Wednesday, November 30, 2016

And so it goes on....

As the sun sets on Obama, now we see him hand over to Trump in much the same way as Bush did to Obama. It makes no difference weather Republican or Democrat. The president is working for someone higher up, as this article so eloquently demonstrates.

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From TechDirt

In His Final Days, Obama Quietly Expands War Powers Before Handing Them Off To Trump

While we knew it was impossible for President Obama to truly rein in the massive executive powers that he helped expand (following on the massive expansions from previous administrations) concerning national surveillance and war -- we had still hoped that maybe his concern about a President Trump would let him do a few small things to limit some of the most egregious powers. Instead, it appears that President Obama is doing the opposite, and expanding his war powers, just as he's about to hand them to someone that he, himself, has loudly criticized as being unfit for the Presidency.

For years now, we've written about how the Obama administration has regularly rewritten the dictionary in order to pretend that the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) hastily granted by Congress in the wake of 9/11 enabled him to go to war with basically anyone. If you don't recall, the AUMF granted the President the power to use "all necessary and appropriate force" to go after those who "planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." That's already fairly broad, but over the years basically our entire government has pretended that (1) the AUMF included the ability to also target "associated forces" (even though it does not) and (2) it allowed the President to simply lump in anyone he wanted as an "associated force" allowing him to bomb them without any Congressional authorization. This is how you get a war without end, in which the explicit authorization to go after Al Qaeda is now being used on a surprisingly long list of groups that didn't even exist in 2001.

And, just a few days ago, President Obama expanded the list yet again, allowing himself to go after yet another group: Shabab. Now, no one is trying to claim that Shabab, or ISIS or any other group that has been added to the list aren't out to do serious harm to the US. But, this seems to go way beyond the basic functions of the office of the President and the simple Constitutional requirement for Congress to declare war. As Trevor Timm notes at the Guardian, this is a big deal:

Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Micah Zenko didn’t mince words in the Times when describing what the Obama administration is doing: “It’s crazy,” he said of the administration’s redefining the law out of existence. “This administration leaves the Trump administration with tremendously expanded capabilities and authorities.”

Make no mistake: Trump will have a free hand to use the law meant for the perpetrators of 9/11 to wage war around the world, fashioning it to different enemies at his command, and he will be able to point to precedent set by the Obama administration as he does it.

Per usual, all the White House’s decisions are being made under the veil of official secrecy. The only reason we know about it is not because the administration announced it, but because the New York Times reported it after unnamed officials leaked it to them.

Read More...

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That's not "change we can believe in."

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Obama's Broken Guantanamo Promises

From: Reason.com

Obama's Broken Guantanamo Promises

Barack Obama's first official act in office addressed not the economy or health care but Guantanamo. In a moment of high drama, surrounded by a phalanx of retired military brass, the president signed a series of executive orders acknowledging that "the individuals currently detained at Guantanamo have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus," providing that the executive branch would undertake "a prompt and thorough review" of whether the "continued detention" of the men at Guantanamo "is in the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and in the interests of justice," and ordering that "the detention facilities at Guantanamo...shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order." Obama issued a separate executive order banning the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," i.e., torture.

As far as Guantanamo was concerned, those executive orders would represent the high-water mark of the Obama presidency. The first year of his administration was noteworthy not for the closure of Guantanamo but for a series of unilateral actions that were starkly at odds with the president's rhetorical defense of habeas corpus and that doomed his much-heralded directive to close the island facility:

Read More...

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That's not "change we can believe in."

Thursday, January 22, 2015

The Biggest State Of The Union Lies

From WeAreChange

In this video Luke Rudkowski goes over Barack Obama's 2015 State of The Union address and exposes some of the biggest lies told to the american people.

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That's not "change we can believe in."

Obama pledges Gitmo Closure Again..., 6 years after first promise.

from RT




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That's not "change we can believe in."

Monday, October 27, 2014

Obama caught violating anti-torture treaty


From RT America:




Which brings to mind this video: Yasilin Bey (a.k.a Mos Def) force fed under standard Guantanamo Bay procedure

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That's not "change we can believe in."

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Bipartisanship

From: Association of American Editorial Cartoonists
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That's not "change we can believe in."

Friday, May 16, 2014

Force-feeding in Guantanamo Bay

Obama is now in his second term, but back when he was running for his first term, he promised to shut down Guantanamo Bay as his first point of duty in office.

At the time it was a big deal, and his promise to shut it down rang true with many voters and this helped him to win the nomination for the Democrats. If it sounds hazy, then take a quick trip down memory lane.

Fast Forward to 2014.

There is video evidence that Guantanamo inmates, held on questionable moral and legal grounds, are being tortured as they undertake hunger strikes in protest of their conditions. Inmates are force fed while restrained in chairs, to the point of vomiting and/or defecting in the chair.

From RT:

No matter how you look at it, force feeding an inmate who is on a hunger strike is torture, and that is against every conceivable American value.

This is NOT change we can believe in. Wake up America, your taxes are funding this, you are supporting this.

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That's not "change we can believe in."