Glenn Greenwald: Another Guantánamo Prisoner Death Highlights Democrats' Hypocrisy

The Guardian (UK)
September 11, 2012.

"In the hierarchy of evil, consigning someone who has been convicted of nothing to a cage year after year after year, until they die, is high up on the list. And in that regard, this latest episode demonstrates not only the ongoing travesty of the US's war on terror policies, but also the dishonesty of the attempt to exonerate Obama for those policies.  ...

What has always made Guantánamo such an assault on basic notions of justice, and what still makes it so, is not its physical location in the Carribean sea. Its defining evil is its system of indefinite detention: that human beings are imprisoned indefinitely, sometimes for life, without the obligation to prove they are guilty of anything. Notwithstanding the authoritarian eagerness on the part of many to blissfully assume that people in Gitmo must be guilty terrorists because the US government says so, punishing people without trials or charges is as tyrannical as it gets, and it continues in full.

To the extent they ever address any of this at all any more, Obama defenders love to point out that he tried to fulfill his promise to "close Gitmo", but was thwarted by congressional opposition from both parties. That claim is true as far as it goes, but it does not go very far at all.

That's because Obama's plan was not so much to "close Gitmo" as it was simply to relocate it a few thousand miles north onto US soil, with its system of indefinite detention – which makes the camp so odious – fully preserved. That is why civil liberties groups such as the ACLU harshly denounced Obama's plan as "Gitmo North". As the ACLU explained, long before Congress obstructed what Obama wanted to do, "the administration plans to continue its predecessor's policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial for some detainees, with only a change of location."

Indeed, as I documented several months ago, the system of indefinite detention from the start has been central to Obama's plan for these detainees. Put another way, even if Congress had given Obama everything he wanted, the system that means that death is the only way out for many detainees would have been fully preserved. The excuse-making for Obama – "oh, he tried to close the camp but Congress would not let him" – is simply a deceitful tactic Democrats have concocted to justify their total silence about a grave injustice they once pretended to find so appalling and their raucous swooning for a president who supports it.  There is, however, one one significant difference in this regard between Bush's and Obama's policies. Whereas Bush preferred to detain people without due process or judicial review, Obama simply kills them."

 Read the rest here.

*****

Comment: Greenwald's last sentence in the excerpt above is horrifically revealing.

Obomber has in effect become more evil than Bush.  Who would have thought so when he promised to close Guantánamo as he stumped for the presidency?

And yet there is no shortage of apologists for Tom.  On any given moment, as we head closer to November, you can find any number of Democrats making excuses for this murderer and his machine.

"What other choice is there?" was asked of me recently.

Choice?

Does one ignore the brutality of Obomber because you are restricted by the lack of choice?  Is that even the issue?

So send this murderer back for another four years because you worried that the 'no choice' of Romney will be too unsafe for liberal concerns about abortion and contraception - as the extension of the 'choice' argument goes.

Meanwhile Obomber is destroying the very constitution that supposedly enshrines choices like the right to be heard in a fair trial without having to die uncharged and caged like a rabid animal in Guantánamo.  

So who will speak up for those innocents killed by Obomber's machine, women and girls included?

What about the integrity of their bodies and their manifest right to live?  Do they have a choice?  And how does it intersect with the concern for choice stateside?

F*ck the contrived and myopic liberal concern with choice in all its contrived guises.  

Americans, particularly liberals (Democrats), need to get a grip on reality and remove their consent because in effect they are not mere bystanders to Obomber's murderous reign, they are in fact willing participants.

Onward!