Remember how Candidate Obama promised to close Gitmo?
Senator Barack Obama, August 2, 2007:
As President, I will close Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions Act and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists.
He not only has failed to keep that promise, but he’s opened a new secret prison in Somalia. The Nation:
The CIA’s Secret Sites in Somalia
Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners. The existence of both facilities and the CIA role was uncovered by The Nation during an extensive on-the-ground investigation in Mogadishu. Among the sources who provided information for this story are senior Somali intelligence officials; senior members of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG); former prisoners held at the underground prison; and several well-connected Somali analysts and militia leaders, some of whom have worked with US agents, including those from the CIA. A US official, who confirmed the existence of both sites, told The Nation, “It makes complete sense to have a strong counterterrorism partnership” with the Somali government.
Time:
According to Scahill’s reporting, based on interviews with U.S. officials, human rights workers, lawyers, Somali politicians and analysts, the U.S. could be complicit in the possible torture of those held in the underground prison and has perhaps overseen the rendering of Somali terror suspects from Nairobi back to Mogadishu. A team of lawyers representing one man known to be in detention there paints the whole set-up as a kind of “decentralized, out-sourced Guantanamo Bay.” An article in Harpers outlines the moral tenuousness of the American position:
On the second day of his presidency, Barack Obama issued an executive order that on its face terminated the CIA’s “black site” program, which had seen the agency operate a series of clandestine overseas prisons for terrorism suspects. A few months later, on April 9, 2009, then CIA Director Leon Panetta stated that the CIA “no longer operates detention facilities or black sites,” and that the sites were being “decommissioned.” At the same time, however, the CIA was also maintaining a series of “special relationships” under which cooperating governments maintained proxy prisons for the CIA.
Whatever the depth of the involvement of the CIA and other intelligence and military agencies in Somalia, the report raises this specter of longstanding and much-loathed U.S. counter-terrorism practices in the Muslim world — policies that many hoped would fade under the Obama Administration and in the wake of the Arab Spring. Before, brutal regimes like those of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and even Muammar Gaddafi in Libya happily collaborated with U.S. agents in the arrest, secret detention and likely torture of Islamists and terror suspects. Scahill’s piece suggests not much has changed, at least in the Horn of Africa, a part of the world that has vexed American policy makers for nearly two decades.
Good thing we got rid of that evil Bush guy, huh? Now that constitutional law professor Obama is POTUS we’re once again a nation that abides by the rule of law.
/snark
Where are all the progressive voices that screamed about Bush-Cheney war crimes and secret prisons? Where are the Hollywood stars? Where’s the outrage?
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So who do the Dems have to primary him? As long as his base thinks he’s better than any evilllllll Republican, he may have another term to break more promises
A little o/t…..hey myiq, you been hangin’ with Charlie? /snort
I assert my Fifth Amendment privilege.
It’s not just the anti-war movement that disappeared in a puff of smoke. Where are the scathing editorials? Where are all the “journalists” who examined and re-examined the wars endlessly, and talked about the lack of a plan and the tremendous cost? Want to bet there will be no major coverage of this new secret prison?
This…THIS more than anything disgusts me to my core with the left and their media sycophants. The silence is deafening, hypocritical, and very very revealing about who they really are and what they really believe.
Because from where I am standing, it looks an awful lot like they believe in power for their tribe, and that’s about it.
It’s really maddening isn’t it? I always knew politicians could be hypocrites, but when their supporters show that they can just casually forget their core beliefs, it’s really disturbing.
Somebody explained to me that we’re now fighting these wars from an antiwar perspective, so that makes them different. Everything is always different when your tribe in in charge, their motives are now pure, so they can do the exact same thing the last guy was doing, but they’re doing it in the name of “good” instead of “evil.”
That’s how Palin and Obama could have the exact same stand on gay marriage and yet he’s a “fierce advocate” and she’s a “gay hater.”
I actually had a discussion with my husband the other night trying hard to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. We often play devil’s advocate with coldly logical “what if” scenarios, just to sharpen and broaden our minds. This is just hypothetical, so bear with me.
I said “What if he was at least somewhat sincere about wanting to end the wars, end the secret prisons, close Gitmo, stop the drone wars, etc.? And what if, after he got into office and began to receive real intelligence reports, he discovered that we are actually in greater danger, and further up shit creek as far as active terrorism goes, than he ever realized?”
IOW, leaving aside the morality or legality of all this, what if he discovered that distasteful as it is, Bush had damn good reason for a lot of what he was doing? What if it’s SO bad that he thought, “I have to do this, or we are well and truly fucked, because the threat is more overwhelming than I ever knew. The American people would freak if they knew how bad it is.”
Yeah, yeah, I know – pffffffft! Again, suspend disbelief for a second, this is hypothetical.
The conclusion my hubby and I came to is that even were that the case, an honest and principled leader would come to the people and tell us that. Would admit that his railing at Bush as a warmonger was a bit simplistic, and that it wasn’t as black and white as he had assumed. A real leader would say, “We have to find a way to protect ourselves within the rule of law, and we are going to try to do that. But in the meantime, we don’t have a lot of choice about continuing these programs, because we would, in reality, have american cities in flames if we stopped them now. We need to find a better way, but I’m not letting america be attacked while we seek a solution.”
In other words, even in that extreme hypothetical (which probably isn’t true), Obama has still utterly failed, and is a fucking hypocrite. Bush at least had to own what he was doing, however wrong, and try to justify it. He at least stood up and continually said, “I think what I am doing is right.” whether I agreed with him or not.
Obama hasn’t even owned it. And no one besides a very few journalists seem interested in making him do so. He is being allowed to play both sides of the fence. If he thinks continuing and expanding Bush’s policies is right, make him say so. Make him own it.
Obama promised transparency yet still blames Bush for most of his problems. The Dems are blaming Murdoch for News Corps ills, yet don’t hold their own guy up to the same standard. Gunwalker anyone?
He also got defensive when asked about all the fundraising trips he’s been doing …. “well, other Presidents did it too!” It’s just not what he promised to be, among other things.
Re: News Corp, I think that what has happened in the UK with that tabloid is disgusting, and ought to be prosecuted. I am withholding judgement on Murdoch until I see some evidence that he approved or promoted these practices. So far there is none. He oversees a HUGE media empire, with dozens of companies and publications, and it’s unlikely he knows everything that happens.
I believe that the head of an organization does, in the area of public opinion, take the heat for what their underlings do. But as far as full culpability goes, especially legal-wise, you need more evidence than that.
There is a recent scandal at the State Dept. wherein an employee lied to get big contracts illegally funneled to her husband and daughter. Is Hillary fully culpable for that? Not unless she knew and approved. It does give the State Dept a black eye, and affects her reputation, for sure. But that’s not the same as saying “she personally did this”.
When the Obots all claimed that he was the anti-war candidate. I tried to point out that if Obama can’t even buy a house on his own, how exactly is he going to end a war started by war-profiteers?
I guess the fine details that a bought man would not be selling out the buyers flew right past them.
“There’s no anti-war movement to speak of.”
Yep. That’s been my point ever since Obomba took office. They have fallen silent.
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