Jose Rodriguez Deserves an Award

Now, now David... we have to show the rest of the world just how civil we are. Perhaps we should put KSM up in the Hilton, feed him steak and lobster and have young girls tend to his every need. Anything less would just be torture. I mean, come on, are you seriously thinking of putting him in a concrete jail cell and feeding him prison food? You monster, you! Just because he was responsible for the death of thousands of Americans including some who slowly burned to death then slowly, excruciatingly sawed the head off a fellow human being on TV doesn't mean that he has to endure even the slightest discomfort! We aren't Communist Russia, you know...

 

If these liberal prigs think the Obama Administration isn't actively involved in "enhanced interrogation" techniques, they're either ignorant, blind or just plain stupid:

President Obama has been calling since last summer for the departure of Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose forces have massacred thousands of opponents. In his State of the Union speech Jan. 24, Obama said Assad's regime "will soon discover that ... human dignity can't be denied."
But it's been a different story in court, where the Obama administration has fended off suits by foreigners who were seized by U.S. agents and sent abroad for brutal interrogation - in one case, to Assad's Syria.
The program was known as extraordinary rendition. Alleged terror suspects, mostly captured in foreign countries, were flown either to secret CIA prisons or to other nations, often those with a history of torturing prisoners.
Some of those nations' leaders are the same autocrats Obama has targeted in his recent campaign to align the United States with popular uprisings in the Middle East. Critics of his stance in the rendition cases say he's undercutting his own message.
Protesters in Syria, Morocco, Egypt and other Mideast nations are aware of "the gap between U.S. rhetoric about human rights and its cooperation with torture regimes," said Ben Wizner, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in one of the rendition suits.
President George W. Bush, who greatly expanded the use of rendition, said captives were sent only to nations that had assured the United States they would be treated humanely. His administration said it wasn't responsible for any mistreatment they may have suffered after rendition.

Human rights progress

Obama, in his first month in office, promised to eliminate abuses in the program but did not disavow use of rendition. He renounced torture by U.S. interrogators, ordered that secret CIA prisons be closed, and issued an executive order saying prisoners could not be sent to countries where they would be tortured, though he hasn't specified how that condition would be enforced.
Rendition is "one of the areas where Obama had made the clearest progress (in reforming the program), but there's been no action on accountability," said Joe "Chip" Pitts, a Stanford law school lecturer and former chairman of Amnesty International USA.
Obama's Justice Department has opposed lawsuits against U.S. officials for torture during past renditions, arguing that the cases - all of which have been dismissed without trial - would expose state secrets if allowed to proceed.
The Obama administration first stated its position in a San Francisco courtroom, where five men accused Jeppesen Dataplan, a San Jose flight-planning company, of helping the CIA transport them to foreign countries where they were tortured during Bush's administration.
Sweden's government later paid one of the men, Ahmed Agiza, $450,000 for its role in his rendition to Egypt. Jeppesen has not commented on its work for the government, but a 2007 Council of Europe report described the company as the CIA's aviation services provider, and an employee quoted a director as saying in 2006 that Jeppesen handled the CIA's "torture flights."
At a federal appeals court hearing in February 2009, an Obama administration lawyer echoed previous Justice Department arguments that the case was too hot for courts to handle, warning that "judges shouldn't play with fire." The court later ordered the suit dismissed, and the Supreme Court denied review.

Arar's story

It was the same story for Maher Arar, a Syrian-born software engineer and Canadian citizen who was seized by U.S. agents at New York's JFK Airport in October 2002 based on information from Canadian police that he belonged to al Qaeda.
After nearly two weeks of detention and questioning, he was sent to Syria, despite a U.S. intelligence board's prediction that he would probably be tortured there. Arar said he was held for a year in a coffin-size cell and viciously beaten with an electric cable during interrogations.
After his release, Canada investigated his case, acknowledged that its police had falsely accused him of terrorist connections, apologized and paid him $10 million.
The United States has denied mistreating Arar and has barred him from entering the country. The Justice Department - the Bush administration in lower courts, Obama in the Supreme Court - won dismissal of his lawsuit, arguing that it would interfere with foreign policy and damage national security.
When Obama started calling for leadership change in Syria, some critics brought up the Arar case. One was San Diego attorney Chad Austin, who said in a Jan. 27 blog on the Mondoweiss website that Obama wasn't so eager to renounce Assad's human-rights abuses when they served the rendition program.
The White House would not comment on whether its position on rendition has undermined its support for Arab Spring protesters. Other foreign policy commentators offered mixed views.
Pitts, the Stanford law instructor and former Amnesty International leader, said Obama's opposition to lawsuits for rendition abuses has affected other nations' "perceptions of our stature and our moral legitimacy" and has made some U.S. allies reluctant to extradite terrorist suspects to this country.
But Allen Weiner, a former State Department lawyer who directs Stanford's International and Comparative Law program, said the brutality of some rendition cases should not prevent the United States from condemning abuses elsewhere.
"I'm not an apologist for what happened to Arar," Weiner said. "But it does not follow that if the U.S. record on human-rights issues is imperfect, that we are muzzled and lose the ability to criticize other countries for (abuses on) an entirely different scale."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/18/MNPV1N1V8P.DTL#ixzz1tjRVodY9​

 

Interesting how you left out all references to "enhanced interrogation" or torture in your comment. If denial works for you, if that helps you believe you are a good person, I can understand that. I prefer to not be in denial about what these people have endured. I can't call torture justifiable and consider myself to be a good person. It really is that simple.

 

Who are you referring to? You didn't specify that in the rest of your comment cut and paste.

Obama's continued use of Jr.'s policies in rendition and so forth is something I, and many liberals, disagree with.

 

But this would be in blatant contradiction to the RW party line that everyone that they perceive to be to the left of them is blindly approving of whatever Obama does and will support Obama no matter what. Therefore, your assertion that both you and many liberals disagree with Obama's continuation of Jr's policies regarding rendition (among other things) simply cannot be true. It does not fit the narrative.

 

Who do you think I'm referring to? I'm referring to all the liberal prigs.

 

Either I've missed something or this is one of the biggest straw men I've seen in a long time. With some minor modifications and "improvements" Obama is continuing pretty much the same policies that Bush and his merry band of murders started. Who's saying he isn't? Not me.

 

They are the same which should make everyone think who or whom is really running this nation.

 

That's just a restatement of the original words. I'd venture a guess, but experience has shown me that your kind treats that unkindly. So, can you be more specific?

 

Once the republicans gained more power in Congress, his hands were somewhat tied. That said, there was a period of about a year where I thought he should be fighting hard against the buggers, once it was clear they had no intention of compromising, but instead he continued to try to reason with them. As the "discussions" on this site can testify, reasonable is not a word that describes republicans typical behavior, even less so when politics are directly involved.

 

Obama's choices for his administration and other key posts were a disappointment to me. I had expected more "professor-types" to be instated. Instead, he chose some of the very people responsible for the mess we were in, "big-business-types", and I'm still pissed about that lol

 

I agree with you in that the Republican faction is composed of obstructionist ideologues and corporate whores who have no intention of compromising with anybody on anything. But this is nothing particularly new. It has made them a little awkward to work with during the last decade or so at least.

By the time he took the oath of office Obama had been in politics long enough that he should have known what he was dealing with. And if he had any doubts, the experience of his first few months as President with the Thugs in de facto control of the Senate ought to have been more than enough to reinforce the already obvious reality that there was no working with them. Yet he continued to the point of absurdity to try to compromise with them instead of telling them to go f themselves, instructing Harry Reid to get rid of the filibuster, and taking his case straight to the people.

I also have at least as many issues with what he has done as I have with what he hasn't done. He has not only retained all the new and imo unconstitutional powers that accrued to the presidency during the Bush regime has has tended to expand them. His White House is every bit as corporatist and Wall Street oriented as it was under Bush and his justice department is a joke. Sometimes I think he's in a kind of awful symbiotic relationship with the Rethugs in that they provide him with cover and excuses and he provides them with a perfect bete noire with which to stir up their faithful.

 

...yet, with all that going against him, he's still leaps and bounds better than Romney lol

 

I suppose so, but only in the way that first class is leaps and bounds better than coach even though the destination is the same.

 

What might that destination be? A concentration camp?

The American Civil Liberties Union has stated that "While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had 'serious reservations' about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA." and, despite claims to the contrary, "The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision... [without] temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield." The ACLU also maintains that "the breadth of the NDAA’s detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war."

 

Not exactly. Both Romney and Obama with the backing of their respective factions want us in a place where we can be monitored at will, where the only rights we have are conditional, where wars and fear of vague threats and nightmare enemies keep us cowed and supportive of our own oppression, where we uncritically absorb the lies that they feed us through the media they control and where our primary purpose is to support the 1%. The camps, like the one Bush established at Guantanamo, and the torture gulag that complements them are only for those who are perceived as a threat.

 

The "gulags" you're so fond of referring to were actually begun by Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt who sent many American citizens to detention camps at the start of WWII. Republican President Richard Nixon signed the Non-Detention Act into law in 1971 which guaranteed against this type of detention of American citizens ever again. Of course, with the stroke of pen on December 31, 2011, President Obama effectively wiped that law (and a chunk of the Constitution along with it) from the books with the signing of the NDAA. Thanks a million, Comrade Obama.

Even Al Franken (imagine that!) is against Obama's NDAA (or "gulag" if you prefer) law:

Why I Voted Against the National Defense Authorization Act


12/16/11
Yesterday, the Senate passed a bill that includes provisions on detention that I found simply unacceptable. These provisions are inconsistent with the liberties and freedoms that are at the core of the system our Founders established. And while I did in fact vote for an earlier version of the legislation, I did so with the hope that the final version would be significantly improved. That didn't happen, and so I could not support the final bill.

The bill that passed on Thursday included several problematic provisions, the worst of which could allow the military to detain Americans indefinitely, without charge or trial, even if they're captured in the U.S.

At their core, these provisions will radically alter how we investigate, arrest, and detain individuals suspected of terrorism. What's more, they could undermine the safety of our troops stationed abroad, and they introduce new and unnecessary uncertainty into our counterterrorism efforts.

But before I get into the details of why I opposed these detainee provisions, I think it is important to recognize that September 11th irrevocably and unalterably changed our lives. I was in Minnesota that terrible day. A number of Minnesotans died -- in the towers, in the air, and at the Pentagon. In New York in the months following the attacks, I attended the funerals of brave firefighters and law enforcement officers who sacrificed their lives to help rescue Americans from the towers. I can't shake those images from my mind, and I am guessing like many of you, I won't ever be able to erase the horrors of September 11th from my head.
But it is exactly in these difficult moments, in these periods of war, when our country is under attack, that we must be doubly vigilant about protecting what makes us Americans.

The Founders who crafted our Constitution and Bill of Rights were careful to draft a Constitution of limited powers -- one that would protect Americans' liberty at all times -- both in war, and in peace.

As we reflect on what this bill will do, I think it is important to pause and remember some of the mistakes this country has made when we have been fearful of enemy attack.

Most notably, we made a grave, indefensible mistake during World War II, when President Roosevelt ordered the incarceration of more than 110,000 people of Japanese origin, as well as approximately 11,000 German-Americans and 3,000 Italian-Americans.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon signed into law the Non-Detention Act to make sure the U.S. government would never again subject any Americans to the unnecessary and unjustifiable imprisonment that so many Japanese-Americans, German-Americans, and Italian-Americans had to endure. It wasn't until 1988, 46 years after the internment, when President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, that the government formally acknowledged and apologized for the grave injustice that was done to citizens and permanent residents of Japanese ancestry.

These were dark, dark periods in American history. And it is easy today to think that is all behind us.
But I fear the detention provisions in the bill forget the lessons we learned from the mistakes we made when we interned thousands of innocent Japanese, Germans, and Italians.

With this defense authorization act, Congress will, for the first time in 60 years, authorize the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without charge or trial, according to its advocates. This would be the first time that Congress has deviated from President Nixon's Non-Detention Act. And what we are talking about here is that Americans could be subjected to life imprisonment without ever being charged, tried, or convicted of a crime, without ever having an opportunity to prove their innocence to a judge or a jury of their peers. And without the government ever having to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

I think that denigrates the very foundations of this country. It denigrates the Bill of Rights. It denigrates what our Founders intended when they created a civilian, non-military justice system for trying and punishing people for crimes committed on U.S. soil. Our Founders were fearful of the military--and they purposely created a system of checks and balances to ensure we did not become a country under military rule. This bill undermines that core principle, which is why I could not support it.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, and this wasn't the way to mark its birthday.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-franken/why-i-voted-against-the-n_b_1154327.html

 

I'd suggest to you that you read up on the detention of Japanese-Americans during WW II. Specifically, who was calling for it and was supporting and pushing FDR to make that appalling decision. You obviously don't know much about it.

And in the true spirit of political hackdom you ignore the major contribution of the Bush II regime and the Rethugs in Congress to the creation of the type of society you claim to abhor. And thanks for the Al Franken thing. Waste of space since in directing this at me you are preaching to the choir. Your time would be better spent trying to convince your Fascist friends and theocratic buddies of the error or their ways. I'm already a believer.

 

Please answer the following questions. That's OK, I'll answer them for you:

1. Which President, in 1942, issued the order for the internment of American citizens? FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

2. What Executive Order did Roosevelt sign authorizing the interment? EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066

3. To which political party did Roosevelt belong? DEMOCRAT

4. Which President, in 1971, signed the Non-Detention Act into law? RICHARD NIXON

5. To which political party did Nixon belong? REPUBLICAN

6. Who rescinded Executive Order 9066 in 1976? GERALD FORD

7. To which political party did Ford belong? REPUBLICAN

8. Which President signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 into law granting reparations to the Japanese-Americans who had been interned in WWII? RONALD REAGAN

9. To which political party did Reagan belong? REPUBLICAN

10. Which President, in 1989, appropriated payments to Japanese-Americans who had been interned in WWII? GEORGE H.W. BUSH

11. To which political party did Bush belong? REPUBLICAN

12. Which President, in 2011, signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law authorizing indefinite detention? BARACK OBAMA

12. To which political party does Obama belong? DEMOCRAT

Are you beginning to see a pattern here? I'm glad to see that you and I agree on the NDAA. The signing of this act alone should be enough for anyone in their right mind to vote against Barack Obama.

Pardon me for wasting the space with Al Franken's words. I wasn't sure if you had been enlightened previously or not. I'm glad you're aware of his vehement opposition to the NDAA (many people are not aware). For those other forum members who are not, please enlighten yourselves.