So, Obama Lied…

It’s not exactly “Change We Can Believe In”, is it?

President Obama has decided that the Kangaroo Court Guantanamo Bay military tribunal system isn’t so bad, afterall:

President Obama halted the trials as one of his first acts on taking office in January, saying the US was entering a new era of respecting human rights.
The decision to revive the military trials has angered civil rights groups.
There are currently 241 detainees still at the US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

President Obama has pledged to close the camp by January 2010.

Some rights groups reacted with dismay to the news. They campaigned throughout the Bush administration for the military trials to be scrapped.

“It’s disappointing that Obama is seeking to revive rather than end this failed experiment,” said Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“There’s no detainee at Guantanamo who cannot be tried and shouldn’t be tried in the regular federal courts system.”

President Obama himself had criticised the military commission system during his election campaign, describing it as “an enormous failure”.

But, his aides pointed out on Thursday, the president never rejected the possibility of using military commissions altogether if they could be made fairer.

They highlighted legislation he supported as a senator in 2006 which was intended to do just that.

Ummm…hello? Do we really need to point out that at the time then-Senator Obama supported the aforementioned legislation in 2006, the democrats were part of the minority and thus their options were severely limited?

Who in the world is advising Obama these days? Mark Penn?

Glen Greenwald has more on Obama’s decision to do a U-turn on his decision to close Guantanamo:

Obama officials are making much of the fact that some Democrats, including him, supported a version of military commissions in October, 2006 — when Democrats were in the minority and that was the only alternative possible to the GOP-sponsored, Bush/Cheney-favored Military Commissions Act. At the time, it should be noted that Obama did say: “I believe we could actually set up a system in which a military tribunal is sufficient to make a determination as to whether someone is an enemy combatant.” But the fact that some Senate Democrats supported a modified version of these commissions when in the minority and when a compromise version was their only chance to block the much harsher military commission scheme sought by the GOP hardly proves that support for military commissions is consistent with the criticism launched for years at Bush’s system of “justice.” Manifestly, the case against Bush’s system was that military commissions in general are a dangerous perversion of justice.

What makes military commission so pernicious is that they signal that anytime the government wants to imprison people but can’t obtain convictions under our normal system of justice, we’ll just create a brand new system that diminishes due process just enough to ensure that the government wins. It tells the world that we don’t trust our own justice system, that we’re willing to use sham trials to imprison people for life or even execute them, and that what Bush did in perverting American justice was not fundamentally or radically wrong, but just was in need of a little tweaking. Along with warrantless eavesdropping, indefinite detention, extreme secrecy doctrines, concealment of torture evidence, rendition, and blocking judicial review of executive lawbreaking, one can now add Bush’s military commission system, albeit in modified form, to the growing list of despised Bush Terrorism policies that are now policies of Barack Obama.

Has it occurred to President Obama that by effectively embracing the very same Bush policies which he and others denounced so forcefully [and rightly so], he is essentially validating Dick Cheney’s current self-serving, Dr. Strangelove media tour where he says, in essence, “we were right to use any means necessary to try to achieve our goals even if a) they were illegal, b) we didn’t achieve those goals and c) even if we abused our power for political reasons.” Naturally, Cheney hasn’t said that in such explicit fashion, but it is essentially what he is saying, given all the recent disclosures about the Bush administration not only using torture, but using it for purely political reasons (ie. to establish a link between Saddam and Al Queda even long after we had invaded Iraq).

And does Obama really want to continue down the road of trashing everything this country stands for?

Over at the blog, Dissenting Justice, we get a very clear picture of Obama’s embrace of some of Bush’s most legally questionable and arguably ineffective policies with respect to the war on terror:

* Obama and members of his administration have embraced the use of rendition. Many of Obama’s most ardent defenders blasted progressives who criticized Obama on rendition as jumping the gun. Today, their arguments look even more problematic than in the past.

* Obama has invoked the maligned “state secrets” defense as a complete bar to lawsuits challenging potential human rights and constitutional law violations.

* Obama has argued that detainees at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan do not qualify for habeas corpus rights, even though many of the detainees at the facility were not captured in the war or in Afghanistan.

* Even though it no longer uses the phrase “enemy combatants,” the Obama administration has taken the position that the government can indefinitely detain individuals, whether or not they engaged in torture and whether or not they fought the United States on the “battlefield.” This logic combined with the denial of habeas to detainees in Afghanistan could make Bagram the functional equivalent of Guantanamo Bay.

And don’t forget things like his support of warrant-less wiretapping by the NSA, which essentially consists of a huge data mining operation irrespective of whether the emails, calls etc. are purely domestic or not. Good on ‘ya Obama! Now that is change we can believe in!

UPDATE: Alternet has a good commentary about how the mainstream, not-so-liberal media are helping to maintain the pro-war status quo by, no, not objective journalism, but by trying to shape public opinion by casting Obama as “mature” and more “presidential” by standing up to all us daisy-chain liberals on the far left. Never mind many in the military have spoken out against things like torture and the use of the military tribunals with these alleged terrorism suspects, some of whom are actually children (or at least were when they were detained).

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