Are you really surprised by this, Glenn. Obama is a skillful and cautious president trying to establish bipartisan consensus on the issues that matter most to him. The theoretical impact of his position on the lives of Americans may interest him, but he has calculated that any real impact on the rights and freedoms of Americans will be minimal. As to the detainees, I think he has decided to sacrifice them in pursuit of his larger policy objectives.

In the short term there is some merit to what I believe to be his view on the impact of this couse of action in regards to the rights of Americans. In the long term I think he has solidified the creation of the Tyrannosaurus Rex presidency.

I do not disagree with your points. However, let me assure you that I do not have any agenda, since I am not an American citizen. I have a very keen interest in American politics because I think there are nothing short of fascinating. I have followed them for the last 40 years and they never stop surprising me.

I have opinions that I hope there are reasonably balanced, but that is not for me to say.

By the way, here is another opinion about President Obama: He is going to do nothing to help the afro-american community. If this is true he may very well help the election of another african-american President for that very reason. Symbols are important, particularly to that community after so many years of abuse, but ultimately actions is what really counts.

Per the UN Convention Against Torture, a Senate-ratified treaty that is “supreme law of the land” by Article VI:

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Emphasis mine.

Stop Indefinite Detention: ACLU Petition to President Obama (see sig)

https://secure.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1625

I agree with both of you actually. The problem is that the view espoused to some extent by me and then to another by Che, is rarely seen in these pages while these pages are rife with the former view, as Che noted.

My own opinion about constitutionally protected rights is that they are the best way for amplifying access to justice for people who have typically been denied it because of a culture predicated on racism, patriarchy and homophobia. While the constitution, when it was created, was a tool of oppression against the vast majority of Americans--women, Indians, African and African American slaves and later Asians and Latinos and white poor and laborers--it has been those very articles and subsequent amendments that have created a path to access for political and social rights.

Sometime when I see the glee in which people take at picking apart Obama, I can only shake my head. Many groups out there have a vested interest in believing in Obama--some of these are Obama-bots who simply don't want to admit that their superstar is just another man in a suit in the West Wing. But others are people who've lived their whole lives seeing few people who look like them, or who have names like theirs anywhere in positions of power. Its an uphill battle to convince them to take joy in razzing Obama and America is going to have to give them their due during elections now that they're mobilized and engaged.

did you mean Obama is Alice?

The fine print about Torture in the USA [I was just reading about this because of a post by ondelette at Humanity Against Crime:http://humanityagainstcrimes.blogspot.com/][Emphasis mine]

October 17, 2006 - The Military Commisions Act is signed into law. [Public Law No: 109-366] It strips detainees of their constitutional right to habeas corpus and, in a provision pushed by Cheney, grants retroactive immunity to Americans accused of potential war crimes. [16] “[This Act] will allow the Central Intelligence Agency to continue its program for questioning key terrorist leaders and operatives.”- Bush For an example of the effect of the MCA on an attempted prosecution see the case of Mohammed Jawad. [24] For a pdf of the Military Commissions Act, see [28] See also September 15, 2006 and November 10, 2006. In the June 12, 2008 Boumediene decision the Supreme Court declared that the detainees have a constitutional right to habeas and struck down the jurisdiction-stripping provision of the MCA as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ. [118] “Above all, the Military Commissions Act protected the CIA's use of psychological torture by repeating verbatim the exculpatory language found in those Clinton-era, Reagan-created reservations to the U.N. Convention [Against Torture] and still embedded in Section 2340 of the Federal code. To make doubly sure, the act also made these definitions retroactive to November 1997, giving CIA interrogators immunity from any misdeeds under the Expanded War Crimes Act of 1997 which punishes serious violations with life imprisonment or death.” [153]

Sources: http://www.webdsi.com/jebbie/tline.html

From: “A Short History of Psychological Torture: Its Discovery, Propagation, Perfection, and Legalization” Alfred W. McCoy, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of California at Davis, Center for Mind and Brain, September 30, 2006

http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/resources/library/documents-and-reports/McCoy.pdf

[This lecture was part of: Workshop on the Neurobiology of Psychological Torture; September 30, 2006

UCDavis Center for Mind and Brain http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/events/first-ucdavis-workshop-on-the-neurobiology-of-psychological-torture ]

1.) When the Cold War came to a close, Washington resumed its advocacy of human rights, ratifying the UN Convention Against Torture in 1994 that banned the infliction of “severe” psychological and physical pain.

2.) On the surface, the United States had apparently resolved the tension between its anti-torture principles and its torture practices.

3.) Yet when President Clinton sent this UN Convention to Congress for ratification in 1994, he included language drafted by the Reagan administration—with four detailed diplomatic “reservations” focused on just one word in the convention’s 26-printed pages.

a.) That word was “mental.”

b.) Significantly, these intricately-constructed diplomatic reservations redefined torture, as interpreted by the United States, to exclude sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain—the very techniques the CIA had refined at such great cost.

c.) This definition was reproduced verbatim in domestic legislation enacted to give legal force to the UN Convention--first in Section 2340 of the US Federal Code and then in the War Crimes Act of 1996.

--N.B. Remember that obscure number--Section 2340--for it is the key to unlocking the meaning of the controversial Military Commissions Law enacted by the US Congress in late September.

d.) In effect, Washington split the UN Convention down the middle, banning physical torture but exempting from psychological abuse.

4.) By failing to repudiate the CIA’s use of torture, while adopting a UN convention that condemned its practice, the United States left this contradiction buried like a political land mine ready to detonate with such phenomenal force, just 10 years later, in the Abu Ghraib scandal.