Obama Guts Dodd-Frank + Umbrella Movement Epitaph + Grocery Store Torture Report Discussion

When we look back on the Obama years, I fear, they will be seen as a dividing line. On one side of the line will be the quaint notion that people actually have a say in how we live our lives; on the other, the dystopia of our lives as actually lived in a brutal society held together by lies ruled by the super-rich and their police-state enforcers.

Last night the House of Representatives narrowly passed a budget bill (Ashley Parker and Robert Pear, "House Narrowly Passes Bill to Avoid Shutdown; $1.1 Trillion in Spending") that guts a main provision of Dodd-Frank, the key piece of legislation designed to prevent another Great Recession. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, no one's idea of a Leftist firebrand, broke with the Obama, who was lobbying for the bill, and asked her caucus to reject it. The budget ending up clearing the House with 162 Republicans and 57 Democrats voting yes.

Jonathan Weisman explains in "Furor Over Move to Aid Big Banks in Funding Bill" what it is that the House just did:

WASHINGTON — In a 1,600-page, $1.1 trillion spending bill, a provision to roll back an obscure financial regulation became a focal point of uproar as Congress struggled to keep the government funded. 

The “push-out” regulation — a measure to ensure that banks trade their riskiest financial instruments without the protection of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Federal Reserve’s backup — was controversial from the start. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were shoveled into Wall Street banks after instruments like credit default swaps became worthless in the financial crisis, but even some crucial Democrats were unsure if Congress went too far when it voted to include push-out in the landmark Dodd-Frank law to regulate Wall Street in 2010. 

But with regulators pressing to put rules into effect to carry out the law, a provision in the enormous spending bill to remove the push-out regulation drew bipartisan outrage. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, said she was “heartbroken” by the “taint” visited upon the spending bill, which would finance virtually all of the government through September.

***

The fierce Democratic opposition over the Dodd-Frank rollback provision created the odd spectacle of President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. calling Democrats to muster support for the spending bill over the opposition of Ms. Pelosi. 

“I love the American political system, I really do, but the ability to sneak in substantive policy measures and make it take it or leave it, I think it’s appalling,” said Simon Johnson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, who is a prominent critic of the nation’s big banks. 

The push-out legislation assumed outsize importance, not only because of what it does but because the biggest Wall Street companies have fought it since it was proposed. 

The language in the spending bill was inserted by Representative Kevin Yoder, Republican of Kansas, but he did not write it. Citigroup did. In 2013, the bank and its allies were able to corral a bipartisan vote to pass the rollback out of the House Financial Services Committee. In an analysis by The New York Times of Citigroup emails, more than 70 lines of the committee’s 85-line rollback bill came from Citigroup’s recommendations.

The banking industry strongly supports the rollback measure. James C. Ballentine, an executive vice president at the American Bankers Association, said financial instruments like credit deferred swaps are used to mitigate risk, not bolster it. To force their trading into units unprotected by federal taxpayers would be onerous, he argues. 

“The push-out requirement to move some swaps into separate affiliates makes one-stop shopping impossible for businesses ranging from family farms to energy companies that want to hedge against commodity price changes,” Mr. Ballentine said. 

Tony Fratto, a former official in the Bush Treasury and White House, called the opposition “a lot of hyperbole” around “an incremental common-sense regulatory improvement.” 

Mr. Johnson said the evocation of family farms and mom-and-pop banks was specious. The four largest banks conduct more than 93 percent of all derivatives trading in the United States. The repeal push is for them, he said. 

Such banks can still deal in derivatives and credit-deferred swaps in units uninsured by the federal government, but they could charge clients a considerably higher premium if they could keep that federal backstop. 

“In 2008, we learned the economic consequences of conducting derivatives trading in taxpayer-insured banks,” said Thomas Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, calling the repeal Congress is contemplating “illogical.”

We're back to where we started before that 2008 election-night celebration in Grant Park when Oprah and Jesse Jackson cried for the television cameras.

Obama has been a terrific bust. His administration has returned the U.S. military to Iraq, has signaled a open-ended commitment to staying on in Afghanistan, has embarked on a New Cold War with Russia, is pivoting to Asia to confront China, and now has provided the crucial support to gut Dodd-Frank.

Most people understand that it was Wall Street's addiction to lightly-regulated derivatives that caused the financial crisis. Obama's support for a federal backstop of the big banks' derivatives business proves that nothing has changed.

So next time you run into a liberal who wants to tell you that Obama is a good and decent leader who would always do the right thing if not for those devilish Republicans in Congress remind him of Obama's support for the 2015 budget.

The epitaph of the Umbrella Movement has been written by Chris Buckley and Keith Bradsher, "Hong Kong Protesters Lose a Last Bastion, but Vow to Go On." The goal here, as in any political campaign, is to claim victory, regardless of the actual outcome, once the campaign is over. Note the tabloid-like opening:

HONG KONG — Constance So, a slightly built university student, wept as she looked for a way past the tightening ring of police officers closing in on the last of the sizable protest camps in Hong Kong. 

With friends urging her to avoid an arrest record, Ms. So, like many others, decided to give up voluntarily. There was no violence, only a few defiant final stands and many tearful goodbyes, as the nearly three-month Umbrella Movement disbanded. 

“It was like my home,” Ms. So said. “I’m leaving my friends behind. I feel like I’m betraying them.” 

For the Hong Kong authorities and their superiors in Beijing, the peaceful end to the protest is likely to be seen as a major victory. They repeatedly rebuffed demands for a greater degree of democracy in this former British colony, and defused the longest sustained political uprising on Chinese territory in many years without a bloody crackdown.

Yet even in their defeat, the protesters, most of them college students, left with a new sense of political identity, a willingness to challenge the almighty power holders in Beijing, and a slogan from a science-fiction film that many of them repeated as they cleared out of the encampment in Hong Kong’s Admiralty district: “We’ll be back.” (A sliver of a protest camp remains in Causeway Bay, a busy shopping area.)

Buckley and Bradsher, thankfully, do include a counter-narrative, which has to do with the diminished status of  Hong Kong's tycoons:

Some in Hong Kong worry that the protests this autumn have harmed the long-term cause of achieving greater democracy. 

They fret that Beijing has permanently transferred large numbers of security and intelligence specialists to Hong Kong to keep a much closer eye on the Chinese Communist Party’s many critics. Beijing, they say, could end up even more resistant to further democratization in Hong Kong for fear that a hostile government might be elected. 

“This movement has done more damage to the pro-democracy camp than anything in the last 17 years,” said Steve Vickers, who was a senior Hong Kong police official before Britain handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997, and who said he favored the introduction of greater democracy. 

Under the British, and through the first 17 years of Chinese sovereignty here, the most powerful political force has been the leaders of the city’s biggest businesses — heavily Scottish at first, but now mostly Chinese families originally from the neighboring Guangdong Province or from Shanghai. These tycoons have long opposed increases in social spending, fearing they would lead to higher taxes on them.

But the bruising political battle with democracy activists has hurt the tycoons’ image and their clout with top city officials and the Beijing authorities, people with a detailed knowledge of Hong Kong’s policy making said. 

To Beijing’s annoyance, the tycoons were reluctant to criticize the protesters for fear that their own businesses might be boycotted. One of the most politically active business leaders, a real estate developer, James Tien, publicly broke ranks in October with the administration’s support for Mr. Leung and called for more negotiations with the protesters. 

“The tycoons are no longer a factor; their days are past,” said the person who works closely with the Beijing and Hong Kong governments.

Last night at the grocery store I asked the checker, a guy I have known for years, what he thought of the torture report. He said, "Torture? What torture report?"

I explained to him that the Senate had released its study of the Bush administration's post-9/11 use of torture and its creation of a network of overseas secret prisons to house the tortured detainees.

He said, "Well, I'm still glad I live in this country."

"Have you ever lived anywhere else?"  I asked.

"No, I haven't."

"How do you know it's not better in, say, Ireland?"

"Well, you're right. But I would like to think that it is better here."

Strategy Behind Ongoing Campaign to Cover Up CIA Torture Program Revealed

A second day dawns following the release of the Senate report on CIA torture and it is clear where the action is. The action is going to be in holding the United States accountable to international legal conventions to which it is signatory.

The take-away from two different articles (one by Somini Sengupta, "Americans Involved in Torture Can Be Prosecuted Abroad, Analysts Say"; the other by Joseph Goldstein and Rick Gladstone, "Afghan Leader Expresses Shock at Torture Revelations") is a statement by United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Hashemite scion Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein, making clear that “The [International Convention on Torture] lets no one off the hook — neither the torturers themselves, nor the policy-makers, nor the public officials who define the policy or give the orders.”

The Obama administration has argued as recently as last month that the U.S. is in compliance with the International Convention on Torture because of a four-year Department of Justice criminal investigation into the CIA torture program led by federal prosecutor John H. Durham. Durham recommended against bringing charges and Attorney General Eric Holder agreed.

Now the Gray Lady is going to court to access documents from this DOJ investigation in order to allow the public to see some of the interviews with CIA officials and understand the reasoning why no charges were brought by Durham. Charlie Savage has the must-read story, "U.S. Tells Court That Documents From Torture Investigation Should Remain Secret":

Last month, in a presentation in Geneva before the United Nations Committee Against Torture, which oversees compliance with a global anti-torture treaty, the Obama administration pointed to Mr. Durham’s investigation as having fulfilled the United States’ obligation under the treaty to investigate torture. 

The United Nations panel expressed skepticism about the Durham investigation, pressing for details like whether Mr. Durham’s team had spoken only with government officials, or whether it also interviewed any current or former detainees as part of the investigation. A Justice Department lawyer who was part of the delegation defended the investigation as vigorous and told the committee that Mr. Durham’s team had interviewed about 96 witnesses. But he declined to identify them because no charges were filed. 

The Senate and Justice Department investigations trace back to a December 2007 article by The Times that the C.I.A. had destroyed videotapes of interrogation sessions. The Intelligence Committee started an oversight investigation, and the attorney general at the time, Michael B. Mukasey, appointed Mr. Durham to lead a criminal inquiry. 

In 2009, as President Obama took office, the committee voted to expand its investigation into the C.I.A. program. Months later, Mr. Holder announced that he was expanding Mr. Durham’s mandate to look into whether charges should be brought for any interrogation that went beyond approved techniques. 

In 2010, Mr. Durham, an assistant United States attorney in Connecticut, recommended against any charges connected with the tape destruction. The next year, he recommended closing the preliminary investigation into the treatment of about 100 detainees in C.I.A. custody, but elevated two other incidents that resulted in detainee deaths into full investigations. In 2012, he also recommended closing those without any indictments. 

“In light of our assessment of the evidence, the reports thoroughly analyzed the type and nature of criminal charges that could be brought against suspected wrongdoers, along with various defenses that could be raised in opposition to any such charges,” Mr. Durham wrote in his declaration filed on Tuesday. “The reports also discussed what the evidence showed and did not show, and evaluated previous investigations conducted by other entities.”

Accessing these investigatory documents could be the Rosetta Stone for deciphering the CIA torture program. That is why the Obama administration is going to court to block their release.

Charlie Savage does an excellent job concisely tracing the history of both the DOJ and Senate probes to the illegal destruction of the torture tapes in 2005.

Savage also does a superb job of deftly unpacking the mechanics of the cover-up actively perpetrated by the Obama administration. The main line of attack by the CIA and its Republican defenders is that the Senate report is false because it includes no interviews with CIA personnel responsible for the torture. That wasn't by choice of the Senate investigators; that was because CIA personnel wouldn't talk to Senate investigators because of Durham's active criminal investigation.

Savage deftly describes the mechanics of the ongoing cover-up:

The Justice Department said in a statement on Tuesday that its investigators had looked at the full version of the Senate Intelligence Committee report “and did not find any new information that they had not previously considered in reaching their determination,” adding that Mr. Durham’s “inquiry was extraordinarily thorough and we stand by our previously announced decision not to initiate criminal charges.” 

Mr. Holder’s decision in 2009 to open a criminal investigation into the C.I.A.’s treatment of detainees abroad had prompted a political backlash and made it difficult for congressional investigators to speak with current and former agency officials, since they faced legal jeopardy. 

Citing the fact that the Senate investigation would have to rely only on internal C.I.A. documents and not interviews with witnesses, committee Republicans withdrew their support for it. And since the report’s release, defenders of the C.I.A. have argued that the report should not be seen as an accurate and complete historical account.

Michael Davidson, who was the top lawyer for the Senate Intelligence Committee until his retirement in 2011 and who worked on the first four years of its investigation, portrayed the executive branch’s stance as a Catch-22. 

“One agency of the executive branch (the C.I.A.) complains that no one was interviewed,” he said in an email. “Another element of the executive branch (D.O.J.) actually conducted lots of interviews,” he added, referring to the Department of Justice.

“Its investigation made it difficult for a Senate committee to conduct interviews. So check there. Then D.O.J. objects to disclosing them. So checkmate there. That leaves the C.I.A. free to complain about lack of interviews. Pretty neat,” he said.

It is too early to say that we have to returned to the social ferment of the 1970s when the Church Committee and the Pike Committee shined a light on the CIA's family jewels, when the Weather Underground still roamed the land, when athletes were activists. But it seems like we're getting there.

More Sunlight for the Deep State: Senate Intelligence Committee Report on CIA "Rectal Feeding" Torture Program

I go to work. On the way to and from work I read the paper, the Gray Lady, the New York Times. Before work, I wake up early and read what she has to say online.

This is basically my life. I run on the weekends and watch the NFL on Sundays. Mostly though I go to work and read the newspaper.

And I must say that this morning's edition is unusual. It is not often that one story so dominates the front section. For instance, the recent reaction to the Michael Brown and Eric Garner grand jury decisions did not consume as much space as the release yesterday of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's torture program carried out at black-site prisons around the globe during George W. Bush administration.

Probably the main reason for such depth of coverage is that the report's release has been anticipated for years; it has also been the source of a separation of powers conflict when researchers for the Senate Intelligence Committee accused the CIA of illegally monitoring their investigation by accessing their computers.

Mark Mazzetti, whose story, "Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Interrogations," anchors the Gray Lady's coverage, summarizes:

The battle over the report has been waged behind closed doors for years, and provided the backdrop to the more recent fight over the C.I.A.'s penetration of a computer network used by committee staff members working on the investigation. C.I.A. officers came to suspect that the staff members had improperly obtained an internal agency review of the detention program over the course of their investigation, and the officers broke into the network that had been designated for the committee’s use.

Mazzetti's lengthy article is topnotch, as are many of the other stories in today's paper. But if you wanted a helpful synopsis, the Gray Lady's unsigned editorial, "The Senate Report on the C.I.A.’s Torture and Lies," is a good place to start:

The report raises again, with renewed power, the question of why no one has ever been held accountable for these seeming crimes — not the top officials who set them in motion, the lower-level officials who committed the torture, or those who covered it up, including by destroying videotapes of the abuse and by trying to block the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of their acts.

At one point, the report says, the C.I.A. assured Congress that the behavior of the secret jailers and interrogators was nothing like the horrors the world saw at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. That was the closest the agency seems to have come to the truth — what happened appears to have been worse than what took place at Abu Ghraib.

The CIA-peddled lie that the Senate report seeks to debunk is that torture was an effective technique that revealed actionable intelligence:

The C.I.A. and some members of the President George W. Bush’s administration claimed these brutal acts were necessary to deal with “ticking time bomb” threats and that they were effective. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, an avid promoter of “enhanced interrogation,” still makes that claim. 

But “at no time” did the C.I.A.’s torture program produce intelligence that averted a terrorism threat, the report said. All of the information that the C.I.A. attributed to its “enhanced interrogation techniques” was obtained before the brutal interrogations took place, actually came from another source, or was a lie invented by the torture victims — a prospect that the C.I.A. had determined long ago was the likely result of torture.

Scott Shane makes this same point in "Report Portrays a Broken C.I.A. Devoted to a Failed Approach":

The report spends little time condemning torture on moral or legal grounds. Instead, it addresses mainly a practical question: Did torture accomplish anything of value? Looking at case after case, the report answers with an unqualified no.

In fact, it says, “C.I.A. officers regularly called into question whether the C.I.A.'s enhanced interrogation techniques were effective, assessing that the use of the techniques failed to elicit detainee cooperation or produce accurate intelligence.” Still, higher-ups ordered that the methods be continued and told Congress, the White House and journalists that they were having great success. 

Just as striking as that central finding is the detailed account of C.I.A. mismanagement. Both factions in the fight over interrogations were led by people with histories that might have been expected to disqualify them. 

The chief of interrogations, who is not named in the report, was given the job in fall 2002 even though the agency’s inspector general had urged that he be “orally admonished for inappropriate use of interrogation techniques” in a training program in Latin America in the 1980s.

And Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, identified by the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar in the report, had not conducted a single real interrogation. They had helped run a Cold War-era training program for the Air Force in which personnel were given a taste of the harsh treatment they might face if captured by Communist enemies. The program — called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape — had never been intended for use in American interrogations, and involved methods that had produced false confessions when used on American airmen held by the Chinese in the Korean War. 

The program allowed the psychologists to assess their own work — they gave it excellent grades — and to charge a daily rate of $1,800 each, four times the pay of other interrogators, to waterboard detainees. Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen later started a company that took over the C.I.A. program from 2005 until it was closed in 2009. The C.I.A. paid it $81 million, plus $1 million to protect the company from legal liability.

The two former Air Force psychologists, James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who crafted the CIA torture program are mentioned repeatedly in today's coverage. They, along with former CIA chief Michael Hayden, who is quoted more than once lying about the effectiveness of torture, seem to be likely targets for any future prosecutions.

Calls will continue to mount in Geneva for some type of reckoning for the architects of the Bush-Cheney torture protocols (see "Overseas, Torture Report Prompts Calls for Prosecution" by Rick Gladstone and Robert Mackey) as the content of the Senate report sinks in. For instance, the following passage from Mazzetti's article:

The long-delayed report delivers a withering judgment on one of the most controversial tactics of a twilight war waged over a dozen years. The Senate committee’s investigation, born of what its chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said was a need to reckon with the excesses of this war, found that C.I.A. officials routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained, and failed to provide basic oversight of the secret prisons it established around the world.

In exhaustive detail, the report gives a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects. Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.'s medical staff, some prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.'s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

The CIA and the GOP and the Wall Street Journal have already started to counterattack (see Scott Shane, "Political Divide About C.I.A. Torture Remains After Senate Report’s Release") by dismissing the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report as a partisan Democrat document that is inaccurate chiefly because it included no interviews with the principals of the CIA program. This is obfuscation. The report's findings are based on comments made by CIA officials in classified cables. As Mazzetti notes,

The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a C.I.A. facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some C.I.A. officers were “to the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.

During one waterboarding session, Abu Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” The interrogations lasted for weeks, and some C.I.A. officers began sending messages to the agency’s headquarters in Virginia questioning the utility — and the legality — of what they were doing. But such questions were rejected. 

“Strongly urge that any speculative language as to the legality of given activities or, more precisely, judgment calls as to their legality vis-à-vis operational guidelines for this activity agreed upon and vetted at the most senior levels of the agency, be refrained from in written traffic (email or cable traffic),” wrote Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.

The Senate report describes the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as a "series of near drownings." 

“Such language is not helpful.”

The Republican Party and the CIA can try to sweep this under the rug, but I believe such an effort will only diminish their already diminished public standing. We are at a moment when people are in the streets protesting homicidal institutional racism. Who is going to rally under the banner of forced "rectal feeding" other than polluted oligarchs like Sheldon Adelson and cancerous pols like Dick Cheney?