roachboy

the conservative meme must be correct: see how identical obama and bush are:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/us...ef=global-home

sometimes the right makes me laugh and laugh.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

powerclown

It is discordant to me to see the The Agent of Change following in the foreign policy footsteps of his predecessor on terrorism. He represented the hopes and dreams of millions of idealistic people across the world. I'm not fully sure what to make of it. Is he doing it because the threats are real, or is he doing it for some other reason. If he's doing it for some other reason, what could that reason be? Is he joking? This is a man who ran and won the office of President of the United States on a platform of Change, the living breathing embodiment of an International Apology for the quasi-fascist policies of the Bush administration. Now we come to find out its business as usual. Where we duped? Tricked? Foisted? Propagandized? What the heck?

roachboy

snap out of it, powerclown.
you can do it.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

I've got a basement, I'll take a few detainees if the state or federal government can supply a few full time prison guards, at least until they can be tried. I'll even feed them. I just want this chapter in American history to end.

Paq

you know, you make a good point. If a rep would simply say, "You know, nobody wants these prisoners, but we need to move on and get past this, we will gladly house them in ____," and poof, instant hero. His constituents may despise him for a bit, but it's better than hearing everyone claim the NIMBY approach. It's annoying and we just need to get past this. Besides, i'm suuuuure he could get a S**tload of money for some pet projects just for taking the hit on this....

I'ts win win...i don't get it

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Live.

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Willravel

They don't want to look "soft on terror", as if that phrase had any meaning whatsoever.

ratbastid

You think locking terrorists down in a home-state Super-Max is soft? I'm QUITE sure it could be spun the other direction.

Willravel

I don't think it's soft. The politicians clearly do, though.

Derwood

Obama got skewered by Rachel Maddow on his new policies towards detainees, and rightly so. It's incredibly disappointing that he is not only NOT overturning Bush's policies, but is taking them even further. Completely unconstitutional decisions being made in a speech where he says he wants to follow the letter of the law. Amazing.

powerclown

I see we are now acknowledging the existence of bonafide terrorists and terrorism. Where before they and it were the stuff of the fevered imaginations of fringe conservatives only. Obama certainly is concerned with terrorism.

There has been progress made here.

Derwood

Being concerned with terrorism is fine. Arresting people and detaining them based on something they may do is completely unconstitutional

powerclown

As soon as they announced Robert Gates would be staying on as Defense Secretary, it was apparent the status quo would be maintained.

Derwood

and it's completely disappointing to me. hi stance on GITMO and detainees was, for me, a major selling point is his campaign.

Polar

-- "Completely unconstitutional" how?......
Please be specific. Thank you.

roachboy

of COURSE the overall status quo is being protected/maintained. you really didn't believe the characterisations of obama as some kind of left radical, did you powerclown? no-one believed that. i know people who were dancing in the streets when obama was elected--because he wasn't a republican, because of who he is---but no-one in their right mind thought that he was any kind of Radical.

if you had been living under a rock for the interminable television spectacle of run-up to the dribbling conclusion of the bush fiasco, and so missed all the nonsensical framing and reframing of obama as this or that image, and surfaced near the end, and decided to try to figure out where obama stood, the information was readily available: in the decision to continue in afghanistan you could have seen a basic acceptance of the idea of the "war on terror"---it was just a narrower interpretation of it than the bush people tried to generate, and so didn't include the iraq debacle--but it DID include al-qeada---and apparently the taliban (situational dynamics which result from yet another dimension of the incompetence of the bush squad resulted in swapping out the object of the "war on terror" for another object)---the array of compromises of principle that came along with this "war on terror" were also not in themselves Problematic--rather obama seemed to have understood that among the central problems caused by the overwhelming incompetence of the bush squad was POLITICAL and so giving the APPEARANCE of breaking with that period of overwhelming incompetence was task 1. there was NEVER any indication of a wholesale break.

the list can be extended in almost any direction.

so i don't know what you're talking about, powerclown: you seem to be working your way through your own private drama in which things really are as the ultra-right tried to portray them.
that was never the case.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Derwood

The Constitution does not grant the President the power to indefinitely hold prisoners without trial. It's pretty simply really.

Aladdin Sane

Observers of differing political stripes are stunned by how much of the Bush national security agenda is being adopted by this new Democratic government.

Victor Davis Hanson (National Review) offers a partial list:
"The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq (i.e., slowing the withdrawal), Afghanistan (i.e., the surge) -- and now Guantanamo."

Jack Goldsmith (The New Republic) adds:
rendition -- turning over terrorists seized abroad to foreign countries; state secrets -- claiming them in court to quash legal proceedings on rendition and other erstwhile barbarisms; and the denial of habeas corpus -- to detainees in Afghanistan's Bagram prison, indistinguishable logically and morally from Guantanamo.

An unnamed and dismayed human rights advocate, on legalizing indefinite detention of alleged terrorists (in the New York Times, May 21):
"We were able to hold it off with George Bush. The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama administration over these powers is really stunning."

__________________
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Polar

-- Absolutely true.

But it does not grant habeas corpus to enemy combatants taken on the field of battle, either.

They are not covered by the Geneva Convention, for that matter.

ratbastid

It most certainly DOES. In Boumediene v. Bush, Dec 5, 2007 the court recognized habeas corpus rights for Gitmo detainees. The first people were released from there under writs of habeas corpus starting October of that year.

EDIT: Okay, technically, the Constitution doesn't grant ANYBODY the right of habeas corpus. That's not a right explicitly granted by the Constitution. It's a piece of common law adopted from very old British practice. But it remains one of our fundamental legal rights nonetheless, and the Court has held that it extends to non-citizens and people being detained at the pleasure of the President.

In fact, the Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld on June 29, 2006 that so-called "enemy combatants" were entitled to the protections of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention--in short, deciding that the made-up classification "enemy combatant" didn't suddenly NOT make them prisoners of war.

So... I get your opinion on the matter, but the people who actually have the job of interpreting the Constitution and our nations laws disagree with your assertions.

Baraka_Guru

Does this mean they aren't enemy combatants? Does this mean this isn't a war?

Speaking of the Constitution, in regard to Habeas Corpus, and especially torture, isn't the American executive subject to the Eighth Amendment in these matters?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

ratbastid

The Military Commissions Act does, though. That law may very well itself be unconstitutional--provisions of it have been shot down by the Court as laid out above. There's nothing preventing Congress from passing and the President from signing laws that are blatantly unconstitutional. It's the job of the judiciary to elevate cases that test those laws to the SCOTUS for review.

dksuddeth

this is an all too common fallacy that needs to be put to bed once and for all. The constitution does not grant rights. It protects the rights of individuals by placing limitations and restrictions on the powers of the government. That means that even non-americans have rights in this country.

__________________
"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

Derwood

I haven't watched the news today....what has been the GOP response to Obama's detainee plan? I'd think they'd be conflicted between supporting him (because they agree with the plan) and blasting him for flip-flopping on a campaign promise...

ratbastid

I'm not sure I'd agree with that as a general statement, but it's certainly true as regards habeas corpus.

To be more specific in this case... USC Section 9 Clause 2 reads: "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." That's the only place habeas corpus is mentioned in the Constitution.

Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. It was also suspended very specifically for Americans of Japanese descent during World War II (and only restored in the early '90s, adding long-standing insult to injury).

The implication (and certainly the interpretation that the Court has held) is that habeas corpus is a privilege given all people subject to US law, whether or not they're citizens.

FOR THE RECORD: It's dangerous to wander into an area where I've done my research!

dksuddeth

specifically, what don't you agree with?

which means that only congress has any power to suspend it, however, in the case of the gitmo detainees, or any detainee, they didn't invade or rebel, hence, habeus corpus should not even come in to play.

and after Lincoln suspended it, the supreme court ruled against him, however, congress capitulated later and authorized him to suspend it. semantics, but technically correct.

It could only be implied that way if one is to assume that the only rights a person has are ones directly written about in the constitution. This is not so and all of the documents relating to the ratification of the constitution bear this out.

and so it is with me

__________________
"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

samcol

A conservative radio host gets waterboarded and says it's without a doubt torture. What's going on in this video is nothing compared to what goes on in gitmo type places I'm willing to bet. I still find it hard to believe many refer to this as 'enhanced interrogations'.

__________________
It's time for the president to hand over his nobel peace prize.

Marvelous Marv

It's okay--he's the Messiah, and therefore can do no wrong.


It isn't. We could win in Iraq. We can't in Afghanistan, but Obama is too stupid to know that.


Yes, the differences are stunning. "Prolonged detention" is what the left has been claiming about GITMO all along. That laughter is sounding just a wee bit shrill these days.



Want a link?


You mean BILL Gates? Apparently, Bush's military background prevented him from mistaking his SECDEF for the head of Microsoft.

Wait, the liberals have finally discovered that, after holding their hands over their ears for almost 8 years?



So waterboarding THREE people (and preventing another WTC in Los Angeles by doing so) is horrible, but locking up people indefinitely on the basis of what they MIGHT do is perfectly acceptable? You DO know that every US Navy SEAL has been waterboarded, right? I'm not sure, but it might be required of every US Navy pilot, too. Are you also aware that Obama left himself a loophole to do it as well?

indeed.

__________________
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."
Margaret Thatcher

Derwood

Seriously, no one says this. Shut up already. The joke was old in November

Charlatan

This is not a good thing.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

ratbastid

It must be interesting inside your head, Marv, inventing all these windmills to tilt against... Nobody can even agree with you without getting an argument from you!

samcol

Really? Why should I for any reason believe that waterboarding prevented a los angeles WTC? The lies and misinformation from the past administration are endless.

Also, I don't care if Obama thinks left a loophole or not I still think it's wrong and we shouldn't be doing it. Don't you understand false confessions? Waterboarding is a way for the 'war on terror' to chalk a point up for the good guys. How many dozens or hundreds of times being waterboarded while being in prison for years would it take for you to admit to just about anything?

Waterboarding is just a method to pull false information out of people to make it look like the war on terror is justifiable.

Don't you get it yet?

__________________
It's time for the president to hand over his nobel peace prize.

roachboy

let's say that the chomsky piece i posted yesterday (which may end up being too long to generate a discussion, but we'll see) is accurate. the united states is a kind of empire, but one that runs via direct economic domination and consistent physical coercion (though not constant, one would assume) all in a context built around superficial freedom--so countries are formally independent even as their economies remain organized on either old-school colonial grounds, or on the new-and-improved neo-colonial model we quaintly refer to as "globalization."

patterns of systemic violence extend back to the earliest phases of the history of the united states---the treatments meted out to native americans & the slave trade are examples of explicit violence; routinized violence operates through the class order; the various mythologies of the united states (city on a hill, an Exception blah blah blah) take shape at roughly the same time and are instituted as aspects of the post-revolutionary war origin mythology which sets up a sense of autonomous nation-ness.

the imperial dimension is usually extended back to the spanish-american war, and the development of american empire extends across the twentieth century, but takes explicit institutional shape after world war 2. the accompanying nationalist hallucination fares variously well in the post-war period; close to being dismantled by the vietnam period; triaged by the reaction against that period spearheaded by the reagan period.

across all of this, the american empire has been held together by registers of violence; internally this violence is dissipated into the collective stupor of nationalism, which folk protect with varying degrees of energy, which enables an avoidance of the not just the characteristics of the underlying socio-economic configuration but of that configuration itself. so it follows that people still imagine nation-states to be operative centers of meaningful power in areas that are not about coercion. it's quaint.

what the bush people's astonishing incompetence managed was to exposure aspects of the way in which this system was operated since world war 2, in part because the logic that shaped it was coming unravelled and the neo-con gambit was to attempt a new triage by imposing the united states as global military hegemon and so to shape what they called the post cold-war world around political continuity (nation-states uber alles) and systemic continuities (the role of the military hegemon would be to enforce it's vision of the world by force and/or by threat of force)---of course they fucked everything up (of course not because it was inevitable, but of course because, well, they did)...witness iraq, the Great Gambit itself.

in the process of fucking up, the bush people managed to expose elements of the normal operating procedures of the american imperial system itself--and to create the illusion (the traction of which i cannot figure out--i mean it's not like the history of the american system is secret--maybe folk really do know so little about it that they're willing to believe most anyting that explains what becomes visible in factoid form of the characteristics of the system they prefer to pretend doesn't exist) that the bush people invented this stuff. so the practices AND the bush people's framing of them were collapsed into each other--and in the last campaign, obama was able to run against both as if they were the same--and it worked.

because of the relative publicness of the bush people's fuck ups, obama was able to frame himself as moving against the bush people AND the practices that they extended/distorted/continued. now all we're seeing is a series of indications of the boundaries that in fact obtain between the bush people's distortions and the continuities of imperial practice that preceded them.

what's good about the obama administration's encounter with these boundaries is that it's public--people can see it.

what's not so good is that there's no coherent acknowledgement of what is in fact the case--so the process is getting misframed--this thread reflects nothing beyond the right's perverse attempt to seek vindication of the bush administration and by extension of it's own ideological framework by misrepresenting EVERYTHING about what's happening. it's a scary world so violence is necessary so we can continue buying shit and living our oblivious lives blah blah blah.

this seems to me yet another consequence of the simple fact that the obama administration is ideologically quite moderate and of its correlate which is that moderate politics provides and can provide almost nothing in the way of system-level critique simply because apology for the system itself is central to their ideology. another way: the obama administration's central committment is the maintenance of the existing situation---that maintaining it requires changing it in significant ways follows from te conjuncture it finds itself in historically--but the logic of the administration is primarily maintenance. it remains to be seen how far they can go with this before maintenance itself becomes dysfunctional and its modalities force upon the administration something more radical.

but we aren't there yet. we're nowhere near it.

i think everything about the way this process is understood in the popular ideological machinery is fundamentally wrong. this is mostly about preserving the prerogative to not see reality by substituting for it pseudo-realities that can generate pseudo-debates which provide the illusion of motion but which in fact accomplish nothing, get nowhere. treading water while jockeying for tactical advantage in a strategic context shaped by the erasure of the actually existing world.

this is how empires collapse.
enjoy the ride.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Aladdin Sane

Rachel Maddow sure seems confused. If she really believes what she says, shouldn't she call for Mr. Obama's impeachment? Can such lawlessness in the White House be tolerated while the Republic stands?

__________________
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Willravel

You may not remember, but liberals gave Bush a chance to change his mind. Impeachment calls really didn't start until 2003. That's a whole year of "letting it slide".

powerclown

I would be VERY interested to know what Bill Gates III knows about international cyber-warfare...

Aladdin Sane

May 24, 2009
U.S. Relies More on Aid of Allies in Terror Cases
By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI
New York Times

WASHINGTON — The United States is now relying heavily on foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest-level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to current and former American government officials.

The change represents a significant loosening of the reins for the United States, which has worked closely with allies to combat violent extremism since the 9/11 attacks but is now pushing that cooperation to new limits.

In the past 10 months, for example, about a half-dozen midlevel financiers and logistics experts working with Al Qaeda have been captured and are being held by intelligence services in four Middle Eastern countries after the United States provided information that led to their arrests by local security services, a former American counterterrorism official said.
--------
The current approach, which began in the last two years of the Bush administration and has gained momentum under Mr. Obama, is driven in part by court rulings and policy changes that have closed the secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency, and all but ended the transfer of prisoners from outside Iraq and Afghanistan to American military prisons.

Human rights advocates say that relying on foreign governments to hold and question terrorist suspects could carry significant risks. It could increase the potential for abuse at the hands of foreign interrogators and could also yield bad intelligence, they say.

..........................................................................................................

This is a very complicated matter that I've probably misunderstood. Should I hold my breath and wait for the movie? Michael Moore as writer and director, with Jamie Foxx as the power-mad (but articulate) U.S. President who tramples the Constitution in pursuit of mythical enemies and personal power. Should production begin today, the opening could coincidentally be just in time for the 2010 elections.

__________________
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

roachboy

once again, the conservative world-inversion assumes that its audience knows almost nothing about history and is therefore willing to buy into whatever self-serving line of shit they're fed.

this is damage control. the bush administration did not invent the use of proxies to "gather intelligence" using "aggressive techniques" that are entirely illegal---this has been happening for at least 60 years: it was a mainstay of the cold war period. it is part of how the american empire has operated.

ignorance--you just can't teach it. you either have it or you don't. it's an inner virtue.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Aladdin Sane

Exactly. And I predicted it! I knew I had it all wrong. That is why it is best that I wait for the movie.

__________________
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

timalkin

..

__________________
Trinity: "What do you need?"

Neo: "Guns. Lots of guns."

-The Matrix

Charlatan

Question to Conservatives: If Obama appears to be doing what you've wanted done, why all the sour grapes? Seems to me you should be supporting him. If not, why not?

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke