Commander-In-Chief Donald Trump Will Have Terrifying Powers. Thanks, Obama.

[Mr. Snickers]

In article <t22bj8$3b9jk$1...@news.freedyn.de>
mybuddygaetz <ga...@protonmail.com> wrote:

WHEN DONALD TRUMP becomes commander in chief in January, he will
take on presidential powers that have never been more expansive
and unchecked.

He’ll control an unaccountable drone program, and the prison at
Guantanamo Bay. His FBI, including a network of 15,000 paid
informants, already has a record of spying on mosques and
activists, and his NSA’s surveillance empire is ubiquitous and
governed by arcane rules, most of which remain secret. He will
inherit bombing campaigns in seven Muslim countries, the de
facto ability to declare war unilaterally, and a massive nuclear
arsenal — much of which is on hair-trigger alert.

Caught off guard by Hillary Clinton’s election defeat, Democrats
who defended these powers under President Obama may suddenly be
having second thoughts as the White House gets handed over to a
man they described — with good reason — as “unhinged,” and
“dangerously unfit.”

In the years after the 9/11 terror attacks, Vice President Dick
Cheney and his legal adviser David Addington dramatically
expanded the powers of the presidency, asserting the unilateral
right in wartime to ignore legal limits on things like torture
and government eavesdropping. Congressional Democrats generally
caved, but made a few efforts to push back.

The Democrats went silent on executive overreach when Obama was
elected, however.

When the New York Times revealed Bush’s warrantless wiretapping
program in 2005, 60 percent of registered Democrats thought the
program was “unacceptable.” But after NSA whistleblower Edward
Snowden revealed a dramatically larger surveillance apparatus in
2013, a 61 percent of Democrats said the opposite — presumably
because they trusted the man in charge.

The Obama administration has counted on that trust repeatedly.
When defending the drone program in 2012, instead of referencing
its legal standards, administration officials reassured the New
York Times that Obama is “a student of the writings on war by
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas,” and that CIA director John
Brennan is like “a priest with extremely strong moral values who
was suddenly charged with leading a war.”

After eight years of trusting the President with expanding
military power, liberals must now reckon with the fact that
Obama will pass the same capabilities to a man who has proposed
killing terrorists’ innocent family members, who has said he
would do “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” and who has
suggested dipping bullets in pigs’ blood is sound
counterterrorism strategy.

And most of the paltry few legal limitations that regulate the
security state could easily be repealed by a President Trump.

In 2015, for instance, in response to protests in Ferguson, Mo.,
Obama signed an order banning the transfers of certain surplus
military weapons to police, including armored vehicles, grenade
launchers, bayonets, and high-caliber ammunition. Trump, who has
called police the “most mistreated people in America,” and has
refused to criticize police for brutality or killings, could
easily revoke that ban.

Trump has said he would create “a deportation force” –
apparently ignorant of the fact that he’ll inherit one. Obama
has increased the budget for immigration enforcement to an all-
time high and accelerated the rate of deportations. Obama has
deported more than 2.5 million people – already more than any
other President – and has made the Department of Homeland
Security the largest law enforcement agency in the country.

Obama also already incarcerates hundreds of thousands of
immigrants in detention centers, and forces young children to
appear before immigration judges without a lawyer.

Trump will also take over the FBI, which has 35,000 employees
and a network of 15,000 paid informants. Trump, who has said
Muslim Americans should be forced to register on a government
list, could easily rewrite its investigative guidelines.

As for the NSA, Congress passed a law in 2015 ending the bulk
collection of Americans’ phone records and replaced it with a
modified program. But according to a former State Department
official, the phone records program is minuscule compared to the
government’s “universe of collection” under Executive Order
12333, which Trump is free to reinterpret or modify.

To make matters worse, the Obama administration has convinced
courts that citizens cannot challenge the legality of NSA
programs until they can prove they are under surveillance.
Because government secrecy makes that generally impossible,
courts have started to reject anti-surveillance lawsuits on
procedural grounds.

Trump may also get his wish to “fill up” Guantanamo Bay. Despite
Obama’s efforts this year to rapidly depopulate the prison camp,
60 prisoners remain, along with the architecture to imprison
hundreds more.

With an additional stroke of his pen, Trump could reopen the
global network of CIA “black sites” and imprison people there
without any due process. After the Supreme Court ruled under
Bush that Guantanamo detainees have rights under habeas corpus,
the Obama administration in 2009 fought to avoid having the same
rule applied to military prisons around the world.

Trump could also make good on his promise to resurrect the CIA’s
torture program with a “hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,”
despite the fact that it would be clearly illegal under a law
passed by Congress in 2015. Trump said he would “expand the
laws,” but he could probably get away with it regardless,
because by refusing to prosecute any CIA officials involved in
Bush-era torture, Obama made clear that presidents can get away
with illegal torture.

During Trump’s campaign, former CIA director Michael Hayden and
current CIA director John Brennan both insisted that CIA
officials would disobey any order to commit “torture.” But both
have defended the CIA practices, and while Brennan has said he
would refuse to engage in “some of these tactics,” he has
defended others as useful. Under Brennan, the CIA has also
fought to undermine oversight efforts, and has publicly
contested the results of an exhaustive Senate investigation into
their abuses.

Trump, who has said he would “bomb the shit” out of terror
groups and has proposed killing terrorists’ innocent families,
will also inherit a global, unaccountable program of drone
assassination. Obama started a vast escalation of Bush’s drone
program in 2009, and Democrats have trusted him to assassinate
people he deems an “imminent threat,” even when they are far
away from war zones, and when he doesn’t even know who he is
killing.

Obama made it look like he was reining in the program in May
2013, signing guidelines that required “near certainty that a
terrorist target is present,” and “near certainty that non-
combatants will not be injured or killed.” But a number of
disastrous strikes in the following years – including one on a
wedding party in Yemen – have led many to believe the
administration is not following its own guidelines. And to
whatever extent they actually apply, those guidelines could
easily be revoked when President Trump gets to decide what is an
“imminent threat,” living out his desire to “bomb the shit” out
of terror groups.

The Obama administration has also convinced courts that they
have no role to play in reviewing the legality of drone strikes
– even when it involves killing a U.S. citizen. Lawsuits on
behalf of drone victims, filed both before and after strikes
took place have all been dismissed, setting the stage for
Trump’s targeting decisions never to see their day in court.

When it comes to sustained bombing campaigns, Trump may not have
to justify his actions much at all. Obama dramatically reduced
the number of ground soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he
has continued to bomb seven countries, with virtually no
Congressional acknowledgement or debate.

Obama has continued the Presidential tradition of going to war
without Congress, sometimes in almost absurd ways. In 2011, for
example, the White House needed to argue that it could continue
bombing Muammar Gaddafi’s forces in Libya without Congressional
authorization. So the top lawyer in the State Department sent a
memo to Congress arguing that a bombing campaign did not amount
to wartime “hostilities,” mainly because the enemy could not
fire back.

Even when the Obama administration sought Congressional
authorization in 2013 to strike Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-
Assad’s forces in retaliation for using chemical weapons, he
insisted that he didn’t really need to. And he has not sought
out a separate authorization to extend the war on terror to
fight ISIS in Syria, ISIS in Libya, Al Shabaab in Somalia, or
Boko Haram in Nigeria.

With such expansive war powers, and armed with the broad, Bush-
era 2001 Congressional resolution authorizing war “in order to
prevent any future acts of international terrorism,” the next
President could conduct military operations on a whim.

And perhaps most alarming is that Trump will inherit a Justice
Department that has waged an unprecedented war on press freedom.
Rather than shut down the Bush-era office that prosecuted leaks
to the press, Obama made it his own, and has prosecuted more
than twice as many people under the Espionage Act for leaking
information to the press than all of his predecessors combined.
His actions met with no resistance from Democrats.

In 2013, Obama’s Justice Department seized the phone records
from three Associated Press bureaus to uncover the source for a
story. Obama also waged a seven-year legal campaign against New
York Times Reporter James Risen, threatening him with prison if
he did not reveal his source for a story about a botched CIA
operation. The prosecutors dropped the request at the last
minute.

The legacy of that system is now passing into the hands of
someone who has made a show of his contempt for the media.
During his campaign, Trump repeatedly incited crowds against
reporters, threatened publications with defamation lawsuits, and
expressed his desire to “open up those libel laws.”

President Obama has spent much of his time as commander in chief
expanding his own military power, while convincing courts not to
limit his detention, surveillance, and assassination
capabilities. Most of the new constraints on the security state
during the Obama years were self-imposed, and could easily be
revoked.

It is too early to tell what Trump will actually do. But if his
campaign promises are anything to go on, he will flex all the
powers Obama accrued and more, while cutting through Obama’s
self-imposed restraints like tissue paper. And the silence of
Democrats during the Obama years will play a major role in
facilitating his abuses.

Correction, Nov. 11:
An earlier version of this story incorrectly characterized the
extent to which Obama has increased the budget for immigration
enforcement

President-elect Donald Trump talks after a meeting with U.S.
President Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/11/commander-in-chief-donald-
trump-will-have-terrifying-powers-thanks-obama/