Change Indeed

Friday 10 August 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

Glenn Greenwald on the unfair accusations that Obama has not brought change to the office of the president:

Please re-read that bolded part to appreciate the magnitude of Obama’s trail blazing. When The New York Times, back in April, 2010, first confirmed the inclusion of an American citizen on Obama’s hit list, it, too, noted: “It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said.” But it was only recently known what a personal role Obama himself played in ordering the historically unprecedented hit. As a result, writes Coll, “President Obama and his advisers have opened the door to violent action against American citizens by future Presidents when the facts may be much less compelling.” In fairness to Obama, he did campaign on a promise of change, and vesting the President with the power to order the execution of citizens in secret and with no oversight certainly qualifies as that.

[. . .]

Specifically with regard to Obama’s assassinations, Coll notes the extreme secrecy behind which they are ordered: “None of Obama’s legal advisers has testified similarly about what secret system and classified legal memos may exist for judging, in the case of an American citizen targeted overseas, whether and why a capture attempt may be feasible.” Indeed, when Awlaki’s father sued in advance to try to prevent the U.S. Government from killing his American son without due process, the Obama DOJ told a federal court that Obama’s assassination program was too secret even to permit judicial adjudiciation of its legality.

So to summarize the Obama campaign’s apparent argument: it’s absolutely vital that we know all about the GOP nominee’s tax shelters and financial transactions over the last decade (and indeed, we should know about that), but we need not bother ourselves with how the Democratic nominee is deciding which Americans should die, his claimed legal authority for ordering those hits, the alleged evidence for believing the target deserves to be executed, or the criteria used to target them. So low are one’s expectations for an American Election Year that there are very few spectacles so absurd as to be painful to behold, but the Obama campaign’s waving of the transparency flag definitely qualifies.

[. . .]

For all the current hysteria about massive leaking, the reality is that the U.S. Government operates behind a more impenetrable wall of secrecy than ever before — exercising the most extremist and threatening powers a government can wield, without a shred of transparency — led by a President whose campaign argues that the Republic will be jeopardized if Mitt Romney isn’t more transparent about his personal tax shelters.

Change indeed.

2012-08-10  »  madlibertarianguy