During his presidential campaign, then-Senator Obama emphasized negotiations rather than military action. The Republicans ridiculed his focus on diplomacy as naïve, “Strong countries and strong presidents meet and talk with our adversaries,” Obama said during an August 19 debate. “We shouldn’t be afraid to do so. We’ve tried the other way. It didn’t work.” Candidate [...]
The report in Wednesday’s New York Times stating that the Obama Administration is preparing to resurrect Military Commissions to try Guantanamo detainees probably sounds the death knell for the kind of justice meted out by Federal civilian courts in the U.S. for more than two centuries. Instead, according to some of the nation’s most respected [...]
The Obama administration has shown a blatant disregard for international treaties and basic human rights in its second forcible deportation from Guantánamo of an Algerian national in the last six months. On January 6, the administration secretly and forcibly repatriated 48-year-old Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed to Algeria, which he reportedly fled in the 1990s, trying [...]
This story was written by Jason Leopold and originally published on Truthout.org. This week, in a burst of stunning hypocrisy, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that imposes sanctions on Iran for human rights abuses and targets eight Iranian government and military officials who are blamed for the torture, abuse and murder of citizens [...]
The Obama administration is a welcome change from the Bush–Cheney years. Against severe Republican opposition, President Obama has kept campaign promises to reform health care, curb Wall Street excesses, create a federally-funded stimulus program to help bring the nation out of the recession, and to remove American troops from the needless Iraq war, which has already cost Americans more than $740 billion and 4,400 lives. He has also pledged to eliminate the Bush–Cheney tax cuts for the rich, while not raising taxes on the middle- and lower-classes.
As the Justice Department remains on a collision course with the State of Arizona‘s tough new anti-immigrant law, and myriad additional legal problems develop for Arizona’s Republican governor, President Barack Obama has launched a new robust rhetorical initiative to pass comprehensive immigration reform. The president was unclear, however, as to the timing of Congressional action. It was generally believed that Obama would talk about immigration reform between now and the election of the next Congress in 2010.
President Obama’s hopes of closing Guantánamo, which were already gravely wounded by his inability to meet his self-imposed deadline of a year for the prison’s closure, now appear to have been killed off by lawmakers in Congress. Although the House Armed Services Committee was happy to authorize, by 59 votes to 0, a budget of over $700 billion for war ($567 billion for “defense spending” and $159 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) for the fiscal year beginning in October, lawmakers unanimously saw through — and turned down — a fraction of this budget for what the administration had labeled a “transfer fund” — money intended to close Guantánamo and buy a new prison in Illinois for prisoners designated for trials or for indefinite detention without charge or trial.
President Obama claimed last month that off-shore drilling technology had become so advanced that oil spills and blowouts were a thing of the past. Of course, as he said this, Australia and Indonesia were still assessing the damage from a similar offshore oil platform, the Montana, in the Timor Sea, which blew out and poured millions of gallons of oil into the ocean off Western Australia for over three months before it could be sealed off.
The Democratic Party’s embarrassing electoral disaster in Massachusetts, losing a seat held for 46 years by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, provided a clear warning that the party, and President Obama’s presidency, are headed for an epic trouncing this November, when all members of the House and a third of the Senate face reelection.
Two reports coming out of Afghanistan illustrate the depth of hypocrisy and subterfuge characterizing the US/NATO intervention in that country. One could cite a myriad of such examples, so immoral and wrong is the US war there. In the first report, a 2009 human rights assessment prepared by Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department, obtained by The Canadian Press and reported at CBC News, revealed a skyrocketing suicide rate among Afghan women:
