President Obama’s recent removal of travel restrictions for Cuban Americans visiting family has given hope to those who assert our freedom to travel the globe, particularly those who stand to benefit from America opening up travel with Cuba.

Orbitz Worldwide is sponsoring a petition drive in order to lobby the President, Secretary of State and the Congress to completely open Cuba to Americans.

Polls indicate the vast majority of Americans believe that all U.S. citizens should have the freedom to travel to Cuba, but the anti-Communism of 50 years ago still slows the Congress from enforcing the will of the people.  Many of our representatives still believe that Cuba must make drastic reforms before America can repeal the travel ban, though I don’t hear any of these hardliners calling for travel bans to Communist China, Socialist Venezuela,  or any other country with whom we’ve held pissing matches.

Man has the right to move as he will on the face of the earth.  Sign the petition here.

The LA Times has more.

The document primarily promises a stronger commitment to existing laws already on the books – laws that many human rights groups claim are often overlooked or suppressed.

Further, no reforms are made to the country’s one-party system, the plan does not end or even phase out the practice of sending individuals to “re-education” prison camps without trial, and the unregistered prisons set up for political dissidents are not even mentioned.

The paper promises a “right of urban and rural residents to a basic standard of living,” and that unemployment will remain below 5%.  The Chinese government appears far more interested in keeping up appearances than in putting people first.

China has made some real progress on human rights since that bloody day in Tiananmen Square, but many local and provincial government agencies are slow to change their ways.  The plan does call for solid action to reduce the occurrence of torture, such as requiring interrogation rooms to have some physical separation to  distance interrogators from a suspect, but even such simple and effective steps will take years to implement nationwide.

About a week ago, Sun Wenguang, a 75-year-old retired professor who has been imprisoned multiple times in his life for expressing his political opinions and who was placed under 24-hour surveillance in the days prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, was brutally beaten by 5 unidentified men “in broad daylight and clear view of the police,” according to Human Rights in China.

On December 10, 2008 -  over 300 Chinese intellectuals and human rights advocates signed Charter 08, echoing many of the demands of the Tiananmen Square protesters.  20 years after the “June Fourth Incident,” the world is still waiting…

In early 1939, during the run-up to war with Germany, the British propaganda ministry created these posters – “Keep Calm and Carry On” – in order to reassure the people, and remind them that all would be okay, no matter how dire the circumstances, if only they would not fall into fear and paranoia.

While very few of these posters ever made it into circulation for the British people to see, keep calm they did.  On August 24, 1940 during the bombing of London by the German Luftwaffe, journalist Edward R. Murrow was in Trafalgar Square with his microphone.

In the streets, there is no terror, no panic.  Murrow describes a man stopping in front of him to light a cigarette, walking casually as others move quietly at a quicker pace.

…

A lot has changed since those days.

In the interest of “working together for a safer London,” the Metropolitan Police have launched a new counter-terrorism hotline and accompanying media campaign, which encourages calling the cops over anything “suspicious.”

London has been under video surveillance for years, and the Orwellian overtones haven’t been lost on very many.  But this new campaign takes the watchful eye to a new level.  Big Brother is so 1984… in 2009, we all just spy on each other!

The similar look, and yet starkly contrasted nature, of these two images strikes me.

The two other images at the Metro police site are worth examining.  The first seems to imply that good citizens should rummage through one another’s garbage bin looking for incriminating evidence, and the other gives the impression that anyone looking at London’s ubiquitous CCTV cameras is a terrorist bomber.

If something legitimately suspicious is seen, I don’t think the average person needs reminding that such a thing should be reported (and this can be legitimately helpful to law enforcement).  But while the 21st century has taught us the value of distributed computing with hardware, software and wetware, to me this is a dangerous precedent.

Such a hotline seems destined only to waste police officers’ time, and serve as a tool for retribution against that guy down the block whose dog insists on barking all night.

What’s more, promoting  constant low-level paranoia, ratting out neighbors, and passively accepting surveillance as virtues is a far cry from “Keep Calm and Carry On,” the unspoken motto of the stiff upper-lipped folks who faced the terrors of Hitler’s onslaught and responded to the wail of air-raid sirens with only clacking heels on cobble-stones.

If you still prefer the old version, you can share the message – or perhaps you appreciate a bit more irony.

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.