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The meaning of Change, post-inauguration
Cugel
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As a long-time lurker, the absence of discussion on the new administration's position on human rights has prompted me to venture an effort at a thread.
In light of recent events, it has become harder for me to deny that Obama has set a precedent of continuing, actively or passively, a number of policies held by the previous administration. This largely revolves around the rendition program and invocation of state secrets, particularly concerning the treatment of detainee Binyam Mohamed. Though recently released to Britain, The Observer reported that he has clearly experienced brutal torture in the past few weeks.
In addition, administration officials have not only refused to give out info how Mohamed was treated, but may have even threatened the British government to back down on investigation into the matter. I don't want to believe this. While I never hopped on the Obama bandwagon to the same extent as others, I have always thought him to be a very positive thing to happen for this country. Confronted with this evidence (much more and better detailed by Glenn Greenwald here and here) Obama's promise of Change seems half-hearted at best, deceitful at worst.
The main defense given seems to be that Obama needs to be given more time, especially in light of the financial crisis. While the economy is absolutely vital, this has nothing to do with expenditure of political capital, nor is it something that would have simply been overlooked in the hustle and bustle surrounding the stimulus package. Is there some other extenuating circumstance that I am missing?
Besides the usual bloggers like Greenwald and those over at the DailyKos, these stories seem to have been largely ignored by the American media. I suppose, however, that the story has come out at all and Mohamed has been released is more change than not.
tl;dr: How do you view the current and future fulfillment of campaign promises after Obama's first month in office? (note: the investigation of the actions of the previous administration, while important, is not the topic I'm going for here; I don't understand how certain people immediately jumped on the investigation and not, ya know, the whole torture and undue secrecy thing.)
In light of recent events, it has become harder for me to deny that Obama has set a precedent of continuing, actively or passively, a number of policies held by the previous administration. This largely revolves around the rendition program and invocation of state secrets, particularly concerning the treatment of detainee Binyam Mohamed. Though recently released to Britain, The Observer reported that he has clearly experienced brutal torture in the past few weeks.
Binyam Mohamed will return to Britain suffering from a huge range of injuries after being beaten by US guards right up to the point of his departure from Guantánamo Bay, according to the first detailed accounts of his treatment inside the camp.
In addition, administration officials have not only refused to give out info how Mohamed was treated, but may have even threatened the British government to back down on investigation into the matter. I don't want to believe this. While I never hopped on the Obama bandwagon to the same extent as others, I have always thought him to be a very positive thing to happen for this country. Confronted with this evidence (much more and better detailed by Glenn Greenwald here and here) Obama's promise of Change seems half-hearted at best, deceitful at worst.
The main defense given seems to be that Obama needs to be given more time, especially in light of the financial crisis. While the economy is absolutely vital, this has nothing to do with expenditure of political capital, nor is it something that would have simply been overlooked in the hustle and bustle surrounding the stimulus package. Is there some other extenuating circumstance that I am missing?
Besides the usual bloggers like Greenwald and those over at the DailyKos, these stories seem to have been largely ignored by the American media. I suppose, however, that the story has come out at all and Mohamed has been released is more change than not.
tl;dr: How do you view the current and future fulfillment of campaign promises after Obama's first month in office? (note: the investigation of the actions of the previous administration, while important, is not the topic I'm going for here; I don't understand how certain people immediately jumped on the investigation and not, ya know, the whole torture and undue secrecy thing.)
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The bolded part is where you are very, very wrong.
Starting off his presidential term with a witch hunt, no matter how justified, does expend political capital. Lots of it. That's not complicated to understand.
Are you trying to imply that opening investigations with the hope of them actually leading to appropriate punishments in response to the fuckmuppitry instigated by the previous administration isn't going to require political capital?
Edit: And fine, I'll bite, would allowing a British high court access to some of the pertinent documents really expend the amount of political capital as a full on investigation? This isn't the Bush administration on trial even, but the British government and their knowledge of whether the confessions of the detainee were extracted under torture or not. They're two very different levels, and by stonewalling completely now we reduce the possibility that real investigation will ever begin.
False. I read the BBC article, which interestingly enough said:
Even assuming the first part is true and threats were made, we're talking about not wanting details to be released on what is/could be an ongoing legal case. That's pretty much par for the course, and far from sinister.
This part was also interesting:
So where's that part where you linked proof of the Obama administration doing horrible things?
You were so wrong on the first one I'm not going to read the two fucking Salon articles you posted and scour them for bullshit. So it's on you now. Quote and link, from a reputable source, that "compelling evidence that the new administration has continued abuses."
I won't hold my breath, though.
But if that's the issue you have then ideally yes, I wish that he had managed to do so as well. I do not find it suspect or particularily disheartening if he hasn't managed it however. Probably because I'm rather skeptical the President can say "knock that shit off" from behind his desk in Washington and be listened to immediately by, for example, the people who have been running Guantánamo the way it's been run all these years.
So, yeah, I can believe that beatings are still issued in Guantánamo to some extent. One because it's a prison and two because I'm highly skeptical telling guards who are used to being able to beat prisoners to knock it the fuck off will get them to cease any and all beatings immediately. I have a feeling it's going to take more than that. That "more than that" is what I think would take poltical capital.
As for the undue secrecy thing as Nocturne pointed out you still haven't really provided anything indicating the problems you're attempting to bring to our attention exist. The article only seems to make accusations against the Bush administration which are pretty expected at this point.
Agreed and torture was gonna be stopped by McCain if he won as well.
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The first one? You mean this, reported in The Observer (the Sunday sister-paper to The Guardian)? That's not a reputable source? If that's what you think then I'm probably not going to be able to get through to you.
As for the Salon articles, just because they may hold a different bias than you does not mean that the reputable news articles the articles bring up are not valid. I linked to Greenwald's column because he has done a great job at compiling the unpleasant information.
Yes, it is part of an ongoing legal case, that's the point, he is charging that the British government has been complicit in his torture and the evidence that there is wrongdoing comes in the form of US government reports. Here I'll admit to a minor misreading, after several months, Mohamed's lawyers did gain access to the evidence, but the US has threatened over a more public release. While this does move the matter more into a grey area, it remains quite unpleasant, to say the lesat. Here, have a few quotes from the BBC, if that's credible enough for you:
Here Here, and, since you clearly did not read or did not read well the other articles, this from the same article gives some more background on whether or not there was a threat from the United States:
You must have skimmed the original BBC article I posted to have missed this: Who are you going to trust, David Milibrand, the UK Foreign Secretary who has an interest in maintaining UK/US relations or the judges looking into the case?
As for the invocation of state secrets, I will admit that it does have a lot to do with Bush, but political expediency is not a good reason to withhold information. The release of information as pertaining to cases brought by citizens would not bring about a witch hunt. You can find the current administrations continuation of Bush policies on charges brought by former detainees here from ABC or here from the New York Times. Of note:
While the executive order setting up the future end of the detention centers and restricting interrogation techniques is a massive improvement, it doesn't seem to have saved Mr. Mohamed from abuse since its enactment.
As for those of you saying that he either lacks the time or the power to keep government employees from committing crimes, are you serious? The first just isn't true, and the latter, if true, would be really, really bad. If you're right that it's just the facility managers just turning a blind eye, then I do hope to see a statement in the next week now that we have the clear possibility that the abuses have continued. It needs to be stopped, now.
Edit: And to make this even more ridiculously long, an excerpt from a Daily Press Briefing on Feb. 5th, documenting the current administration thanking the Brits for not making public information on US torture practices
Or is this a case of "anyone employed by the US government is personally ordered to do shit by the president" and not "new dude took office, old holdouts bitter, continue doing bad shit before someone with authority shows up to enforce new policies"
Because anyone who has ever worked anywhere can tell you: new policies don't take effect until someone notices they're not being followed and sends an enforcer/threatens the bosses.
Gitmo's guards are the people who did the abusing. They're not going to stop because a piece of paper said knock it off. They're going to stop when new officers show up with direct orders to drum anyone out of the service who violates the new piece of paper.
This is the same shit as the whole "ZOMG THEY'RE STILL CITING STATE SECRETS" before we even had a new AG confirmed who could take a look at what was being claimed. So in that case "they" are the exact same people as last year, they just haven't been replaced or given new orders yet.
He signed the order on his second day in office. 2 days before that he had no actual power. He couldn't really have done anything if he wanted.
What exactly did you want from the man? He is closing the prison, re-evaluating the cases of the detained, and putting an end to the abuse.
You saying he didn't do these things fast enough or effectively enough doesn't sit well considering how quickly he signed the order once he took office. Find something else to complain about.
I must admit that the claim of post-inauguration torture has not been taken up outside The Guardian gives me doubts as to its veracity, but I would not be terribly surprised for it to be something a lot of major outlets would pass over.
Several weeks meaning 3 in this case apparently. The abuse this man received in the meantime is the responsibility of the people that abused him. Obama can't be all places at once to make sure grown adults behave themselves. It's now his responsibility to deal with the offenders accordingly, but to put this all on him is a bit of a stretch.
Except these grown adults not behaving themselves are government employees. Yes, a good part of Obama's responsibility lies in dealing with the offenders. The offenses passed on his watch; he can't be everywhere but that does not mean he should not own up to the mistakes made.
There aren't cameras in the facility? Observers from an outside agency couldn't be placed in the camps to monitor that their fellow government employees are behaving morally and within orders from the chief executive? And as several people here have already argued "What can you expect out of people that have been doing these things for the past few years," please don't say, "Well, he could never have known..."
The whole point of that place was that there weren't any observers and they could do whatever they wanted. The organizational effort to add transparency to the place isn't worth it when you just sign the order to close it down....
Also, hindsight is 20/20, if anything ever goes wrong someone will say "why wasn't there more transparency, we should have seen this sooner and acted accordingly".
The President sets the policies as best he can through Executive Orders, and the Veto. Actual laws are created and enforced through Congress, the Senate, and the Justice Department.
For the Justice Department, from what I understand, Obama is just getting his appointments confirmed and they are just starting their jobs, so it may take them a while before they can start prosecuting the guards at Gitmo. Again, that isnt something that Obama is responsible for though.
MWO: Adamski
When did Executive Orders become suggestions?
If we already knew that they needed prosecution, why would they be allowed continued free-reign at the facility? I'm sure the President more means beyond immediate prosecution from ensuring that people are not committing war crimes at a government facility. You're saying, "Oh, let's make sure we're not committing acts of torture as soon as it's more convenient/easy."
The President is not responsible for what the NSA and CIA tell MI5 or MI6 tbh, those guys are in the job 30+ years and although they answer to him they have mandate to make their own decisions I am sure.
I understand how your priorities line up - with the closing of gitmo, detaining of prisoners, etc. being at the top of your list to do.
But if Obama made that his off the bat priority rather than getting the country economy straight first, I would regret voting for him.
He signed the executive order, its the only thing he could do quickly before getting caught up in more important matters, like the stimulus. Give him a few months, hell maybe even a year. Its on his list of things to do - probably really high on it. He's just not there yet.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Until then though, if I become CEO of a multinational corporation tomorrow, chances are anything I declare beyond the font being changed on the corporate letterhead will take months to actually happen. And the old letterhead will still be used by some branch office in bumblefuck until they run out of it and order new shit.
He signed the orders to stop shit. Now he needs the people in place to enforce these orders. If they don't do that and he doesn't replace them for it, then it's his fault. But right now it's the equivalent of calling Iraq Obama's war in Iraq, because suddenly his name is at the top of the Org chart.
I'm unsure where you got that from, since most of the articles were quite clear on the fact that he was a detainee of the US at Guantanamo Bay, besides for when he was outsourced to Morocco for extra-special torture.
If you knew you were to become the CEO of a multinational corporation in a few months, and not only knew about public outcry against your accounting branch playing football using puppies as footballs, but had personally promised that it would be stopped, you'd be pretty incompetent to not watch the culprits very carefully, if not fire them outright.
- The kind of responsible a captain is for his ship. If some maintenance guy blows up a boiler and the ship sinks, the captain is still responsible even though he didn't know until after the fact.
- The kind of responsible where someone actually has control over the situation.
Obama may be the first, but he's not the second. He's been in office a month, has ten thousand fires to put out, and this is just hitting the news now. What was he supposed to do, take all the soldiers out of Gitmo on day one and replace them with a new unit just in case there were some assholes in the old bunch?
The US allows other countries to interrogate prisoners they hold. Much like if another country catches a criminal that the US is interested in, they will let the US interrogate them, and sometimes even extradite them.
MWO: Adamski
This would be sort of true, sort of not. You'd be responsible to tell the people in charge and so on down the chain to knock it the fuck off.
You would not, however, be expected to fly to the branch office and sit in their cube watching them work. That's a monumental waste of your time.
So far, Obama's set the order and formed a tasked the formation of a group to sit down and investigate key abuses. That's about as far as his direct action is required until the group says "hey, we found nobody's following your orders", at which point he punishes them accordingly. But the President does not actually fly down to gitmo to give employee reviews. That's completely irresponsible unless absolutely nothing else in the free world requires his attention.
But the use of the state secrets privilege and using Bagram as an indefinite detention facility with no charges ever being filed are actually concerning to me as continuations of Bush policy in the terrorism related field. Also Greg Craig's quote about not wanting to lessen the power of the Presidency. On this particular issue I'm encouraged but still wary about the new administration.
I should note that I'm a torture hawk for lack of a better word and want everything related to it ended and the people responsible charged.
And I entirely understand how you could think that, but that's not been my intention. These are the things that worry me. I see a President who has either slipped up on simple fixes for stopping human rights abuses or deliberately side-stepped the matter. I understand that he has his hands quite full with the economy, but I honestly cannot imagine how he can be so busy as to overlook the possibility of torture still being committed by Americans. Some of the responses that my post has received thus far seem to me giving unbelievable amounts of leeway on the matter. And others (Nocturne, I'm looking mainly at you) have been outright horrible in their aggressive lack of reading comprehension and throwing up of strawmen.
I understand these things need time, but when did torture become a non-issue? Give it another year? Tell that to those who are still detained, tell them that America cares about their basic human rights, but cannot find the time to look into it. War crimes are still war crimes even when you've promised they would be stopped, and thus pretty darn important.
I don't want to lambast anyone, I'm genuinely frightened of how this seems to have been pushed into the corner now that Bush is out of office. I believe that Obama will put an end to torture. Eventually. I just cannot understand how liberal-minded people are reacting with such disinterest on the matter.
It's a task force. It has a deadline to work out the logistics of closing an active prison and rapidly (for the government) sifting through and sorting who it's charging and who it's letting go.
Does it suck from a JUSTICE point of view? yeah. But expecting it to be over two months after the inauguration is about as rational as expecting us to leave Iraq in a week, or fix the economy in a month. Shit takes time. If he hadn't even commented on it yet, I'd be worried. If the deadline comes and goes with a "well it's COMPLICATED" response, I'll be livid. But I've never seen good things come from swift government.
Disengaging 150k+ US troops and their support personnel takes time, and is very dependent on conditions on the ground. Ensuring that torture is not continued in a US-run facility is on no level comparable.
Holder is in Guantanamo, as of today, which is a step in the right direction. The Defense Department also disputes that there has been any wrongdoing. I suppose we'll find out in due time.
I also agree that the recent decision on Bagram prisoners is disheartening.
Clearly we should impeach Obama for taking care of what ultimately effects Billions of people first.
I suppose it stems from a revulsion towards the bandwagon mentality that seems to permeate the majority of Obama supporters. I voted for Obama because he was the best choice given, the issue of human rights was not, and remains not my top priority. I see the many fellow "liberal-minded" people dismissing problems that would have been pounced upon and loudly waved around were the previous administration still in office. This does not mean I want overreaction, but it concerns me that Obama is given a free pass. I suppose that my perception of the administration's multitasking is a bit different than the majority's, so for now all I can do is sit back down and be more patient.
Despite some disquieting decisions or oversights, I do believe that Obama will eventually greatly rescind the human rights abuses routinely carried out by the Bush administration, and even much of the expanded surveillance powers. This does not mean that, until then, we should hesitate to point out mistakes or wrongdoing in current actions.
What did you like better, the Marc Rich pardon or the upholding of the Bush state secrets interpretation? Or are you talking about all the pretty things he said at his confirmation hearing. He's just another sleaze ball.
Also, I had a big long post, but it was kind of blowhardy. So, question to the thread:
Should there be criminal investigations and prosecutions of Bush administration members for war crimes?
Sadly, no... But here's a list of what you will get out of Rock Band:
[too much to fit in a sig, thats what]