(Crossposted from The Free Speech Zone)
Center for Constitutional Rights President Michael Ratner and Managing Attorney for CCR’s Guantanamo project Shayana Kadidal responded with disappointment to President Obama’s speech this morning. CCR represents the detainees at Guantánamo and is part of the key FOIA lawsuit surrounding the torture photo disclosures.
Ratner and Kadidal were disturbed by the direction the Obama administration is taking on questions of human rights, transparency, accountability and the law. CCR’s Executive Director, who met with the president yesterday, briefed his colleagues before boarding a plane this morning.
Said Ratner, “The president wrapped himself in the Constitution and then proceeded to violate it by announcing he would send people before irredeemably flawed military commissions and seek to create a preventive detention scheme that only serves to move Guantanamo to a new location and give it a new name.”
Said Kadidal, “Preventive detention goes against every principle our nation was founded on. We have courts and laws in place that we respect and rely on because we have been a nation of laws for hundreds of years; we should not simply discard them when they are inconvenient. The new president is looking a lot like the old.”
Video I made of Obama selling us “prolonged detention” as a new legal precedent for our nation. In front of The Constitution no less. This is contradictory to our value of the rule of law and the very soul of this nation. It is clear that we can no longer rely on President Obama to put forth our agendas and only tapped into the grassroots for the phone bankers and door knockers that would get him power only to sell us out when he finally got into office.
The answer is clear. We must stand up for ourselves. Each person being their own god, their own master, must work towards something greater then themselves and rely only on one another who seek our allegiance and solidarity, not our votes.
To help Human Rights groups that wish to stop the torture and implementation of “IRF” teams inside the prison camps under the Obama Administration as well as to uphold our civil liberties of a fair trial inside the United States, feel free to contact these groups:
Center For Constitutional Rights:
Amnesty International:
ACLU- American Civil Liberties Union:
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Infection complete.
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:::washes clothes in detergent-free soap:::
is exactly what we thought he was – a snake oil salesman. If it hadn’t of been for “the kids”, I don’t think he would have won. And then what? We really need public financing of elections, or we need a real third party.
…remember this? U.S. Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1?
It’s right funny to note that Obama’s Prolonged Detention also runs afoul of the Brown v Board of Education precedent, by treating as “separate” a particular group of individuals.
Obama should summon the guts to confess that his Prolonged Detention is a ploy to evade the constitutionally mandated result of evidence obtained illegally: dismissal of the charges and the freeing of the accused.