Horton's point is actually more salient to me than Berkowitz's piece, which discusses some profound examples, but seems rather too plagued with conventional ideas for the task at hand. He first takes note of the strong beginning Berkowitz makes in discussing the Versailles media's refusal to use the word "torture". He later writes:
As Berkowitz notes, Barack Obama began his presidency with two contradictory calls. On the one hand, although he acknowledged that the U.S. government had practiced torture, he declined to hold those who did so accountable, saying we should "look forward and not back." On the other, at his inauguration he called for a "new era of responsibility," suggesting that "we are suffering a culture-wide crisis of judgment." One and a half years into the Obama presidency, all the evidence suggests that Obama is promoting the failure of accountability in government rather than taking the steps he promised to address it. As Berkowitz puts it, "While Obama worries about a rush to judgment, our real problem is that we have abdicated our right and our duty to judge at all."
But, of course, two things need noting:
First, the call to "look forward and not back" was from the very beginning a call for irresponsibility, directly at ods with his call for a "new era of responsibility." The contradictions aren't new. They are just being spelled out in bigger and bigger block letters until they can be seen from the moon.
Second, it's only certain people who get a pass: The Bush torture team, not the whistleblowers. The Banksters, not the folks who got stuck with mortgages pre-designed to fail. Despite the wailing of the right to the contrary, Obama's tougher on undocumented immigrants than Bush ever was, and as David just noted, he's also helping out with high-tech off-shoring.
There is a lack of judgment, here, all right, but it's not exactly the sort that Berkowitz or even Horton is talking about. And there's a lack of judgment, too, in those who still refuse to see what's happening right in front of their eyes.
It would truly be a grotesque irony if the greatest phenomenon in favor of democratized, bottom-up change in history--the network neutral internet--was destroyed under the administration that has consistently sold itself as the most democratized, bottom-up, grassroots-friendly White House in history. But, we are on the brink of seeing exactly that happen.
The Obama administration's endless dithering and insatiable desire to not appear--or be--confrontational toward corporate America and other status-quo institutions is about to allow the Internet to become a top-down, corporate captured medium.
This is not to say that Horton is completely off the mark. Obama certainly uses the non-judgmental rationale that has a role in tradtional liberalism. And it's certainly worth cogitating on how that works out.
But we simply can't ignore the big picture of the Bush-Obama continuity, which is that the big boys keep on getting away with murder, while the rest of us have to pay the price and play by the rules they fixed to cover their asses.
Within Scott Horton's disturbing tale of the three "suicides" that probably weren't, comes confirmation that America's rotten gulag of ill repute has an Area 51 gulag of its very own, meet "Camp No":
The compound was not visible from the main road, and the access road was chained off. The Guardsman who told Davila about the compound had said, "This place does not exist," and Hickman, who was frequently put in charge of security for all of Camp America, was not briefed about the site. Nevertheless, Davila said, other soldiers-many of whom were required to patrol the outside perimeter of Camp America-had seen the compound, and many speculated about its purpose. One theory was that it was being used by some of the non-uniformed government personnel who frequently showed up in the camps and were widely thought to be CIA agents.
A friend of Hickman's had nicknamed the compound "Camp No," the idea being that anyone who asked if it existed would be told, "No, it doesn't." He and Davila made a point of stopping by whenever they had the chance; once, Hickman said, he heard a "series of screams" from within the compound.
See it here, top left. Please tell me this facility at least, could be closed in less than a year without an epic Congressional meltdown of NIMBY cowardice. Hopefully we won't have to find out in another revelation that Camp No itself had a secret room or wing where even more inhuman things were going on too horrible for the regular denizens of Camp No.
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