Ray McGovern’s Op-Ed for Antiwar today entitled Washington Post Weighs in on the Wonders of Torture is not merely a must read but an absolute Tour de Force.

August 30, 2009

Justin Raimondo asks the obvious question today regarding President Obama’s speech in Cairo – he talks the talk – but will he walk the walk? Given the embarrassing contradiction served up yesterday regarding plans to contradict SOFA while the President was claiming that it would be observed, it’s a fair question.

Israel responded to the speech by claiming that they would not halt settlement expansion in the West Bank because of a secret agreement struck with the Bush Administration allowing them to continue – a deal that former Bush Administration officials claim was never made. Given the parties involved, who knows who’s telling the truth. After all, it’s taken the Israelis three years to even announce to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations that it would provide them with maps detailing where the IDF used cluster bomb ordinance in South Lebanon in 2006. The United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center of South Lebanon, the UN branch that is responsible for the defusing and removal of such ordinance, currently estimates that there are half a million to a million unexploded cluster bomblets in Southern Lebanon, and that since 2006 they have killed 30 civilians and injured a further 203.

June 5, 2009

Over the last few days I’ve had numerous conversations with various people about the direction of the Obama Administration and the fact that it is failing to uphold significant campaign promises. During those conversations I have been stunned at the perception of others that, despite the breaking of promises, President Obama should be given a break given the mess that he’s inherited. While I agree, to some extent, that US involvement in foreign conflicts is an area that will take the new administration time to get their heads around, the breaking of campaign promises is not something that should ever be met with a laissez-faire attitude.

Unfortunately, when it comes to US politics, and Canadian politics for that matter, ‘accountability’ is a hollow, worthless notion that serves no other purpose than to adorn campaign rhetoric. The truth of the matter is that re-election outweighs promises of accountability, which means that if your leopard has to change its spots to ensure that accountability promised doesn’t result in unpopularity, then spots get changes to stripes. That would be why we don’t actually hold politicians accountable, despite the fact that we like to think we do.

Let’s face it, a mannequin dressed up to look Presidential would have been a step up from George Bush. But therein lies the concern – given that, how many promises can President Obama get away with breaking simply because he’s not George Bush?

As Ivan Eland pointed out yesterday, the answer to the question is – quite a few…

“Unfortunately, politicians claim they don’t read opinion polls, while scrutinizing them even more closely than options for their next junket. This has been most evident recently in the civil liberties arena. On the same day he was inaugurated, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that would close Guantanamo prison in Cuba – a largely symbolic and overrated act to show his break with flagrant Bush administration abuses of civil liberties.

But Obama is not the only person in the Washington public relations circus who is perpetrating demagoguery on the issue. The Republicans, and now the Democrats, in Congress are fearmongering over the possibility that some of the Guantanamo inmates may come to the United States. In both cases, the politicians read the opinion polls and acted accordingly.”

[…]

“…although Obama has pledged to close Guantanamo, the act would be only symbolic if he retains all of the abuses that have gone on there. Torture and mistreatment happened at other U.S. prisons around the world, and Leon Panetta, Obama’s CIA director, has not ruled out allowing the CIA to use torture in extraordinary circumstances. In addition, Obama has refused to release photos of past prisoner abuse because he deemed them to be devoid of new illuminative value and claimed, without hard evidence, that U.S. troops overseas would be endangered by their release. But in a republic, should the government deny citizens the right to see what it has done – even if it is grisly or shameful?

Obama is retaining military commissions, which he vehemently criticized during the presidential campaign for their lack of due legal process. Despite his pledge to limit hearsay evidence and ban evidence obtained through torture, the tribunals are still kangaroo courts that do not meet constitutional standards of due process. Also, before he became president, Obama was one of many congressional Democrats in Congress to wail about warrantless wiretapping on people in the United States, only to eventually strengthen the law that allows such unconstitutional spying.

Despite all of the hubbub about the possibility of bringing Guantanamo prisoners to the United States, most scary are Obama’s recent musings about changing laws to allow preventive detention. When a president can yank people off the streets merely because he alleges that they are “dangerous,” throw them in jail, and hold them indefinitely without charge, we are on the road to dictatorship. Although Bush violated such habeas corpus rights, which have been one of the cornerstones of the rule of law in both Britain and the United States for centuries, Obama is talking about enshrining the violations into permanency. All of this shows that Obama is not restoring the republic, but has adopted a policy of Bush Lite, which retains some of the unneeded and un-American Bush policies. (I do not accuse people of “un-American” activities lightly, but this erosion of unique American freedoms does seem to fit the bill.)

And what of Congress? Democrats now control it and should be keeping Obama honest in rolling back the horrendous Bush practices. Instead, Republicans are squealing about having Guantanamo’s terrorists in our midst, and the scared Democrats are caving in to them. Yet American prisons seem to have been able to hold the perpetrators of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 without being attacked or having them escape. The same has been true for domestic terrorists, such as snipers John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo and Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols of Oklahoma City bombing fame. The town of Hardin, Mont., with a vacant correctional facility, didn’t think it that dangerous to hold Gitmo detainees and has offered to take them. Moreover, if U.S. prisons are off-limits to terrorists, where will any of those convicted be held?”

May 24, 2009 11 Comments

By way of Jason Ditz at Antiwar…

“President Obama’s tenuous claim to the antiwar community was already unraveling long before he formally took office. Shortly after the election his national security team’s extremely hawkish makeup was drawing concern. Two days after his inauguration, he had backed off his campaign promise to have all US troops out of Iraq in 16 months. Still, his supporters could find some measure of solace in his halting of the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay and his promises of a more transparent administration.

Or at least they used to be able to. In the past 48 hours the administration has backed off of the few scraps of significant policy revisions thrown to an electorate hungry for his campaign’s mantra of change. First, he overruled the Pentagon’s decision that undisclosed photos of detainee abuse could be released. Perplexingly, he insisted that the photos did not contain anything “particularly sensational,” before cautioning that making them public would imperil the troops and inflame anti-American opinion.

It was less than 48 hours later that the president confirmed that he was going to resume the military tribunals against detainees at Guantanamo Bay. He had previously ordered such tribunals halted when pledging to close the facility. Now instead of the rule of law, the administration is offering a modest selection of new “rights” detainees will enjoy, none of them particularly earth-shattering.

Even the pledge to close the detention center has become something of a hollow victory, amid reports that the administration is floating to Congress the idea of holding many of the detainees on American soil indefinitely and without trial. This legal sleight of hand would be accomplished through the creation of National Security Courts, which would be empowered to try detainees without the legal rights enjoyed in US criminal courts. The new courts would also provide an aegis for holding the detainees without trial while still appearing to have some measure of legal oversight on their captivity.”

May 16, 2009 4 Comments

From Antiwar…

“For the second time in four days, the United States has quashed an attempted United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate end to the war in the Gaza Strip. After the latest rejection, US envoy Alejandro Wolff declared that there was “no point” in the statement, because Hamas (who has previously suggested openness to a ceasefire) would never abide by it. Wolff added that it was unacceptable for the council to equate the killing of civilians by the Israeli government with the killing of civilians by Hamas, and that “Israel’s self-defense is not negotiable.”

The previous draft resolution also called for “an immediate ceasefire and for its full respect by both sides,” which the United States condemned as “one-sided.” The new draft seemed aimed at answering those concerns, as the British government suggested everyone was open to a resolution if the terms were right.

Yet this seems not to have been the case, and the US rejection this time appears to have nothing to do with the terms of the draft, and everything to do with the fact that it would call on Israel to stop its invasion. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the United States can veto any resolution, and has traditionally done so when the resolution would stand in the way of Israeli military action. As the toll continues to rise (passing 500 today) the UN will remain completely unable to act, barring a sudden and miraculous change of American foreign policy priorities.”

Four Israelis have died as a result of Hamas rocket attacks since the invasion began, with a handful of others injured, most of them only slightly. On the other hand, hundreds of Gazan civilians have been killed and perhaps a thousand injured, many seriously. The situation is so dire, in fact, that hospitals in Gaza are unable to cope with the influx of the wounded, lack supplies, and have to deal with intermittent power. Hamas or no, how that doesn’t spell humanitarian crisis is quite beyond me.

January 4, 2009 6 Comments