So: in terms of the top officials who were involved in this, especially the President and Vice President (both of whom received periodic reports on it), this torturing program was actually two crimes in one: it was not merely torture itself, which is illegal; but it also was part of the entire larger Bush operation to obtain a pretext for invading Iraq, by tying Iraq to 9/11. That's abuse of office -- abuse of power -- in two ways, and not merely in one.
As early as the start of April in 2009, was reported that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the tortures had concluded that these techniques "were ineffective. That's not all, it also says these techniques had no connection to the intelligence that ultimately netted Osama bin Laden."
Then, the FBI agent who had handled the CIA's detainee Abu Zubaydah, told the U.S. Senate that, by the agent's using the standard FBI professional psychological method of interrogating Zubaydah, he had extracted from Zubaydah the truthful leads that produced the identifications and ultimate captures of both Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Jose Padilla, but that then Bush's torture-team came in, under instructions from the White House, and took over with Zubaydah, and started by humiliating him and then ultimately waterboarding him, but "The new techniques did not produce results, as Abu Zubaydah shut down and stopped talking." Even after hundreds of waterboardings, Zubaydah refused to say anything: not even such things as "Saddam made us do it."
This FBI agent then provided to the Senators irrefutable documentary evidence that the White House had been lying. He said: "As you can see from this timeline, many of the claims made in the memos about the success of the enhanced techniques are inaccurate. For example, it is untrue to claim Abu Zubaydah wasn't cooperating before August 1, 2002. The truth is that we got actionable intelligence from him in the first hour of interrogating him."
In other words: The Bush White House's law-breaking effort to obtain evidence incriminating Saddam Hussein failed, but the FBI agent's law-compliant effort to obtain truthful evidence regarding the 9/11 attacks succeeded; and it did so almost immediately but was quickly halted by the White House, which wasn't interested, really, in truthful evidence, about anything. They were looking for pretexts that they could trumpet to the public, to invade Iraq.
Barack Obama, instead of enforcing the law, which is the President's chief obligation (both his chief responsibility to the Constitution, and his chief accountability to the public), blocks prosecutions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, and the others who were involved in that operation to use illegal tortures in order to obtain whatever pretexts they could, to invade Iraq. Two massive U.S. and international crimes in one -- the tortures of detainees, and the lying to invade Iraq -- were perpetrated, and yet Obama blocks prosecutions of both.
One of the world's greatest investigative journalists headlined "10 Torture Myths Debunked," and presented crushingly powerful evidence against the Bush Administration on that matter. This was simultaneously a crushingly powerful case against Barack Obama, because Obama has served as an accessory-after-the-fact in this entire matter, by failing to fulfill his Oath of Office, to "preserve, protect, and defend, the Constitution of the United States." He was discriminatorially enforcing the laws: to him, all praise and rewards go upward, to his friends and the other powerful individuals (including Bush, Cheney, Rice, etc.) -- thus, no accountability; and all blame and punishments go downward, to piker-crooks among the general public, and to all other outsiders, the non-members of Obama's beloved elite. He protects these elite, at any and all costs.
WALL STREET
So, let's now consider the Wall Street bailouts. I have previously presented the case against Obama for his having blocked prosecutions of the Wall Street criminals who brought down our mega-banks by incentivizing the sales forces of their firms to defraud both homebuyers and MBS investors and boost their own executive bonuses thereby, and so to produce the millions of stripped investors and foreclosed homes and the resulting loss in property-values and the global economic crash, whose source continues to be covered-up by our Government, so as to protect the elite mega-guilty. Like I had documented there, Obama secretly told the mega-bank CEOs, at the very start of his Administration, "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. ... I want to help. ... I'm protecting you." He lied to the public, in public -- but not to the banksters, in private. He kept his promises to them. (He held that private meeting with them on 27 March 2009.)
Besides his cover-up of this massive criminality being criminal in itself (accessory after-the-fact participation in criminal enterprise), some numbers will be cited here to show that his covering-up the problems, and not prosecuting the mega-crooks, isn't at all solving the underlying problems that Obama had been elected in order to solve and has claimed to be solving: this problem is the economic crash, a crash from the home-building and home-buying bubble, which was also the MBS, or Mortgage-Backed Securities, bubble (the other side of that same coin). There is no real 'economic recovery' except for America's richest, who are evidently Obama's only real concern.
A Harvard study in 2013 showed ("Figure 8" there) that whereas in 2006 -- the earliest year of the manufactured 'bubble' that stripped investors -- there were about 2 million vacant (essentially, wasted) housing units in the U.S., this figure rose above 3 million in 2008, reached about 4 million by 2010, and was still at around 3.5 million as of 2013 (the latest year). A study, by Freddie Mac, of the U.S. housing market, showed (p. 23, "Excess Unsold Homes for Sale") that whereas the "Excess" (above-normal) unsold homes peaked in 2008 at around 900 thousand homes per quarter, there still continues an excess of around 200 thousand homes per quarter, and that this number (200,000) has remained rather constant throughout the past two years, so that it seems to be the new norm: around 200,000 more homes per quarter are remaining unsold than had long been the case, prior to George W. Bush's Presidency. Obama's policies didn't rectify that but instead continue it.
Furthermore, this same Freddie Mac source (at p. 26, "Housing Affordability") shows that though house-prices (in terms of "affordability") did start coming down in 2012, those prices have unfortunately stabilized throughout 2013 and 2014 at still around 20% above the price that prevailed at the start of 2008, so that houses are now much less affordable than was the case before the 2008 crash. Even all of those unsold homes aren't enough to push down home-prices enough to clear out the excess housing-inventory: prices would need to come down a lot more for that excess inventory to be removed and the construction-industry to recover, but both the excess inventory and the high prices have instead been stable throughout these past two years.
Clearly, then: If the Fed really were to stop its Zero Interest Rate Policy (now "QE"), then there would be another housing-crash. Interest-rates would be going up, during the time of this new normal in real estate, when there is already an excess inventory of unsold homes, even before that crash-after-the-crash comes. It would thus be significantly worse than in 2008 (prior to this new-normal). The unsold-housing inventory would then be skyrocketing above its current, already-high, level.
The Census Bureau reports that single-family homes under construction averaged about 500,000 per year during the 1990s, and peaked at 929,000 in 2005, then plunged to a low of 221,000 in 2011, and that they were at 319,000 in 2013, still well below the figure during any year prior to 2000. Construction of multi-family units with less than 5 apartments is also at or near record lows, which are from only half to an eighth of the numbers that had prevailed during the pre-Bush years. However, construction of large apartment-buildings, "5 units or more," has been at the long-term normal rate throughout the past two years. So: except for the construction of large apartment buildings, the entire residential construction industry in the U.S. remains in what seems to be a permanently depressed condition. Obama's "economic recovery," from Bush's real-estate-induced "recession," has thus been fictitious, just as it has been fictitious for the lower 99% of America's income-recipients.
Therefore, the summary regarding the entire residential housing market is: it's weak but stabilized at that weak level, and if the Fed were to stop its bubble-policy, the residential housing markets in the U.S. would collapse, yet again; and this time from a base that's already weak; so that the Fed will probably continue to be in "bubble" mode until some other sector of the economy (not under the Fed's control) crashes and brings on an economic hurricane, which will then be both bigger and more complex than was the 2008 crash. That's what Obama's 'economic recovery' amounts to. When he secretly told the banksters, "I'm protecting you," he meant it, and he did it. Maybe McCain or Romney would have been no different (except in their public rhetoric), but they could hardly have been much worse. An electoral choice like that is not democracy, any more than Obama's Department of 'Justice' is justice.
Here is what happens when all of the nation's income-increase goes to the top 1%, as it has under Obama: American purchases have continued to exceed American incomes, and the Federal Government has been adding the difference to its balance-sheet; consumers haven't been adding it to theirs. Since Obama became President in January 2009, retail sales have increased about 28%, or 4.8% annually. But household debt has remained virtually unchanged under Obama, having been $13.7 trillion in the first quarter of 2009, and being $13.3 trillion in the second quarter of 2014. However, federal debt was $10.6 trillion on 31 January 2009, and was $17.8 trillion on 30 September 2014. Therefore, total U.S. debt has risen under Obama, from around $24.3 trillion to $31.1 trillion; that's a 28% rise in 5.8 years, or a 4.8% annual increase, which is the same as the annual increase in retail sales. So: in the years following after the 2008 crash, retail sales rose by increasing the country's total debt, all of which debt-increase has occurred in the federal debt, not at all in the personal debt. Thus, what has been keeping retail sales up during the past six years is the income-increases by only the top 1%, and it's all been getting charged to the federal credit card, courtesy of Obama and the Federal Reserve, as a sheer gift from Obama and the Fed to the top 1%. But all taxpayers and recipients of government services (such as infrastructure and education) will be paying for that gift to the Bush-Obama elite, via increases in their own taxes to the Government, and via reductions in their services (including bridge-maintenance, etc.) from the Government. The only beneficiaries of all this will be today's top 1% -- the people who are receiving all of today's income-increases. Obama's federal money has, in ultimate effect, been going only to those people. That's in the data. This is a siphon from the masses to the classes, and it was started by Bush but is being continued by Obama.
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