Friday 26th of April 2024
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all hope, no glory .....

all hope, no glory .....

The change that we are witnessing is in Obama, not in policies. Obama is morphing into George Bush.

Obama has not been in office four months and already a book could be written about his broken promises.

Obama said he would close the torture prison, Guantanamo, and abolish the kangaroo courts known as military tribunals. But now he says he is going to reform the tribunals and continue the process, but without confessions obtained with torture. Getting behind Obama's validation of the Bush/Cheney policy, House Democrats pulled the budget funding that was to be used for closing Guantanamo.

The policy of kidnapping people (usually on the basis of disinformation supplied by their enemies) and whisking them off to Third World prisons to be interrogated is to be continued. Again, Obama has substituted a "reform" for his promise to abolish an illegal policy. Rendition, Obama says, has also been reformed and will no longer involve torture. How would anyone know? Is Obama going to assign a U.S. government agent to watch over the treatment given to disappeared people by Third World thugs? Given the proclivity of American police to brutalize U.S. citizens, nothing can save the victims of rendition from torture.

Obama has defended the Bush/Cheney warrantless wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency and broadened the government's legal argument that "sovereign immunity" protects government officials from prosecution and civil suits when they violate U.S. law and constitutional protections of citizens. Obama's Justice Department has taken up the defense of Donald Rumsfeld against a case brought by detainees whose rights Rumsfeld violated.

In a signing statement this month, Obama abandoned his promise to protect whistleblowers who give information of executive branch illegality to Congress.

Obama is making even more expansive claims of executive power than Bush. As Bruce Fein puts it: "In principle, President Obama is maintaining that victims of constitutional wrongdoing by the U.S. government should be denied a remedy in order to prevent the American people and the world at large from learning of the lawlessness perpetrated in the name of national security and exacting political and legal accountability."

Obama, in other words, is committed to covering up the Bush regime's crimes and to ensuring that his own regime can continue to operate in the same illegal and unconstitutional ways.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article22671.htm

capture, detention, to infinity & beyond …..

Did anyone see Obama's speech where he said:

"There may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes. In some cases evidence may be tainted, but who none the less pose a threat to the security of the United States. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States and those that we capture, like other prisoners of war, must be prevented from attacking us again."

I was on jury duty back in the 1980s and I understand keeping someone under surveillance that you believe to be planning something, but I have never heard of incarceration people you think might be planning something.

What does "the evidence might be tainted" mean?

You mean if there was evidence obtained through torture then we can't use it to bring them to trial, but we can use it to keep them in prison forever? But this "war" has no one to deal with for surrender, and there is no government involved, so it sounds a lot like prison until infinity.

Is Obama aware that even if he captured and executed Osama or found proof that he is dead, this would not end this war because there will always be someone to step in and take over because the USA continues to be a bully?

I cannot ever recall in all the history courses I have taken or history books I have read there ever being a time when there was not terrorism, except sometimes the USA calls them "freedom fighters." If you agree with their goal, but not their methods, like John Brown, he was still a terrorist to the Union.

The USA has supported, trained and funded large numbers of freedom fighters, and eventually we have had to fight nearly all of them. We supported Marcos and he ended up with golden bathroom fixtures and his wife needed the Astrodome to hold her shoe collection. We supported the Shah of Iran and he, like Marcos, had no problem killing anyone who disagreed with him. Dick Cheney said Nelson Mandela and his group were terrorists which is why he voted to keep Mandela in jail.

We supported Saddam's overthrow of Iraq and his war against Iran. One of the first non-Afghani freedom fighters recruited by the CIA and USA supported Mujahadeen to fight the Russians in Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden.

Anyone who doesn't understand why we will continue producing terrorists as long as we don't understand that these people have every right not to trust the USA should be prosecuted for an insane lack of attention.

Keeping people incarcerated until the end of terrorism sounds pretty much like infinity to me. Jesus was considered a radical and there have been radicals since the beginning. Even if you believe the Bible, Eve was a radical, non-submissive wife or whatever she was and Cain was a jealous radical who thought his brother was getting more.

It is looking bleak for anyone in US custody to have anything resembling justice and anyone who is going to lock people up indefinitely, without charges and without trial, just swearing not to waterboard them seems a little empty in the areas the rule of law.

I wonder if the North Koreans will keep those two reporters in custody because of what they might do. I am pretty sure if they are released, at least one of them won't be magnanimous in their explanation of their treatment. They may be uncomplimentary to those who kept them locked up on trumped up or non-provable charges for a few months.

Multiply that to 84 months and you might just make a terrorist where there was no terrorist before.

How long is Obama planning to keep them? Is that going to be when every group in the Middle East is pleased at their treatment? Won't we have to stop Israel from killing 100 Palestinians for every Israeli killed?

I think Obama's idea of the rule of law that we have had for several centuries in the USA is different from my own.

Capture, Detention, Infinity.