Friday, May 21, 2010

Obama Keeps Detainees In Perpetuity Without Charges - Just Like Bush

More change we can believe in from President Accountability:

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.

The detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base.

But a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the three had no right to habeas corpus hearings, in which judges would review evidence against them and could order their release. The court reasoned that Bagram was on the sovereign territory of another government and emphasized the “pragmatic obstacles” of giving hearings to detainees “in an active theater of war.”

The ruling dealt a severe blow to wider efforts by lawyers to extend a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A lower court judge had previously ruled that the three Bagram detainees were entitled to the same rights, although the courts had found that others captured in Afghanistan and held there were not.

A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, said that if the precedent stood, Mr. Obama and future presidents would have a free hand to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without having to prove in court that their suspicions about such prisoners were accurate.

“The thing that is most disappointing for those of us who have been in the fight for this long is all of the people who used to be opposed to the idea of unlimited executive power during the Bush administration but now seem to have embraced it during this administration,” she said. “We have to remember that Obama is not the last president of the United States.”

Obama is a fascist and a war criminal - just like Bush.

It's a shame so many of the Daily Kossacks and Talking Points Memo people who would have been screaming about this shit during the Bush administration either lack the guts or the integrity to open their mouths now.

Same goes for Obama's lobbing of missiles at Pakistani weddings and the like.

When Bush and Cheney did it, it was bad; when Obama does it, it's good.

Fucking hypocrites - all of 'em.

And the head hypocrite currently inhabits the White House.

9 comments:

  1. Interesting bits on President Accountability and the Gulf oil spill tragedy here:

    http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6017/laying_bare_the_myth_of_the_left/

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  2. Thanks for that link, Melody. Sirota is absolutely right.

    Might have to blog that this weekend.

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  3. Hey RBE,

    I've been reading your blog for a little bit and I'm just wondering has your opinion changed on Obama or have you always disliked him?

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  4. Same thing with the wars over there in general . . . when Bush was in all we heard in the media was "Bush/war,Cheny/war,Bush/war,Cheny/war . . . Now? On the Obama/war? Not much at all. He's protected. This makes him all the more dangerous. This IS a guy who'll seek to stay in forever as President I believe as dictator In Chief. Sounds paranoid, but I think they'll legalize all of the illegals at the right time, socialize more businesses, and as the economy gets even worse, makes himself the savior. He'll try this ploy at least . . . pray he doesn't succeed.

    I fully expect us to go to war with Iran as well. As you can see with "The Press" over the teacher bashing issue, just about ANYTHING can be justified to the American Public through half truths and brain washing. As Hitler's guy Goebels said . . . "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

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  5. Did anyone actually believe that an inexperienced Chicago lawyer community organizer with an Ivy League academic world view would make a good president? The most notable accomplishment from Mr Hopey Changey is remarkable demagoguery, partisanship and shady back room dealings...with a dollop of loony lefty ideas. Unsurprising.

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  6. Hi Esteban,

    My opinion about him was set after the '06 election when he appeared on FOX NEWS SUNDAY and lectured Democrats about the need to reach out to Christianists and "people of faith".

    He used the very frames the right wing and the media use to talk about liberals - i.e., godless abortion-loving baby killers - and it was then that I first saw he had no core "progressive" values but was willing to do or say anything to get elected.

    I paid very close attention to his education speeches. He used all the ed deform language to frame the issues - teachers were "bad" and needed to be held "accountable," school days and years needed to be longer, charter schools were good, teacher union rules were bad, etc. So when he announced for president, I was opposed to him on two counts: his ed policies sucked (and I thought they might even be worse than he was willing to let on to in public, but even I never thought they would be this bad) and he was untrustworthy - he had no core convictions other than assuaging his own ego and career.

    On the financial bailout, that surprised me a bit. I didn't think he was a total corporate whore, but had I paid a little closer attention to his career in Chicago, I would have known that he has always been very corporate friendly and up for sale to the highest bidder.

    On the war stuff, I always knew the anti-war folks were going to be surprised when he got elected. He is a military industrial complex guy, so it was quite obvious he was going to double down on Afghanistan (and he was upfront about that.) I did suspect he the Iraq pull-out timetable would continue to get delayed, and sure enough, it has. We are still there and actually have more troops overseas now than we did when Bush was president.

    On the environment, did I think he would reverse his anti-drilling stance. No, I didn't. But again, given his lack of core convictions, it is not a surprise. What does surprise me is that the green people haven't hammered him for it. They make excuses for his betrayal instead.

    As for health care, i am not surprised that it is a HMO giveaway. He made it very clear that he was ONLY in favor of an HMO giveaway that would mandate new customers for the insurance industry.

    So, to sum up: I began to despise him in '06 right after his election when I saw him in action.

    I have not trusted him on ANY issue since.

    The education issue was the one that turned me against him.

    But since then, his hypocrisy on the wars, renditions, illegal wiretapping (which he is doing), Gitmo, the financial bailouts and the Federal Reserve have helped me despise him even more.

    And before it is all said and done, I do hope to see him taken out the White House in handcuffs during a perp walk.

    Of course, I also said that about Bush, Cheney, Rove et al., and that never happened.

    But I can hope.

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  7. Hi Veteran Teacher,

    I think this president is very corporate friendly - in Ron Paul's words, he is a corporatist, just like the previous presidents have been - and every expansion of government power he has brought (and he has brought a lot) - from health care reform to ed deform to the market bailouts - has been to EXPAND corporate power, profits and influences.

    I don't see anything lefty about that. It's EXACTLY what George Bush did. Indeed Bush' medicare drug law and Obamacare come from the same place. The Bush bailouts and the Obama bailouts do too. And Obama is quintupling the corporate friendly excesses of Bush's NCLB in NCLB Jr.

    I would ABSOLUTELY agree with you about his past however - shady and b.s. it was.

    I voted for him only because eight years of Bush and the possibility of eight years of Palin softened me up. Even so, I had to hold my nose to do it.

    But that won't happen again. If he hasn't been impeached before 2012 (and if the Repubs retake the Congress, they just might get around to that), I will NOT be voting for him again.

    Or for any Dems (or Repubs for that matter) who support deform.

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  8. RBE,

    Thanks for responding. The problem about 2012 is that we will be stuck without a progressive candidate. We'll have Obama, some repub and possibly a third party candidate in Bloomberg. All of which will back the privatization of public education. It just bodes poorly for teachers.

    I can't help but think that I am on the losing side of a war that is already lost.

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  9. I know the feeling. As Diane Ravitch wrote the other night for the Class Size Matters dinner, the odds are daunting, but we must fight for public education anyway.

    But there are times I think, what am I doing this for? They have the money, the political power, the politicians in both parties and the media in their pockets.

    Hard to beat those odds.

    We shall try anyway.

    Eventually people will realize running schools like a business is not smart policy.

    Guess we'll just have to see what is left of the system by the time that happens.

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