Liar // Current TV

U.S. flouts law at Guantanamo, despite Obama vow: U.N.

By Reuters
Monday, January 23, 2012

GENEVA (Reuters) – The United States is still flouting international law at Guantanamo Bay, despite President Barack Obama’s election pledge to shut the facility, the United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay said on Monday.

“It is ten years since the U.S. Government opened the prison at Guantanamo, and now three years since 22 January 2009, when the President ordered its closure within twelve months. Yet the facility continues to exist and individuals remain arbitrarily detained – indefinitely – in clear breach of international law,” Pillay said in a statement.

Former President George W. Bush set up the camp at a U.S. naval base in Cuba after U.S.-led forces invaded Afghanistan to expel al Qaeda which had launched the September 11 attacks in 2001.

Eight prisoners have died at Guantanamo, two deaths ascribed to natural causes and the rest classified as suicides, and many detainees have said they were tortured. Only six trials have been completed in 10 years.

“While fully recognizing the right and duty of states to protect their people and territory from terrorist acts, I remind all branches of the U.S. government of their obligation under international human rights law to ensure that individuals deprived of their liberty can have the lawfulness of their detention reviewed before a court,” Pillay said.

“Where credible evidence exists against Guantanamo detainees, they should be charged and prosecuted. Otherwise, they must be released.”

Obama had planned to move some detainees to the United States, but Congress blocked funding for that plan and tightly restricted all transfers out, demanding his administration must notify congressional intelligence committees and guarantee the prisoner will not engage in terrorism.

Pillay urged Congress to enable the administration to close the camp.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/23/u-s-flouts-law-at-guantanamo-despite-obama-vow-u-n/

(Reporting by Tom Miles)

"So how bout it BO... Got anymore BS Campaign Slogans???"By Reuters Monday, January 23, 2012 GENEVA (Reuters) – The United States is... more

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Giving Peace No Chance

In 2009, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the annual Nobel Peace Prize to newly minted President Barack Obama. In its press release, the Committee noted “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

Democrats hailed the announcement as a validation of their faith in the erstwhile junior Senator from Illinois. Conservatives acknowledged the most-recent addition to the untested former community organizer’s collection of accolades as proof that the Nobel Prize — which had gained considerable tarnish after being handed to Al Gore for science fiction — was rapidly becoming as precious as those fancy breath mints they have in a dish at the Chicago-area restaurants where Oprah Winfrey dines. The conservative skepticism was confirmed after it became apparent the Norwegian Nobel Committee voted to hand the medal to Obama only nine days into his occupation of the Oval Office.

But Obama is a Nobel laureate. He successfully campaigned on his opposition to war, proudly touting his stance against further combat in Iraq and promising a swift withdrawal from that conflict. With Obama in the White House, not only were we all going to be better people, but we were going to live in a more peaceful world. Obama was demonstrating “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation.”

So, more than two years later, how’s that working out for everyone?

The War in Iraq continues, although the corporate media have developed an apparent aversion to reporting on it. The War in Afghanistan has gotten more — not less — violent, although the corporate media have evidently forgotten how to find Afghanistan on a map. The Middle East has erupted in a revolutionary frenzy which seems inspiring, until closer examination of the various conflicts reveals what may well be some sort of intramural Islamofascist squabble. Instead of delivering harmonious peace to the planet, Obama has increased U.S. military obligations from two wars to four. And he has done so at a time when the U.S. economy is wheezing like Ed Schultz chasing after a date (thanks to Obama’s ham-fisted economic stewardship).

You read that correctly. In addition to the continuing engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has committed us to the dubiously progressing effort to oust Moammar Gadhafi from Libya. And thanks to a report which will probably cost The New York Times a spot on the plane the next time Michelle Obama takes a few dozen of her closest friends to a five-star foreign resort, it has been revealed the U.S. military is now conducting a “secret” — and growing — conflict in Yemen. “Cooperation between peoples” is fairly simple when one side of those “peoples” is pushing up palm trees.

To be honest, I have no issue with justifiable war. Terrorists, among others, need to die; and the U.S. military has consistently demonstrated it is second to none at killing terrorists. Plus, war looks much cooler on television than the corporate media excusing Representative Anthony Weiner’s contact with high school girls. Of course, I didn’t run for President of the United States on an anti-war platform, nor did I win the Nobel Peace Prize on spec. The Obama global doctrine appears to involve some sort of diplomatic board game: “All right, Mr. President, you rolled a five and a three. You have to go to…Yemen… with a cruise missile!”

I am, therefore, perplexed by the ability of rank-and-file liberals to rectify their beloved Obama’s anti-war promises with his decidedly belligerent (or scattershot) performances.

The whole of human history has been marked by war. Indeed, the number of war-free years since the first Neolithic tribesmen began scribbling depictions of dead other Neolithic tribesmen is, counting 2011, effectively zero. Ever since Thok figured out he could have the best cows and women by splitting Unk’s skull with a rock, we’ve been at it. In fact, there may well be only one thing that has defined man’s attempts to assert his own dominance over the world: lying.

–Ben Crystal

http://www.personalliberty.com/hot-topics/outside-the-asylum/giving-peace-no-chance/?eiid=&rmid=2011_06_14_PLA_[P11826592]&rrid=238466338In 2009, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the annual Nobel Peace Prize to newly... more

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Barack Obama, I Want a Divorce | | AlterNet

My honeymoon with the Democrats has long since passed. Our relationship has turned sour, and I'm in no mood to marry again.

March 20, 2010 |

My honeymoon with the Democrats has long since passed. Our relationship has turned sour, and I’m in no mood to marry again.

Anyone who has ever gone through a divorce or marital separation knows how traumatic it can be. Marriages are supposed to be forever, but then life intrudes. First, the blissful honeymoon when it’s unthinkable to be apart from the loved one. Then the middle doldrums when spine-tingling doubts arise followed by flimsy excuses to oneself, self-rationalisations, for the other’s bad behaviour. Love weakens but loyalty remains. (For some of us, constancy is stronger than lust.) We soon grow accustomed to abuse, insults, betrayals and infidelity to the marriage vows. After all, where would we go, what would we do, if we freed ourselves from the bondage of a bad relationship? It’s too terrifying to think about, so we don’t.

That’s pretty much where my liberal friends and I are today with the Democrats and Obama administration spiralling out of control and showing every sign of wanting to do us harm before it flames out. We, like battered husbands and bruised wives, feebly grab at straws of hope. The straws are real, too. There may be only an inch of difference between Republicans and Democrats but real people in a real world live by that inch. For example, north of Los Angeles, where I live, an Obama-reinvigorated Environmental Protection Agency is seriously probing a toxic scandal in the mainly Latino hamlet of Kettleman where carelessly dumped corporate chemicals may have led to babies being born with facial disfigurements. The Republicans wouldn’t have bothered. That’s no small thing for the people concerned. And Obama appointed a known workers’ friend in Hilda Solis as secretary of labour in place of Bush’s Elaine Chao who never saw a union she didn’t despise. In other words, our Harvard professor in the White House has done something.

But the fact remains he is a war president with blood on his hands like Lyndon Johnson – only without LBJ’s guts and arm-twisting talent. Obama leads a dysfunctional, cowardly and bribable Democratic party establishment, personified by his mean-minded economic gurus Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, and his frazzled secretary of state the war-loving Hillary Clinton. The few Democratic politicians who stand up for sanity – against the war, for a public health option – are like Florida’s Alan Grayson and Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich – marginalised by the media and their own colleagues as lunatics or, in Rahm Emanuel’s immortal phrase, “retarded”.

In a bad marriage, if we’re lucky, a sad, angry, unwelcome realism takes over and an existential fear invades our soul. But we do not want to be alone in a loveless world. A divorce often means being cast out into psychological darkness, exile from the “mainstream”, the loss of (and even abuse from) friends, a terrifying sense of isolation and inadequacy. So, stuffing our ears and blinding our eyes to our own victimisation, we recommit to the relationship. We continue to deny, deny, deny. Life goes on, diminished and undignified. Soul-suicide.

But now I want a divorce from the Democrats, the “party of the people” versus the Republicans who with a few honorable exceptions are the party of cruelty. Are there some good Democrats? You bet. Are they outnumbered by callow, fearful Democrats? You bet.

I don’t care that at the moment there’s nowhere to go and hardly anybody to cheer for.

Like the Tea Partiers I’ve had it up to here. But as a taker of GI Bill, social security and Medicare benefits, and as a child of the New Deal which put my unemployed mother and father to work, I know that only big government, as dangerous as it can be, can help pull us all out of the shit – yes, the same government that by deregulating and bailouts pushed us into it. (I wonder how many populists, screaming about “socialist” government, are only too happy to take their portion of federal money as I am.)

I wish I could get behind Ralph Nader or the Green party or Cynthia McKinney or even Ron Paul for his antiwar stance. But having just split from my heart’s desire – the Democrats – I’m in no mood to marry up again. I’m caught in a vise between a lingering wish to be “effective”, not “waste my vote”, and a Huckleberry Finn itch to light out for unknown territory.My honeymoon with the Democrats has long since passed. Our relationship has turned... more

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