Apr 15 2009
Change of venue, anyone?
I just read this article by Glenn Greenwald about how President Obama doesn’t appear to dissent from a Bush Administration decision which essentially moved the prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to a place in Afghanistan called Bagram. The way it works is this: after the Boumediene v Bush ruling in 2008, Guantanamo Bay prisoners were given habeus corpus rights (what a novel idea), which was a great inconvenience to the War on Terror, so
a new prison in Bagram, outside of United States constitutional jurisdiction, was established. It makes sense that the Bush administration would want to carry on business as usual; the top priority during that presidency was fighting terrorism. I do not understand why Barack Obama thinks it is a good idea to support the previous administration’s decision. While I never toted President Obama as a savior of any sorts, I am quite disappointed in this decision. This is a bad call.
My objections are simple ones: The United States of America is not supposed to police the world. If people are doing bad things in other countries, we have no right to step in, arrest people, and imprison and torture them. I don’t believe the government has the right to wrongfully imprison and torture its own citizens either - that would make us just like the terrorists and despots we have been fighting with for the past decade.
Leaving that aside, I do not see how it is appropriate to arrest people and then ship them to Afghanistan to be imprisoned. First of all, if the United States does not have to follow its own laws there, how can it maintain a prison? Logically, this does not make sense, and it looks like a formula for disaster. Eventually someone at Bagram will wonder why the Americans are in charge even though they have no legal bearing in Afghanistan, and the result will be a terrible mess.
As Greenwald posits in his editorial, it’s one thing to capture people in Afghanistan and imprison them; it’s another thing entirely to capture people elsewhere and move them to this super prison.
If you have a problem with the current disregard for civil liberties and basic human rights, please contact the White House and express your concerns.
I think the same national security people who advised Bush are advising Obama.
That or Obama is just another fucking politician.
Likely, both are true.
Obama is indeed another politician playing the same old game, which is why, while I have faith that things will improve during his administration, I do not think that we will see the wide sweeping CHANGE that was his platform. He is neither the Messiah his supporters tote him to be nor the Socialist downfall his critics consider him. Barack Obama is a man and a politician, so I agree with you there.
It’s also likely that the same people are advising him on national security. I personally would like to see some new faces in those positions.