aging wastefully
When Obama hired Kumar as some sort of White House liaison to Hollywood’s less fortunate, I hoped he would turn the page on the indefinite detention of Guantanamo’s Uncharged Prisoners – a/k/a ‘Havana-Go-Home’ – the world’s biggest a capella group.
In fact, one of his first decrees as President was to ‘close Guantanamo prisons.’ But that was way back in 2009, before he implemented corporate Sharia law on our unsuspecting country.
When it comes to military commissions and indefinite detention, President Obama never listened to candidate Obamz. Why? Don’t you read US Weekly’s Executive Order section? 54% think BO drafted it better. (28% thought W and for some reason, 18% went with Emily Blunt.)
the order establishes indefinite detention as a long-term Obama administration policy and makes clear that the White House alone will manage a review process for those it chooses to hold without charge or trial.
Nearly two years after Obama’s pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo, more inmates there are formally facing the prospect of lifelong detention and fewer are facing charges than the day Obama was elected.
Conveniently, the White House blames this on Congress, and its bedwetters like Peter King who are scared shitless about heavily guarded, malnourished Pakistanis setting foot on American soil to stand trial.
But as Greenwald points out, this is what we in the cliche industry would call a ‘red herring.’
It is true that Congress — with the overwhelming support of both parties — has enacted several measures making it much more difficult, indeed impossible, to transfer Guantanamo detainees into the U.S. But long before that ever happened, Obama made clear that he wanted to continue the twin defining pillars of the Bush detention regime: namely, (1) indefinite, charge-free detention and (2) military commissions (for those lucky enough to be charged with something). Obama never had a plan for “closing Guantanamo” in any meaningful sense; the most he sought to do was to move it a few thousand miles north to Illinois, where its defining injustices would endure….
It was Barack Obama’s position — not that of Congress — that detainees could and should be denied trials, that our court system was inadequate and inappropriate to try them, and that he possessed the unilateral, unrestrained power under the “laws of war” to order them imprisoned for years, even indefinitely, without bothering to charge them with a crime and without any review by the judiciary, in some cases without even the right of habeas review (to see why claims of such “law of war” detention power are so baseless, see the points here, especially point 5).In other words, Obama — for reasons having nothing to do with Congress — worked from the start to preserve the crux of the Bush/Cheney detention regime. Even with these new added levels of detention review (all inside the Executive Branch), this new Executive Order is little more than a by-product of that core commitment…
Private Santiago Ahmed was never to be transferred from the base at all, was he Mr. President?!
In high school, I received a 4-hour detention for messing around and “accidentally” breaking a chalkboard. Luckily, this was before Glenn Beck revealed the sanctity of the writing surface, so I wasn’t thrown in prison at 16 – like dozens of the prisoners at Guantanamo. Maybe one of them is guilty as well.
Gratuitous World 