Reloaded: WIBDI (What If Bush Did It)?
Following up on this earlier post, here is more food for thought on the matter:
By Matthew Rothschild
Obama is retreating again on his position against torture and rendition.
Bad enough that we learned last week that he had made an exception for “facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.”
This week we learned that Obama’s Administration has reaffirmed one of Bush’s egregious positions on rendition.
The case involves Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed, who had been a victim of extraordinary rendition and who claims he was tortured by guards in Morocco using a razor blade repeatedly on his penis.
The Bush Administration asked that Britain not release documents about Mohamed’s mistreatment. But it wasn’t just a request from Bush. It was a threat.
The Bush Administration said that if London released the documents, the United States would sever intelligence sharing with its traditional ally.
Now Obama, who has signed executive orders against torture and extraordinary rendition and who has vowed to improve relations with other countries, is simply following the bloody Bush script.
On Wednesday, the British high court refused to release the documents, saying that Obama’s “position remains the same” as Bush’s.
The British high court wasn’t happy about this.
“We did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence contained in reports by its own officials,” two justices said.
They added that it was “difficult to conceive” why the U.S. government still objected to the release of the documents, which would result in “no disclosure of sensitive intelligence mattes.”
The ACLU is not happy, either.
“Hope is flickering,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. “The Obama Administration’s position is not change. It is more of the same. This represents a complete turn-around and undermining of the restoration of the rule of law.”
(Keep reading ...)
Hello:
ReplyDeleteJust a couple of comments on Obama from a guy in Ottawa:
1. I'm relieved that he won because that means that the progeny of President Shrub lost.
2. The overt Obama-love displayed by Canadians is understandable but needs to be tempered. Canadians need to remember that he is the leader of the United States. His policies will reflect US interests. The only thing we can hope for is more flexibility when it comes to issues not vital to US interests.
3. He has already displayed a retraction to the right by appointing Milton Friedman-trained advisers, by attempting to mollify the military industrial complex by escalating the Afghan war without any long-term strategy or statements of what defines success and by displaying almost shocking naïveté in the US stimulus package by failing to see the willingness of the resentful neocons to sacrifice the American middle and lower classes in the name of politics and revenge.
Regards,
D. Noel
Exactly - on all three points ;-)
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