World-News

AntiWar.Com
by Justin Raimondo

He’s not closing Guantanamo, he’s continuing the ‘preventive detention’ policy of the Bush administration under a new rubric (’prolonged detention’), he’s on board with military commissions (’reformed,’ of course) and the denial of habeas corpus — and last, but certainly not least, his supporters in Congress have launched a campaign to give him and his cabinet officials the power to close down the Internet in the name of ‘national security.’ … At least the Bush crowd had enough remnants of a moral sense to sneak around and try to hide their crimes against liberty and the rule of law. Although they tried to rationalize their actions with after-the-fact legal arguments, the effort seems to me rather halfhearted: they weren’t really all that concerned with legalizing their power grab. They just went ahead and did it, and damn the torpedoes. The Obamaites, on the other hand, have a different style — but the substance is essentially the same, with the addition of a few minor tweaks and rhetorical flourishes. They want to bureaucratize and institutionalize the horrors of the past eight years and make what used to be unthinkable routine...

http://tinyurl.com/pfwpr8



Blowing smoke on Gitmo

AntiWar.Com
by Ivan Eland

05/23/09

Despite all of the hubbub about the possibility of bringing Guantanamo prisoners to the United States, most scary are Obama’s recent musings about changing laws to allow preventive detention. When a president can yank people off the streets merely because he alleges that they are ‘dangerous,’ throw them in jail, and hold them indefinitely without charge, we are on the road to dictatorship. Although Bush violated such habeas corpus rights, which have been one of the cornerstones of the rule of law in both Britain and the United States for centuries, Obama is talking about enshrining the violations into permanency. All of this shows that Obama is not restoring the republic, but has adopted a policy of Bush Lite, which retains some of the unneeded and un-American Bush policies. (I do not accuse people of ‘un-American’ activities lightly, but this erosion of unique American freedoms does seem to fit the bill.)...

http://original.antiwar.com/eland/2009/05/22/blowing-smoke-on-gitmo/


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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Indefinite detention
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/630.html



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