Tag: Barack Obama

Owning up to our sins

Craig Crawford at the Congressional Quarterly offers the most compelling reason to release the so-called torture photos — which President Barack Obama has decided to keep hidden:

If the point is to learn the lessons of the past by not concealing or denying the past, perhaps it is best to face the horrors of what was done.

The argument that releasing torture photos puts us at risk by encouraging more terrorism seems phony to me. It’s just an excuse to pretend it didn’t happen.

Transparency brings honor in this case, despite the short-term embarrassment.

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A constitutional disconnect

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m missing something, but am I the only one who sees a massive contradiction between what President Barack Obama said today at the Naval Academy and what he said I just don’t see how this statement — his commitment to the “enduring truth”: “The values and ideals in (the Constitution) are not simply words written into aging parchment, they are the bedrock of our liberty and our security.”

We uphold our fundamental principles and values not just because we choose to, but because we swear to; not because they feel good, but because they help keep us safe and keep us true to who we are.

And yet, he is planning to create a class “detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people.” This group of detainees, he said yesterday at the National Archives, “are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.”

I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture — like other prisoners of war — must be prevented from attacking us again. Having said that, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded.

Essentially, the president has bought into the underlying argument that has underpinned every bad decision we have made as a nation for the last eight years — that we are in a state of war, that terrorism, rather than being a law-enforcement or intelligence issue, is a military problem that demands military solutions. That has put us in the position of using our howitzers to kill a scorpion.

Yes, the Obama plan is better than the Bush plan. But just about anything would have been an improvement. It doesn’t mean that Obama has found a way of mixing pragmatism and principle.

As I said, same as the old boss.

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What was that he said about change?

This is getting old. At every turn, it seems, the Obama administration has chosen to keep in place some noxious policy from his predecessor. The latest — following his decision earlier this week not to release photos of detainee abuse — is his decision to keep in place a version of President Bush’s military commissions.

Administration officials said they were making changes in the system to grant detainees expanded legal rights, but critics said the move was a sharp departure from the direction President Obama had suggested during the campaign, when he characterized the commissions as an unnecessary compromise of American values.

In a statement, Mr. Obama noted that the country had a long tradition of using military commissions, and said the changes would make the tribunals, to be used along with federal courts, a fairer avenue for prosecution. “This is the best way to protect our country, while upholding our deeply held values,” Mr. Obama said.

The commissions are run by the Pentagon under a 2006 law passed specifically for terrorism suspects, in part to make it easier to win convictions than in federal courts. The Obama administration suspended the military commission system in its first week in office.

The commissions, however, do not uphold our values so much as create a system that allows us to pretend we remain committed to a system of justice that puts the burden on the prosecution to prove its case while, all the while, ignoring that basic tenet.

Obama should have realized that he was driving down the wrong street on this one when he was praised by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky,

who has issued daily criticisms of the president’s plan to close Guantánamo, called the move to revive the tribunals “an encouraging development.”

Then there is this even more troubling reaction from David B. Rivkin Jr., a former Reagan official, who

said the decision suggested that the Obama administration was coming to accept the Bush administration’s thesis that terror suspects should be viewed as enemy fighters, not as criminal defendants with all the rights accorded by American courts.

“I give them great credit for coming to their senses after looking at the dossiers” of the detainees, Mr. Rivkin said.

Accepting the Bush thesis? Is this the change for which Americans voted?

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Connecting the dots

David Sirota connects the Panama free-trade pact to the president’s announced crack down on tax havens, pointing out that Panama is one of the bigger violators of tax-haven transparency rules around.

Sorry, but pretending to be for cracking down on tax havens while pushing a trade deal that rewards one of the biggest tax havens – and codifies that tax haven’s laws into our international trade system – insults the public’s intelligence.

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