While we were all shopping and arguing over whether or not fruitcake is fit for human consumption, Obama decided to go to bat and fight for someone. Who was he fighting for? The torturers of the Bush administration, that’s who. Oh, and anyone else in the United States government who wants to torture and violate the human rights of others.
As Chris Floyd reports, The United States is now legally free to torture whomever it wants, thanks to the Supreme Court of the land, and the political power weilded by Barrack Hussein Obama.
It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.
Here’s how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.” They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.
And people wonder what this “hatred” is towards Obama. “I didn’t get my pony?” they ask? Ha. They have no idea. I hate Obama for the same reasons I hate Bush. Why? Because Obama IS Bush. His administration is one and the same as the Bush administration, and I mean that quite literally when it comes to justice, human rights, and the wars. ALL THE SAME PEOPLE are running the show, and we know that Bush’s Justice Department is a bunch of corrupt, human rights-violating flunkies recruited from the ranks of the “religious right”. And they are still in office, fighting for their hatreds
Now Obama is not just passively letting these people continue the Bush/Cheney yearas, he is going out of his way to enable them.
He is putting his name to the most egregious violations of human rights in this nation’s history.
What’s really pathological is that he is shitting on the very system that freed African American people, of which he is a gene-carrying member.
More from antiwar.com:
US: Guantanamo Prisoners Not ‘Persons’by William Fisher,
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that “torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use.”
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., had ruled that government officials were immune from suit because at that time it was unclear whether abusing prisoners at Guantanamo was illegal.
Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.
Ironically, the first African American president is promoting a policy frighteningly familiar to the Dred Scott decision of yesteryear:
“Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not ‘persons’ within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow,” he added.The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants – whether or not they were slaves – were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.
Thanks, Obama. Next time someone calls you an “Uncle Tom” I simply won’t cringe. I might even nod. I might even say “hell yeah.”