« None dare call it usury | Main | Palinodus? »

Change, yes. Hope, no.

By Michael J. Smith on Saturday May 23, 2009 04:20 PM

It's remarkable, isn't it, how Obie has managed to abolish due process of law -- and nobody who has noticed has said anything about it.

Here's the New York Times:

Obama Would Move Some Detainees to U.S.

In a speech at the National Archives here, Mr. Obama gave a full-throated defense of his antiterrorism policies and his commitment to closing the Guantánamo prison....

“We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security,” Mr. Obama declared.

In other words, Mr Humanitarian is going to close Guantanamo, and bring the inmates there to the US, and immure them in one of those horrific "supermax" prisons, and throw away the key -- without ever having brought them to trial and proven their guilt.

Obie has, in other words, ratified the Bush doctrine that the Prez can issue lettres de cachet for anybody he deems a threat to national security.

But Obie has also improved on Bush. Bush at least retained the fig leaf: you couldn't do this kind of thing on American soil. You had to preserve the decencies by doing it offshore.

Obie, by contrast, has eliminated the due-process clause without any quibbles; without even a stroke of the pen. We're going to lock people up indefinitely, without trial, whenever we want to. Get used to it.

And the good gray Times, and all my neighbors who got drawn into the maelstrom by falling in love with Obie -- they're focused on instrumental issues. Is supermax good enough? Is it fair to the good people of Canon City, Colorado?

Comments (14)

Not quite nobody. Glenn Greenwald has been vocal, as has Jonathan Turley here. Rachel Maddow, too, actually.

"He just needs more time."

MJS:

And my good-hearted, high-minded neighbors will give him as much as he wants.

MJS:

Thanks for the links, JL. Maddow I don't follow -- her flippant smugness annoys me too much -- but if she's on the side of the angels too, then good for her.

MJS:

Update -- After reading JL's comment I went searching for a Maddow item on the new Obama policy of imprisonment at the cops' pleasure. Found one, which indeed isn't bad.

She's quite sharp when she picks out the "embarrassing" part of Obie's speech -- at just about 4:15 in the clip. It's fascinating to watch the guy. His face kind of melts. He pauses, he stammers. The deep falsity and wickedness of what he's saying is clearly taking something out of him.

He hasn't been a Democrat quite long enough, it appears.


op:

I think u'll
Find plenty. Of pwogs able to castigate
Torturer in chief
That will give
a garden pass to detainers in chief
If the DnC
is
"One of us"
meritudinarians

How's Maddow on afpak?

Is corporate sponsored humane empire worse then tally waggles
swaddling and stoning their ladies

I. Reminded of the humane knock out gas
Used by the flying technauticals
to. Subdue the
London ruins
war lord's horde
In cameron menzies shapes of things to come

Nurse ratchet
Hegemony

Michael Hureaux:

How could anyone so poetic and patriotic create such ad hoc blah blah blah? I dunno. How could Woodrow Wilson call for screens between black and white workers in public offices, and extoll D.W. Griffith's love letter to the KKK as "history written in lightning", or march merrily off behind J.P. Morgan's campaign to reshape the world with the first modern European tribal war? Maybe something happens to those Ivy League professorial types once they learn the "practical demands" of their type of political power. Or maybe, as A. Silber has suggested many times, Obama or anyone else who's aimed for the U.S. presidency in the last few decades have never been anything but a bunch of megalomaniacal putzes to begin with.

Son of Uncle Sam:

Yeah its as messed up as the TV show Dallas DNA. It's the show where they release prisoners who were never guilty after in some cases 25 years. 19 out of the 40 that have been tested have been exonerated. No one gives a shit about those poor bastards either. Texas Justice??

Son of Uncle Sam:

And as for the guests of Cuba.... Who knows what the hell they do in Iraq and Afganistan if you're a suspected bad guy..... but it's probably not a real good spot to be in....since you'd be guilty untill proven innocent, whats so different about their dilemma whether it's in Colorado, Cuba of the Mid East? Still wrong, but I'll rationalize for my Uncle

Al Schumann:

The detainees' situation is the cruise missile liberal dream come true. No matter how bad it gets, they can cry procedural determinism, wring their hands and "reluctantly" join forces with their corporate millenarian playmates to make it worse. They get all the fun of vicious wingnut misanthropy plus the fraudulent mantle of concern and vicarious sense of victimhood that defines liberalism.

Son of Uncle Sam:

Al-couldn't agree more!! They'd be right too as well... but how could anyone acknowledge it(left or right)?...who wants to ?? I'm pretty Liberal on freedoms(actually extreme) but this bees nest...I'm out! Defend rights or the variable?...Let the liberals feast........... they'll lose> it's TNT. A gun to one's head......I'm a vet from this millenium but trying to read this disaster ........WELL....
There are bigger problems... let the prisoners eat three times a day for a change.....(so arrogant I know, guys w/ families but...).....

Al Schumann:

A little thought experiment, for the fun of it.

The right thing to do is also the practical thing. Turn the poor fellows loose, wherever they ask to be let go, and give them a hefty sum in reparations. Trumpet the benevolence of the gesture and the remorse over their cruel treatment -- remorse that should be shared by the wingnuts, but won't be because they hate America. If any of the detainees later show up as evildoers, blame the wingnuts for driving them mad through torture. In laying on the blame, pay particular attention to the sexual molestation torture. Tar the wingers as pathetic, hive mind perverts, who can't even take personal initiative when it comes to molestation (serious people get their sick freak on without needing a chain of command). If any detainees later open a car dealership or Kentucky fried franchise, claim credit for teaching them free enterprise. This is an eminently practical plan. It's lurid enough to drown out the professional paranoid panic artists. It's got sloppy sentimentalism too, for the weeping people mourning the death of national nobility in front of their televisions. It's cheap, and every journalist in need of copy will crawl a mile over broken glass to heap praise on Good King Obama.

The Dems can't do that, needless to say. It would go against every part of their business model. But there's no risk at all for them. The only risk they face at all lies in what they're currently doing: botching the equivocation, botching the presentation of indignation.

Son of Uncle Sam:

I'm sold- mostly cause I want to see more KFC franchises, but yeah....we could always kill them later...So they'd be like our manchurian candidates only from the blue grass state...I wonder what a mid-east version of Billy Ray Valentine would be like-probably alot of fun to watch

Al Schumann:

I was joking about the KFC franchises and car dealerships, but I wasn't joking much.

Most of the detainees had the bad luck to be working for the wrong warlord at the wrong time. Working for a warlord is comparatively better than being one of the people the warlord harvests, but not by much. As their warlord/boss lost control and power, they were worth money to anyone who could snitch them into trouble. The people snatching them were assigned the task of collecting sufficient bodies to convince the home audience that the "leadership" meant business. If the body in question had a gun and some ammo, that was good enough for government work.

I'd bet that if they were given enough money to resettle prosperously, a full, sincere, very public apology and a chance to testify at the trials of their tormenters, they'd be happy to let bygones be bygones. This minimally decent outcome won't happen, clearly. There's not a chance. The people in a position to make decisions regarding their fate have a hatred for the national interest that's mind boggling. Anything that might advance it terrifies them.

Post a comment

Note also that comments with three or more links may be held for "moderation" -- a strange term to apply to the ghost in this blog's machine. Seems to be a hard-coded limitation of the blog software, unfortunately.

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on Saturday May 23, 2009 04:20 PM.

The previous post in this blog was None dare call it usury.

The next post in this blog is Palinodus?.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Creative Commons License

This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Powered by
Movable Type 3.31