controversial U.S. practice of jailing suspected al-Qaeda militants and other terrorists indefinitely won’t end, because such detentions continue on an even greater scale at the U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, 40 miles north of Kabul. Approximately 250 detainees are currently being held at Guantánamo; an estimated 670 are locked up under similar conditions at Bagram.

The original U.S. prison, established early in 2002, was the main screening site for those captured by Americans and their allies during initial fighting in Afghanistan. At least two detainees died there in December 2002 after being beaten by U.S. troops. While conditions are said to have improved since then, hundreds of prisoners remain in wire mesh pens edged with coils of razor wire, and earlier this year U.S. military officials revealed that a Bagram interrogator had been convicted of assaulting an Afghan detainee who later died. Just last month, the military issued a statement saying it would investigate whether a pair of U.S. soldiers had abused Afghan detainees.

[International Justice Network executive director Tina] Foster and a consortium of other human rights lawyers will be in Federal District Court in Washington on Jan. 7 to demand that those being held at Bagram get the same habeas corpus rights — the right to know the charges against them, and to be freed if a court deems those charges insufficient — that the Supreme Court gave Guantánamo detainees last summer. Their case centers on Redha al-Najar, a 43-year-old Tunisian national who has been held without charge in U.S. military custody since May 2002. Al-Najar was arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, where he had been living with his wife and child. According to his attorneys, al-Najar spent the next two years being shifted among various CIA “black sites” before ending up at Bagram. They argue he has been held for more than six years, virtually incommunicado and without charges or access to a fair means to challenge his imprisonment. The suit asks the court to order al-Najar’s release.

In announcing his nominees for his national security team, including Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State and Robert Gates for Secretary of Defense, Obama made this declaration:

And so, in this uncertain world, the time has come for a new beginning — a new dawn of American leadership to overcome the challenges of the 21st century, and to seize the opportunities embedded in those challenges. We will strengthen our capacity to defeat our enemies and support our friends. We will renew old alliances and forge new and enduring partnerships. We will show the world once more that America is relentless in defense of our people, steady in advancing our interests, and committed to the ideals that shine as a beacon to the world: democracy and justice; opportunity and unyielding hope - because American values are America’s greatest export to the world.

To succeed, we must pursue a new strategy that skillfully uses, balances, and integrates all elements of American power: our military and diplomacy; our intelligence and law enforcement; our economy and the power of our moral example. The team that we have assembled here today is uniquely suited to do just that.

Absolutely!

President-elect Barack Obama thinks bank executives should forgo their bonuses this year to show they are taking responsibility amid difficult economic times.

… Obama said bank executives should make sacrifices because so many other people are struggling as the U.S. economy slips further. Some financial firms, including Goldman Sachs, the Swiss bank UBS and the British bank Barclays, have said they are not handing out annual bonuses to top executives, and Obama encouraged more to follow.

“I think that if you are already worth tens of millions of dollars, and you are having to lay off workers,” Obama said, “the least you can do is say, ‘I’m willing to make some sacrifice as well, because I recognize that there are people who are a lot less well off, who are going through some pretty tough times.’”

Obama’s definitely on the right track.

This is welcome news:

Sources tell ABC News that Defense Secretary Robert Gates will be staying on in the top Pentagon job, for at least the first year of the Obama administration. “It is a done deal,” a source close to the process tells ABC News.

Gates, while a registered independent, has served numerous Republican administrations. President George W. Bush nominated Gates to replace the Donald Rumsfeld after the 2006 midterm elections, when the war in Iraq was spiraling out of control.

Politico’s Mike Allen explains why the Gates pick is a smart one:

The selection of a member of President Bush’s inner circle allows Obama to deliver on his promise of a bipartisan Cabinet, even though Gates has an intelligence background and has not been an active Republican.

The appointment has substantial advantages for Obama, who now can keep is pledge of drawing down troops in Iraq with the aid of an architect of the Bush administration’s successful troop “surge” strategy.

The presence of Gates also will help finesse Obama’s relationship with Gen. David Petraeus, the former U.S. commander in Iraq and now the head of the U.S. Central Command, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan.

The GOP is clammering about Obama’s cabinet selections:

“Leader Boehner obviously hopes and expects that the president-elect will keep his promise to include Republicans in his Cabinet,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner. “Obama has pledged to govern in a bipartisan way, and we have pledged to work with him when he does.”

“Choosing one or two token Republicans in lesser Cabinet positions won’t pass the smell test,” said Dan Bartlett, who served as communications director and counselor to the current President Bush. “Keeping Secretary Gates would be a huge signal and important governing move.”

I wonder. Could either Boehner or Bartlett point to how their party’s most recent White House administrations have done that? I had to go all the way back to Nixon to find a Democrat in a Republican president’s administration (unless you can point to a more recent example). President Bill Clinton appointed Republican William Cohen to be his defense secretary during his second term. What Democrats did George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan appoint to their Cabinets or White House staffs?

Obama has signaled that he may very well appoint Bush’s own defense secretary to continue in that role. He has also considered Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska) for a role in his administration as well as former NATO commander Jim Jones for national security advisor.

Even so, grumbling within the right-wing blogosphere is that Obama’s choices aren’t Republican enough. Again I ask, how many Democrats did Dubya have in his Cabinet and White House staff? Why didn’t Boehner — or even the president’s own communications director Dan Bartlett — hold Bush to the same standard?

“43″ certainly was elected by much narrower margins than “44″ — in fact, he didn’t even have the popular vote in 2000. You would think if anyone should govern in a bipartisan way, it would be someone who was elected by the slimmest of margins among a bitterly divided electorate. But that didn’t happen, did it?

In yesterday’s Politico story about the scrutiny of Obama’s picks for his administration, one sentence in particularly really jumped out at me:

“Gates is not a sharply partisan figure.”

Okay… is that a bad thing? Is that why he’s not Republican enough to pass “the smell test”? Because he’s not a “sharply partisan” figure, does that disqualify him as a Republican or mean that Obama isn’t trying to bridge the partisan divide? Do we really want a sharply partisan figure? I thought one of the things about this election is that the American people wanted to move beyond the gridlock of the bitterly divided Washington and transcend such “sharply partisan” politics.

So far, in my opinion, Obama has done a better job than his predecessors of assembling pragmatic, centrist and arguably bipartisan team to help govern this nation through very difficult times. Based on some of the complaints in the left-wing blogosphere, Obama certainly hasn’t picked aggressive progressives that would satisfy the more left-wing branches of the Democratic Party — despite what fear-mongering you may hear from the radical right-wing bloggers. His economic team, which he is set to announce later this morning, is being pretty warmly greeted by Wall Street, which tells me that Obama can’t be too bad for business like the conservative pundits would have you believe.

This election, I believe the significant majority of the electorate made their choice clear, not only electing the candidate they felt best represented change, but also repudiating the governance of the dominant party for the last eight years by electing wider majorities in both the House and the Senate for the other party. Why, then, would we let members of that failed party’s leadership judge who’s best to serve in this new administration? We shouldn’t and Obama won’t.

I believe Obama is firmly committed to governing pragmatically, which means an administration filled with opposing viewpoints — whether it’s Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, pro-business or pro-worker, hawk or dove. There will be many voices led by one leader. It certainly will be a nice change.

President-elect Barack Obama today announced a bold initiative to save or create 2.5 million jobs in the next two years.

In his weekly address, President-elect Obama announced that he has directed his economic team to formulate an Economic Recovery Plan — a two-year, nationwide initiative that will strengthen our economy and put millions of Americans to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing our schools, and securing our clean energy future.

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For more information, visit change.gov.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill yesterday that he believes “the new administration is off to a good start.”

“They’re saying, in my view, all the right things … that they want to govern in the middle and tackle big things.”

McConnell added a cautionary note: “It would not be a good idea for the new administration … to go down a laundry list of left-wing proposals and try to jam them through.”

“I don’t anticipate they’re going to do that. I’m hoping for the best,” McConnell said.

The GOP senator also said he was glad to see the current president get ready to leave.

“Our members, in one way, are kind of relieved by the departure of an administration that became unpopular and made it very difficult for us to compete.”

I really don’t have strong feelings one way or another on Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State in Obama’s administration. She’s surely capable. The cynical side of me wonders what the back story is on all of this as well as what problems might result from such a pick, especially given the animosity of Bill Clinton toward Obama. However, the president-elect seems committed to a “team of rivals” in his administration, a concept employed by President Lincoln that I heartedly agree with. (I’ll write more about this in an upcoming post.)

What’s mildly surprising is the level of growing support amongst the right-wing punditry. The Weekly Standard’s Michael Golfarb certainly seems to like the choice:

There appears to be little angst among conservatives at the prospect of Hillary Clinton joining the Obama administration as Secretary of State. The idea was warmly embraced by Henry Kissinger, who our President-elect seems to hold in high-esteem, Governor Schwarzenegger, who likely has no more sway on Obama than the proverbial guy in the neighborhood, and Jon Kyl — surely Senator McCain put in a good word today as well. The love affair that was sparked last spring between Clinton and the Obama-fearing right continues to smolder, surely a surprise to those who suspected that such an unholy alliance couldn’t last beyond the convention. Whether Clinton would accept the job, or why she would want it, is not clear, but the right would be happy enough to have her.

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Clinton would be a fine Secretary of State, and she is likely to be a nuisance to Obama whether she is inside or outside of his administration, but as our top diplomat she could reprise a role that made Powell a kingmaker in this year’s election. And perhaps she could even present the case for war with Iran to an insubordinate United Nations in the event that Obama’s personal diplomacy somehow fails to deter the mullahs from their present course.

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Something in his last sentence jumped out at me: “…perhaps she could even present the case for war with Iran…” Seriously… have we not had enough of war to satisfy our blood thirst at least for a little while? We’re not even finished with the two we’ve got going on right now, which is bankrupting us and stretching our military to the breaking point. Our economy is barely hanging on by a thread and we want to start up another conflict that will surely be more costly than the current conflicts, both in financial terms and in human lives.

If we think Iraq was a challenge, it will pale in comparison to a conflict with Iran. Let’s not make another mistake. Let’s recover from these last seven years first before we dig ourselves into any more war pits.

From 23/6:

In the wake of the Obama win, Accounts Receivable gives Accounts Payable a little heads up about exactly what kind of “change” Obama was really talking about all those months on the trail. Payable is NOT going to like this. Not one bit. But he needs to know. And Accounts Receivable is the man to tell him. Accounts Receivable is a really good friend, you know?

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