Leaking the Truth: Obama Reveals More of His True Values
© Austin Cline

The real values of Barack Obama and the Obama administration have become clear: if you commit war crimes you will receive immunity and won’t even be investigated; if you tell the public about American war crimes you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. These are the explicit positions of a president whose platform while a candidate was to restore the rule of law in America and restore America's moral standing around the world.

This isn't spin or hyperbole, they are the simple facts of how the Obama administration has been behaving. Barack Obama stated unambiguously that he preferred to "look forward and not backwards" when he learned that Spanish prosecutors would be investigating Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantanamo. Bradley Manning, in contrast, won't be receiving that sort of privileged treatment and is instead facing 52 years in prison for releasing classified tapes of Americans shooting unarmed civilians.

Click for More on Obama's Treatment of Whistle-Blowers

Squatters in the Fourth Estate
© Austin Cline

Every time I assume that my opinion of American “journalism” has bottomed out, some putz does something so outrageous or stupid that I’m forced to revise my opinion downward by several notches — notches so low that I didn’t even know they could exist. No matter what American journalists do, it seems that they never manage to run out of room to keep spiraling downwards…then they wonder why Americans aren’t watching or reading them as much anymore. Really? Is it that hard to figure out?

You might be assuming that I’m talking here about the incident where White House journalists thought it was a good idea to socialize personally with administration officials at a “super-soaker” picnic hosted by Vice-President Joe Biden. Well, I am, but not in the way you are probably assuming. Here, the super-soaker party is actually the old low that I assumed American journalists couldn’t possibly exceed; the new low was spectacularly achieved by David Gregory — a perennial favorite in the “just how bad can American journalists get” contests.

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People tend to assume that creating strong rules of international law are necessary for constraining behavior and preventing nations from acting in immoral ways. The truth, though, is that rules can also open up the door for immoral behavior while giving it greater legal cover. This doesn't mean that we can do without international rule, but it does mean that we shouldn't look upon rules as a panacea that will solve all our problems. Rules can create as many problems as they solve and, what's worse, make those new problems harder to solve.

Click for More on War, Torture and Terrorism