Blowing Smoke: Obama Is Morally High

Rick Gedeon
Activist Post

Git-Mo Gitmo
On his second day in office Obama promised to close the Guantanamo Bay “detention” center (if it was called a prison camp it would connote that the inmates are prisoners, and prisoners are entitled to rights, detainees aren’t.)  Guantanamo remains open for business and continues to be a national embarrassment to this day.

Promising to return America to the “moral high ground” in the war on terror Obama continues to miserably renege on virtually all of his promises.  He voted for the extension of the Patriot Act, expanded the wars in Afghanistan and now into Pakistan, and the list goes on and on.  If that wasn’t bad enough, Obama recently launched an air war against Libya, completely bypassing Congress.  Obama’s moral high ground also means allowing tortured persons to be tried in a military tribunal without habeas corpus. 

(c) The individuals currently detained at Guantánamo have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. Most of those individuals have filed petitions for a writ of habeas corpus in Federal court challenging the lawfulness of their detention…The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order…    January 22, 2009.

Khalid Shiekh Mohammed and Zacarias Moussaoui
A former Marine Corp officer and retired professor, Jim Fetzer, makes several telling points in, Bush Needs Torture and Terrorism: 

(1) It is common knowledge that torture is ineffectual at producing useful information (or “actionable intelligence”), because the subject will say anything to escape the torment.

(2) This fact cannot have escaped the administration, which found it irresistible to resort to torture to extract false confessions to support its fake rationale for a “war on terror.”

(3)  Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, for example, who is alleged to be the “mastermind” behind the 9/11 attacks, reportedly confessed to no less than 31 attacks (“Al Qaeda Chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Confesses to Planning Sept. 11, Gitmo Transcript Shows,” March 15, 2007).

(4) The fact that some of these occurred when he was a child and others after his capture doesn’t seem to have impressed The New York Times, which runs interference for the CIA.

(5) The trial of Zacarias Moussaoui was an even more grotesque case of the abuse of judicial procedure and violations of due process. He wasn’t convicted of the crime for which he was punished.” (“Scholars call Moussaoui Trial ‘A Charade’”  Scholars [for 911 Truth] published a press release about the Moussaoui trial (“Scholars Call Moussaoui Trial ‘A Charade’,” April 22, 2006)

(6)  He had confessed a year before to participating in a plot to free the blind shiek who had been involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center but had nothing to do with 9/11.

(7) He was equipped with a 50,000 volt ‘stun belt’ at the trial to determine his punishment, which no doubt made him very cooperative. But the situation is absurd.

(8) One day we have an article, ‘Bush Wants Limits on Access to Evidence’ (February 15, 2008), the next day a front page story, ‘U.S. Struggles to Tutor Iraqis in Rule of Law’ (February 16, 2008). We are suspended somewhere between ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘1984’.

(9) The nation is living a lie.  Bush — and now Obama, too — need torture and kangaroo courts to justify their phony ‘war on terror.’”

Spykids

Obama’s moral high ground means repeatedly spying on little children, as documents that were obtained by the digital rights advocacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), via Freedom of Information Act litigation, showed.   The FBI abused surveillance powers granted by the PATRIOT Act.  EFF found that the FBI monitored young kids for at least five days, even though the conversations did not match the language of the target. 

This same agency is currently going around the country arbitrarily questioning Libyans living in the US.  As if the FBI’s entrapment propaganda campaigns weren’t enough, now they’re on the prowl in search of more Arabs to waterboard.  Amazingly, the FBI remains mum to this day about the van loaded with explosives found on the George Washington Bridge on 9/11! 

…two suspects are in FBI custody after a truckload of explosives was discovered around the George Washington Bridge … The FBI … says enough explosives were in the truck to do great damage to the George Washington Bridge.

Not important, that; they’d rather check out your 8 year old. 
 
Know your rights! 


**Special thanks to Jim Fetzer from The Real Deal for assistance with this article.

Rick Gedeon is graduate from USAF Air University, amateur historian, and anti-imperial/anti-police brutality activist.   Rick Gedeon has traveled extensively throughout the US and Asia.  A political marketer, routinely bringing together and forging alliances with different political organizations that share similar goals. He considers himself a Political Atheist and sympathizes with many Libertarian causes.  He can be reached at [email protected]