by Damozel | Not that this comes as a surprise to anyone who was paying attention back in February, which is when we learned that Obama's administration was indeed taking the position that US due process rights were inapplicable to detainees at Bagram AFB in Afghanistan. It certainly won't come as a shock to those who already had to digest his administration's claim the other day of a broad state secrets privilege. Yes, and there was this report from TPM of an interview with David Cynamon, lawyer for four Gitmo detainees, who accuses this administration of "stonewalling" and offers very specific details of exactly how it's going about it. TPM reports:
"The Department of Justice has been doing everything in its power to delay and obstruct these cases," said Cynamon, whose clients were picked up in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in the period after the 2001 U.S invasion of Afghanistan. "They're not doing anything to move the case along, and doing everything to avoid it."... Asked whether he had observed a shift of any kind in the government's approach since the Obama administration came into office, Cynamon flatly replied: "None whatsoever."
Oh, Barry. How could you play us like that?
The most recent bad news, in the form of a determination to appeal the detainee ruling, is available for your shocked and aghast perusal at The New York Times:
In a court filing, the Justice Department also asked District Judge John D. Bates not to proceed with the habeas-corpus cases of three detainees at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, Afghanistan. Judge Bates ruled last week that the three — each of whom says he was seized outside of Afghanistan — could challenge their detention in court.
Tina Foster, the executive director of the International Justice Network, which is representing the detainees, condemned the decision in a statement.
I am really at a loss for words. I am especially bothered because -- as my blog posts from primary season reflect -- I didn't jump on the Barack train till the choices boiled down to him and an increasingly erratic-seeming McCain...not to mention Sarah Palin.
His vote last summer on telecom immunity, the strange rumors of Goolsbee's NAFTA phone call, Obama's uninformed position on late term abortions, and his unacceptable stance on the death penalty all made me deeply uneasy. But the last thing on earth I want is to be proved right. As I say...I am deeply dejected to find that some of my darkest suspicions are being confirmed.
For the right sort of commentary, let us turn to Greenwald: because nobody says it better. He starts out with a short history lesson for anyone who wasn't paying attention.
It was once the case under the Bush administration that the U.S. would abduct people from around the world, accuse them of being Terrorists, ship them to Guantanamo, and then keep them there for as long as we wanted without offering them any real due process to contest the accusations against them. That due-process-denying framework was legalized by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Many Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- claimed they were vehemently opposed to this denial of due process for detainees, and on June 12, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that the denial of habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees was unconstitutional and that all Guantanamo detainees have the right to a full hearing in which they can contest the accusations against them.
In the wake of the Boumediene ruling, the U.S. Government wanted to preserve the power to abduct people from around the world and bring them to American prisons without having to provide them any due process. So, instead of bringing them to our Guantanamo prison camp (where, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, they were entitled to habeas hearings), the Bush administration would instead simply send them to our prison camp in Bagram, Afghanistan, and then argue that because they were flown to Bagram rather than Guantanamo, they had no rights of any kind and Boudemiene didn't apply to them. The Bush DOJ treated the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game -- fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process. Put another way, you just close Guantanamo, move it to Afghanistan, and -- presto -- all constitutional obligations disappear. (Salon)
And then....and then....
Back in the primary days, Deb was firmly convinced that Hope and Change meant saying whatever he had to say to make people think rationally rather than emotionally. But we both wished to believe otherwise. McCain wasn't a viable alternative; the Republicans didn't have one on offer. So we went with Obama and though Deb remained skeptical, I tried hard to believe that Obama would at least refrain from violently offending progressives who worked to get him into office...
Greenwald -- after a nice round-up of contradictory statements from pre-presidency Obama on his commitment to a big Change in the previous administration's detainee policy-- responds as follows.
[T]hese actions -- these contradictions between what he said and what he is doing, the embrace of the very powers that caused so much anger towards Bush/Cheney -- are so blatant, so transparent, so extreme, that the only way to avoid noticing them is to purposely shut your eyes as tightly as possible and resolve that you don't want to see it, or that you're so convinced of his intrinsic Goodness that you'll just believe that even when it seems like he's doing bad things, he must really be doing them for the Good. If there was any unanimous progressive consensus over the last eight years, it was that the President does not have the power to kidnap people, ship them far away, and then imprison them indefinitely in a cage without due process. Has that progressive consensus changed as of January 20, 2009? I think we're going to find out.
Yes, I think so too. Because there's a serious problem in the current discourse and it is us. Greenwald again:
As of January 20, 2009, one no longer finds those claims at National Review, Weekly Standard, right-wing blogs and the like, but instead, finds them commonly expressed in Obama-defending venues and some liberal blogs. Scan the comment section to John Cole's post criticizing Obama's Bagram position to see how frequently this mindset is now expressed to justify whatever Obama does.
"Barack Obama: Trust him! He knows more than Bush did!"
Uh-uh. That ain't going to happen here.
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