The Obama administration released some interesting news on Friday. Normally, Friday is the day of choice for the White House to announce policies and decisions which it doesn’t want to garner much media coverage. By the time everyone is back to work on Monday and reading the news, the story has been effectively buried over the weekend.
So what was the Obama administration so keen to see disappear in the news cycle? The fact that it was abandoning the Bush-era term “enemy combatants“ which was used by the Bush administration to justify powers not applicable to traditional “prisoners of war”, and a pledge to return to the rule of law as determined by Congress and international laws such as the Geneva Conventions. This is the sort of thing the White House would want extensive press coverage of, right?
Digging deeper, it’s not so simple. Former constitutional law and civil rights litigator Glenn Greenwald has some disturbing facts in his recent article over at Salon.
“After many years of anger and complaint and outrage directed at the Bush administration for its civil liberties assaults and executive power abuses, the last thing most people want to do is conclude that the Obama administration is continuing the core of that extremism. That was why the flurry of executive orders in the first week produced such praise: those who are devoted to civil liberties were, from the start, eager to believe that things would be different, and most want to do everything but conclude that the only improvements that will be made by Obama will be cosmetic ones.
But it’s becoming increasingly difficult for honest commentators to do anything else but conclude that. After all, these are the exact policies which, when embraced by Bush, produced such intense protest over the last eight years. Nobody is complaining because the Obama administration is acting too slowly in renouncing these policies. The opposite is true: they are rushing to actively embrace them. And while there are still opportunities to meaningfully depart from the extremism of the last eight years, the evidence appears more and more compelling that, at least in these areas, there is little or no intent on the part of the Obama administration to do so.”
Despite several reversals of Bush administration policies regarding the War on Terror, which former Vice President Dick Cheney believes will “raise the risk to the American people of another attack,” on many fronts it appears the Obama administration is quietly adopting cosmetically-modified versions of these policies while denouncing their original authors.
The “new” Obama policy on suspected terrorist detainees is nuanced, and great efforts have been made to distance it from the Bush version, but at the end of the day the result is essentially the same. Some have argued that “it’s too early to tell” how Obama will use the powers he is retaining from the Bush administration, while others have tried to paint the two presidents as identical on these issues.
The truth is likely somewhere in the middle, but we know at least this much so far:
- In a recent confirmation hearing, Obama’s nominee for solicitor general endorsed continuing the CIA program of rendition and indefinite detention for individuals suspected of financing terrorism – even if they are arrested far from an actual war zone.
- The Obama Justice Department has sided with legal arguments from the Bush-era, stating that a lawsuit by former CIA detainees should be dismissed on the basis of “state secrets.”
- Despite a call for increased transparency, the Obama administration has echoed his predecessor when rejecting FOIA requests on the basis of “national security,” even when there is obviously no national security concern involved – such as with the proposed ACTA legislation.
- In early February, a British court claimed the United States was exerting pressure in order to prevent the release of information regarding the alleged torture of a detainee in American custody. The Obama administration has since thanked the British government for its “continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information.”
- While CIA Director Leon Panetta has said that waterboarding is torture, and CIA interrogators have been ordered to abide by the Army Field Manual’s rules for interrogations, Panetta has further stated that if the approved techniques were “not sufficient” in the case of a detainee with alleged knowledge of an imminent attack, he would ask for “additional authority.”
- The Obama administration has yet to order any change in the illegal warrantless wiretapping program.
Some of these facts may represent the careful actions of a new administration, now faced with the ugly reality of the war on terror. Others may reflect the glacial pace of government action, especially when it comes to reform, even moreso in the face of a President moving to enact sweeping change on a broad platform of issues.
A few, unfortunately, may only serve to communicate an uncomfortable lesson to us; the American people must always remain steadfast, no matter who is in office, against sweeping and unprecedented expansions of authority within the presidency – because once they’ve got it, it’s nearly impossible to take it away. To those Democrats who are saying, “it’s okay, Obama won’t abuse these powers the way Bush did,” I ask you this: do you want the next Republican president to inherit these rights?
White House counsel Gregory Craig has maintained that the Obama administration has decided “not to change the status quo immediately.” It remains to be seen if there will be any substantial changes at all, especially if the civil libertarians choose to give President Obama a pass on this one instead of holding his feet to the same proverbial fire they had Bush’s in for so long.
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