Democracy Has Prevailed.

March 9, 2011

Another Obama Disappointment

First, no prosecution of his predecessor's admitted torture and now:
President Barack Obama announced Monday his decision to abandon for the moment, perhaps for good, his pledge to voters in the 2008 elections to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
And:
Mr. Obama apparently gave up, believing that he could not persuade Congress to agree either to trials in civilian courts or to imprisonment in America. It is easy to see how he could have reached that conclusion and decided to make the best of a situation that is discouraging, in terms of Americans' perception of U.S. justice, and of how it is seen by the rest of the world.
Even Ronald Reagan was against waterboarding and the use of military tribunals for terrorists. From a Harper's Magazine interview with Will Bunch:
Q: Ronald Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture, and his Justice Department indicted and prosecuted a Texas sheriff for waterboarding. How can his views about torture be reconciled with the current Republican pro-torture dogma?

A: It’s important not to nominate Reagan for sainthood in the arena of human rights. His “Reagan Doctrine” in Central America, leaving the fight to anti-Communist thugs and death squads that the then-president called “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers,” is arguably the gravest moral failing of his tenure. That said, back on U.S. soil, Reagan was far to the left of the 2010 Republican Party on issues such as torture. The convention that he signed in 1988 holds that there is no circumstance of any kind that permits torture, which certainly would include the 9/11 aftermath and related anti-terror efforts today.

But it goes even deeper than that. As I noted in an early 2010 blog post: “Reagan would not have approved of drone-fired missile attacks aimed at killing terrorists; as president, he several times rejected anti-terrorism operations for the sole reason that civilians would have been killed by collateral damage. In 1985, he surprised aides such as Pat Buchanan by ruling out a military response to a Beirut hijacking for fear of civilian casualties; Lou Cannon reported then in the Washington Post that Reagan called retaliation in which innocent civilians are killed “itself a terrorist act.” And the idea of trying terrorists in military tribunals as opposed to a civilian court of law? The Reagan administration was completely against that. Paul Bremer (yes, that Paul Bremer) said in 1987, “a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law, against them.”
Another Obama disappointment.

6 comments:

Pgh_Knight said...

The United State has had a perpetual lease since 1903... I see no reason to leave.

Professor Chaos said...

I think if the teabaggers really looked at Ronald Reagan's actual record, they would consider him some sort of radical leftist. I can't believe how far to the right the political dialogue has been shifted. If Nixon ran today, he'd be considered too liberal to be the Democratic nominee. (clean Air Act, Talking to Commie China,etc.)

Unknown said...

Hunh, PK, I wonder if you can close the detention facility without closing the base? I guess not.

rich10e said...

Prof...The Nixon analogy is wrong. Just like it took Clinton to take on welfare...it doesn't mean that Clinton would be a GOP today....more RealPolitik

EdHeath said...

rich, your comment about Nixon and Clinton reveal how little you understand about history. The absolute bald face, outrageous lies conservatives tell about the country, about the rights these choose to support and the rights they reject, and about how the economy works have dragged the the country to the right. There was a statement made once (a joke in a Star Trek movie) that "only Nixon could go to China" because of his impeccable anti-communist record. But Nixon also pander to a considerable more liberal America (and coincidentally expanded executive power) by advocating the EPA and various environmental laws. During and after Reagan, the country has moved steadily to the right, such that Clinton had to run as a centerist (to make him acceptable to independent voters as well as barely acceptable to Democrats). The welfare thing actually has weird echo to Nixon's going to China. The fact that it was the Democrat Clinton who was advocating welfare "reform" (gutting) was the only thing that made it acceptable for some Democrats to support it.

rich10e said...

Oh Eddie, you're such a card!I bet all the teachers in the lunch room laugh at you!!!