We have to confront a painful question about our President. Many of us were convinced that he would be very different from his predecessor in matters of civil liberties.

And many of us were not. It's better to elect people who think they have something to prove to the base instead of people who know they can take the base for granted. Obama knew and continues to know he can take the base for granted. You'll continue to get nothing you expected from this administration. Live and learn.

and haven't read comments yet but--as usual!--I just have to opine immediately by saying Jesus Christ (re: Alicia Shepard's comments):

That's really what she said: that when the U.S. did it (as opposed to Evil countries), it was for a good reason...

What boggles my mind isn't that this view is held by the likes of her and others, but that they have the temerity (or maybe it is simple stupidity along with a dollop of sadism) to express it so directly. You'd think they never took a civics course while being young Americans. Shepard--what the hell happened to you while navigating the shoals of life? When was your humanity lost?

Also, GG, were I you, I'd simply be furious that someone like Nadler took as his own my comments from one of my posts. Of course, you handled it nicely by first citing your actual post, then citing Nadler's citation-without-attribution of it, but still.

Man, that really burns my britches when people do that.

This makes me wonder where are all the "Let's just give him a chance. He has a lot on his plate, so let's give him some time." people are.

Well they're probably not COMPLETE idiots and they probably do have some shame.

I'm interested in what you all think as to why obama is doing this.

What's his motivation?

First off, its "Obama" with a capital "O". The word "President" should also be placed before the name as that's his office. Just a small lesson in proper english.

As to your question of motivation, we'll likely never know what the full impetus behind these moves were. No-one can ever know fully and conclusively what drives another, least of all someone in high office. You're better off asking yourself the same question while looking in a mirror.

at the "sole" discretion of the Messiah.

Is it safe to say that Adnoto was right and we don't live in the country we think we do and that voting for either party candidate is pointless to political outcomes. We don't live in anything remotely resembling a democracy or a respresentative republic--we live in a banana republic where the political oligarchs, business/banking corporatists, and military/intelligence bureaucrats "dictate" our public policies.

Please someone give me one single example of how the above statements are inaccurate.

The sad thing is the groups above don't realize that when the little people wise up and realize "the rule of law" is a sham they're going to resort to self-help of the violent guillotine variety if history is any indicator.

I guess the next grassroots movement will have to be the "anti-party anti-incumbent movement".

These three quotes illustrate the thing I was trying to say in my piece on Aafia Siddiqui on HAC. I have most if not all my ducks in a row there, I have read every piece of news and every blog article written on her that I could find by search engines since July of 2008 (although my archive now has a hole in it due to a disk crash), and still, I could not put it into a concise argument rather than just writing whole paragraphs in anger or depression.

From Ben Wizner, quoted in Glenn's update:

This stunning turn of events highlights a cruelly ironic feature of detention at Guantanamo. In an ordinary justice system, the accused must be acquitted to be released. In Guantanamo, the accused must plead guilty to be released -- because even if he is acquitted, he remains an "enemy combatant" subject to indefinite detention. Only by striking a deal does a detainee stand a chance of getting out.

From Lt.Col. Darrel Vandeveld, quoted by pow wow:

In this way, I came to realize that Mr. Jawad had probably been telling the truth to the court from the very beginning.

And from Col. Winegard, also quoted by pow wow:

Col. Wingard said his client, the son of a wealthy Kuwaiti family, had traveled to Afghanistan to do charity work required of his Muslim faith. He said Mr. Al-Kandari was subjected to sleep deprivation and subjected to extreme cold while strapped naked to a floor at Guantanamo. Col. Wingard said his client was beaten with a chain.

"He was given the full works, an enhanced interrogation," Col. Wingard said.

There are several things at work here: First, there will be no one released unless there is a deal -- and specifically, the deals have included that the released prisoner will not attempt to bring suit against the U.S. government or government officials for torture. There have also been deals with foreign governments that the prisoners not be released, to keep this from happening.

Second, what seems to some as a clear case of a terrorist on trial morphs over time into a massive government attempt to put someone away for good without real charges or evidence. What seems at first instance to be a dangerous terrorist or an insane person, ends up, after long last, as a person who was telling the truth.

Third, the plight of the Muslim aid worker is something that gets heard, if anyone listens, over and over again. They knew this when they apprehended some of these people. Chillingly, they were incarcerated and tortured not because anyone had ever thought them to be terrorists or guilty of anything at all, but only because, being Muslim foreigners in Afghanistan (or elsewhere, like Bosnia), they were thought to know something (as it turns out, to know something about al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein). That it became mandatory later that they confess to being al Qaeda was only to attempt to line up their treatment with future excuses in a court of law -- one where those on trial would be the torturers, not the prisoners.

What is so frustrating is that I get the feeling that the fact that this torture thingy won't go away when it's told to, is the whole reason that the Obama administration seems to be moving from dismissing the issue to being obsessed with crushing it, at the expense of the corruption of our courts, our democracy, our military, and everything else. What's so frustrating is that Congress is fully in on the thing: It was our Congress, not the President, that mandated that no Guantanamo prisoner could ever be released on American soil -- one of the primary reasons why other countries are unwilling to take them. What's so frustrating is that our Courts are plenty willing to hear cases based on plots that were regurgitated with the vomit while blood from the wrist restraints dribbled onto the fingers of a prisoner who'd just been subjected to his 100th episode of near drowning and was spewing everyone he'd read in the news, every person he'd ever met at a party, anything at all to get it to stop.

And so the corruption promised by torture in democracies takes this route: The full power of the entire U.S. government, from the President with his executive orders and indefinite detentions, to the Congress with their revival of military commissions and banning of Guantanamo prisoners and photographs, to the Judiciary, with their admission of plots garnered under torture, their acceptance of renditions, their refusal to order medical tests for torture, and their acquiescence to 'detention on the battlefield' and 'illegal combatants' without careful examination of the 'battlefield' itself, has come down to squash any and every individual who might allege formally under the law, that the U.S. government has ever commit torture. The current government, all three branches in their own ways, conspire to gut our nation of laws all because they can't countenance that the country has commit this crime.