Does Cheney Make Obama Look Good Enough?

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Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) said, "The president wrapped himself in the Constitution and then proceeded to violate it by announcing he would send people before irredeemably flawed military commissions and seek to create a preventive detention scheme that only serves to move Guantanamo to a new location and give it a new name." For that see #5 below.

3. Those ordered released by the courts. "I cannot ignore these rulings because as president I too am bound by the law," Obama said. But he never mentioned and has perhaps never before mentioned the Convention Against Torture, the Anti-torture Act, the War Crimes Act, the UN Charter, the Freedom of Information Act, or the Geneva Conventions as laws he is bound to enforce as well as obey.

4. Those who can be safely transferred to another country. Obama said his team had identified 50 thus far who fit this category.

5. Those who cannot be prosecuted but pose a clear danger to the American people. For example, they've expressed allegiance to Osama bin Laden (something a judge did rule yesterday was grounds for holding people indefinitely without charge, but replace "Osama bin Laden" with "Communism" and then think about it). They are at war with the United States, Obama said of such people, blurring the definition of war exactly as Bush and Cheney did.

Obama proposed to construct a "legitimate legal framework" for category 5. To do this, he said, he'll create judicial and congressional oversight, "consistent with our values and our Constitution". That sounds better than Cheney-Bush but is still based on the fundamental lie that it is legal to imprison people indefinitely without charge. How is a court and a congress to find someone deserving of incarceration but neither guilty nor innocent, and to do so without a trial? Will such non-trials be public? Obama never suggested that they would be.

Managing Attorney for CCR's Guantanamo project Shayana Kadidal commented: "Preventive detention goes against every principle our nation was founded on. We have courts and laws in place that we respect and rely on because we have been a nation of laws for hundreds of years; we should not simply discard them when they are inconvenient. The new president is looking a lot like the old."

Obama claimed that those in the photos he just decided not to release (if courts go along with him) have already been held accountable and that nothing has been withheld to protect anyone from prosecution. This is a nonsensical claim, given that 2,000 photos would strongly motivate the demand for prosecution of those higher up by revealing to people who cannot read the written word the systemic nature of the torture regime.

Obama did mention transparency by saying that he had campaigned promising it and that he understands people's desire for accountability. When he doesn't release information, he said, he will make sure there is oversight by Congress or the courts. Yeah? The courts said to release the photos. How will getting a judge to accept defiance of the decision help?

Obama did not discuss his justice department's recent assertions of "state secrets" power but instead asserted principles exactly contrary to those actions. The "state secrets" power, he said, should not be abused merely because information reveals violation of laws or embarrasses the government. He said his administration was doing a "review" and would follow "a formal process" before asserting the privilege, at least in the future, and would tell Congress why, in each case, it had done so. But that is not the same as allowing courts and the congress to see the information in closed session and overrule a decision. Telling congress (or the public??) what you did is not the same as Congress making the decision. Obama called the other branches of government "co-equal," ignoring the fact that congress in the Constitution is far and away the most powerful branch of our government, and the fact that the president is that now. Obama never mentioned the State Secrets Protection Act, a bill in congress now that would give courts the power to review and reverse state secrets claims.

Attorney General Eric Holder recently refused to tell the House Judiciary Committee whether the president could throw out an entire case, not just block one piece of evidence, by claiming "state secrets". Holder also refused to say that the president cannot hold people indefinitely without charge. Obama is currently doing so in Bagram (unmentioned on Thursday) and elsewhere, including Guantanamo, and did not foreswear that power in his speech.

All of which sounded ominous until the Dark One appeared immediately following Obama's speech preempting the usual media chatter with his own, which my notes recorded thus:

9-11, everything changed, blah, fear, horror, 9-11, blah blah, everything changed, blah blah blah, We saved lives with illegal spying, blah, blah, no evidence, NY Times treasonous, blah blah blah blah blah, We saved lives through "tough interrogations" blah blah, no evidence, blah, blah, Only the highest value detainees were tortured, blah, blah, never mind the photos we've already seen, the Red Cross report, the endless accounts from victims and participants, blah blah.

We had to get information out of people fast, blah, never mind that Ali Soufan said torture is slower as well as produces nothing, blah blah. Abu Ghraib was a few sadistic bad apples, blah, blah, blah BLAH!

Cheney denounces Obama's renaming of "war on terror" and "enemy combatants" not because Obama is continuing the policies under new names but because he supposedly isn't.

Cheney points out that Obama has reserved for himself the authority to order torture if he deems it necessary. Cheney denounces not this imperial assertion of power but Obama's criticism of Cheney-Bush's torturing.

Cheney again makes his claim about memos that he knows cannot and no doubt always knew could not be released because of Bush-Cheney policies, and which Senator Russ Feingold says do not show what Cheney claims. But Cheney now says that Obama can release the memos if he chooses to and dares him to do so.

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David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press and of the introduction to "The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. (more...)

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