[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Change You Can Parse

[Bill Totten]

Obama Abandons Bush's Talk, Keeps His Walk

by Ted Rall

rall.com (March 19 2009)


You can't blame Dick Cheney for being annoyed at Barack Obama. Obama is
closing Guantanamo. He's ordering the CIA to interrogate prisoners
according to the rules written in the Army Field Manual, which doesn't
allow torture. He's even phasing out such classic Bushian phrases as
"enemy combatant" and "war on terror".

But the dark prince of neoconservatism should relax. Obama's inaugural
address may have promised to "reject as false the choice between our
safety and our ideals", but - in all the ways that matter - he's keeping
all of Bush's outrageous policies in place. Sure, he talks a good game
about "moving forward". But nothing has really changed. From reading
your e-mails to asserting the right to assassinate American citizens to
bailing out companies whose executives pay themselves big bonuses,
Obama's changes are nothing but toothless rhetoric.

Closing Gitmo, reported The New York Times, was merely "a move that
seemed intended to symbolically separate the new administration from
Bush detention policies. But in a much anticipated court filing, the
Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain
terrorism suspects there without criminal charges, much as the Bush
administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who
can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by
the Bush administration."

What will happen to the 241 POWs still at Gitmo? They won't be called
"enemy combatants" anymore but most won't be going home. "The filing
signaled that, as long as Guantanamo remains open, the new
Administration will aggressively defend its ability to hold some
detainees there", wrote the Times. Where will they go after that?

Welcome to Gitmo II - courtesy of Barack Obama.

Countless victims have been tortured by US military personnel at Bagram,
the US airbase in Afghanistan where Bush imprisoned 600 people without
charges. Some were murdered in the camp's notorious "salt pit". "Even
children have not been spared", says Amnesty International.

Now Bagram is being expanded - nearly doubled in size - in order to
accommodate 200-plus detainees from Gitmo, as well as future POWs from
Obama's expanded war against Afghanistan. As bad as Guantanamo was,
conditions at Bagram are worse.

Unless you believe indefinite detention without due process to be
torture, Obama says his detainees won't be tortured. Mostly. Probably.
Maybe. The Washington Post quotes an Administration insider as saying
that the CIA will enjoy "more leeway" than the Army Field Manual allows,
in order to "take into account the differences between battlefield
interrogations and those aimed at eliciting intelligence about terrorist
groups and their plans".

Extraordinary renditions, the Times reports in a different article, will
continue under Obama. "In little-noticed confirmation testimony
recently", says the paper, "Obama nominees endorsed continuing the CIA's
program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal
rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials
even if they were arrested far from a war zone".

During the 2008 campaign Obama's critics accused him of saying nothing,
albeit beautifully. Now that we've gotten to know him a bit, it's time
to refine that assessment: He's just a weasel. An eloquent weasel. But a
weasel who says the right things while doing the opposite.

On March 9th Obama ordered federal agencies to suspend Bush's infamous
"signing statements", sneaky documents issued after the signing of a
bill that ordered government agencies not to enforce the very same bill
he'd just approved in front of the cameras. Signing statements, says the
American Bar Association, use one-man dictatorial rule to negate the
people's will as expressed by Congress and are thus "contrary to the
rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers".

"Yet two days later - literally - Obama signed a $410 billion spending
bill and appended to it a signing statement claiming that he had the
Constitutional authority to ignore several of its oversight provisions",
writes Glenn Greenwald of Slate.

Greenwald regrets having to quote the vile Rich Lowry of the right-wing
National Review magazine. So do I. But even the right is right sometimes:

Unlike the word count limit of this column, Obama's perfidy knows no
limits. He's already become more dangerous to democracy and basic human
rights than George W Bush. Unlike Bush, he has no political opposition.
Cheney may nitpick, but most Republicans are happy to see Bush's
policies remain in place. Meanwhile, liberals remain loyal, silent, and
tacitly pro-torture.

Copyright 2009 Ted Rall

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/?uc_full_date=20090319


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