Liberals Continue to Demean George W. Bush’s Legacy — while They Ignore the Immensely Greater Trampling of Human Rights and Law that President Obama Revels in Every Day

26 April 2013

We Americans are sweeping more and more of our former principles under the carpet — as if what we no longer see cannot hurt us

This week, liberal pundits used the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library to lament the self-destructive course that he had set the country on. Yet, somehow these apparently pea-brained commentators missed President Obama’s much greater transgressions against human rights and liberties.

For historical perspective’s sake, I find it easier to forgive a mistaken first and second step on a bad course, than enthusiastically taken, many multiple successor steps.

In this comparative regard, two words take Barack Obama’s miserable measure — drones and Guantánamo.

President Obama’s historical measure — in regard to drone murder

Drones, a program of near indiscriminate death dealing proceeds not exactly as advertised:

“It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,” President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN.

“It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”

Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports . . . show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn’t adhere to those standards.

The documents also show that drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been “exceedingly rare.”

Since 2004, drone program critics say, the strikes have killed hundreds of civilians, fueling anti-U.S. outrage, boosting extremist recruiting, and helping to destabilize Pakistan’s U.S.-backed government.

And some experts warn that the United States may be setting a new standard of international conduct that other countries will grasp to justify their own targeted killings and to evade accountability.

Other governments “won’t just emulate U.S. practice but (will adopt) America’s justification for targeted killings,” said Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations.

“When there is such a disconnect between who the administration says it kills and who it (actually) kills, that hypocrisy itself is a very dangerous precedent that other countries will emulate.”

And in regard to Guantánamo

Does the Guantánamo prison accord with American values, or is the President’s cynical hypocrisy evident there, as well?

The US military dossiers, obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian, reveal how, alongside the so-called "worst of the worst", many prisoners were flown to the Guantánamo cages and held captive for years on the flimsiest grounds, or on the basis of lurid confessions extracted by maltreatment.

The 759 Guantánamo files, classified "secret", cover almost every inmate since the camp was opened in 2002. More than two years after President Obama ordered the closure of the prison, 172 are still held there.

The files depict a system often focused less on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters, than on extracting intelligence.

Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim.

Note

You can read the files, here.

More recently:

"They used dogs on us, they beat me, sometimes they hung me from the ceiling and didn't allow me to sleep for six days," Al Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj, who spent six years in Guantanamo Bay prison, told Al Jazeera.

"Sometimes they wouldn't allow me to use the restroom, other times they would run the air conditioner very high and leave me in that room for a very long time."

This was after he'd had his kneecap broken just after being detained by the US military in Pakistan in 2001, when he was on a reporting assignment to cover the US invasion of Afghanistan. Al-Haj was regularly tortured by US military personnel and interrogators throughout his time in the infamous prison.

"Sometimes they brought soldiers in to be sexual in front of me, other times they brought ladies and removed your clothes to perform sexual actions on you," he continued.

"If you had an illness, like a toothache, and requested medical help, the doctor would tell you to first answer the interrogators questions and then he will care for you. I had tooth problems because they didn't give us toothbrush and paste."

Brandon Neely, a US Military Policeman and former Guantanamo guard, told Al Jazeera detainees were "treated horribly". Neely regularly watched detainees being beaten and humiliated, as well as even watching a medic beat an inmate.

Despite having signed non-disclosure forms before he left the prison, Neely said: "I had to talk about what was going on there. I'd rather deal with the risk of repercussions than live without talking about it because people have to know what is happening there."

Neely isn't the only member of the US military talking about the reality of Guantanamo.

"In the wake of 9/11, tragedy has visited the Muslim world through the United States' shortsighted and aggressive policies in pursuing this so-called War On Terror," Jason Wright, defense counsel with the US military for Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (the so-called mastermind of the 9/11 attacks) told Al Jazeera.

"We've had a dark chapter in the nation's history that has influenced the world," [said] Wright, whose client is in Guantanamo.

"Torture, extraordinary rendition (forced disappearances), secret show trials, and other injustices are now deemed to be the practice of the United States. The US has given a license to the rest of the world to do the same.

“America, once the standard bearer of hope, freedom, and the rule of law, no longer serves as that shining beacon on the hill. Now it's synonymous with Guantanamo."

Prisoners are now trying to draw attention to their plight with a hunger strike:

More prisoners have joined a hunger strike at the US-run detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, bringing the reported total to 93 out of 166 held at the facility, according to media reports.

Lawyers for the detainees claim that the actual number is higher.

“The illegal detentions without charge or trial at Guantanamo Bay have gone on for more than a decade with no end in sight, so it’s not surprising that detainees feel desperate,” said Laura Pitter, counterterrorism advisor at Human Rights Watch.

“The Obama administration simply has to do more to end this unlawful practice that will forever be a black mark on US history.”

Human Rights Watch has long called for an end to the practice of indefinite detention at Guantanamo, which violates international law. More than half of the detainees currently at the facility were approved for transfer to their home or third countries by an Obama administration interagency task force in 2009.

Congress restricted those transfers but the Defense Department still has the ability to transfer the cleared detainees so long as certain safeguards are in place. Human Rights Watch urged the Obama administration to use its authority to begin transferring detainees out of the facility as soon as possible.

Why does this trampling of human decency continue?

No one cares, so there is no political price to pay.

And we are notoriously complacent about thinking about the long term consequences of our actions.

From the political perspective, Republicans typically agree with anyone who will start a war at the drop of an allegedly adversarial hat. And they approve the imprisonment, torture, and drone deaths of anyone even marginally accused of being a terrorist. Anything goes for the Right Wing, especially when Wrong’s victims are not white males.

Democrats, for the most part, indulge in all manner of hypocritical wrong-doing, provided that someone prominent is making politically correct noises about safeguarding human rights and protecting minorities. That is why President Obama gets away with the almost unprecedentedly regal excesses that he does.

As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to think of the United States as a morally principled — as opposed to hypocritically expedient — nation.

What a leader of quality would do in this situation

America’s strength has always lain in the example of hope that it sets. Hope for a better, more comfortable and peaceful place — one which strives to welcome all manner of people to its umbrella of liberty and justice for all.

A leader of quality would use the President’s Podium to persuasively steer us away from actions, taken under the influence of fear, which damage the morally and socially uplifting message that we should be striving to uphold — if only for our own survival as a respect-worthy democratic republic.

The moral? — We are doing ourselves in, via the weaknesses in our ethical fiber that terrorism exposes rather than creates

The mark of a human being is what she and he does, under psychic pressure, when no one and everyone is watching.

PeteFree.com

Liberals Continue to Demean George W. Bush’s Legacy — while They Ignore the Immensely Greater Trampling of Human Rights and Law that President Obama Revels in Every Day