Posted by James O'Rourke on May 21, 2009
thinkprogress.org
Guantanamo Still Needs To Be Closed
Two days after entering office, President Obama issued an executive order announcing his intention to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba within one year. Obama’s order called for a cabinet-level panel to grapple with issues including what locations inside the United States prisoners might be moved to and which courts they could be tried in. But Obama’s efforts hit a roadblock yesterday when the Senate voted 90 to 6 to approve an amendment barring the use of funds to transfer detainees to the U.S. Though Democrats in Congress are supportive of closing Guantanamo, they said that they planned to “withhold the money until the White House settles on a comprehensive plan for dealing with detainees.” “The feeling was at this point we were defending the unknown,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL). “We were asked to defend the plan that hasn’t been announced,” he said. Ken Gude, the the Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress, explained to TalkingPointsMemo yesterday that “Congress, on the legislative calendar, got ahead of Obama on this.” “It’s the kind of problem you have when you have two different tracks moving, but not at the same rate,” Gude said. Though Republicans have responded to the move with glee, Obama is not backing down from his pledge to close the prison. In a speech at the National Archives today, the president answered “critics of his dismantling of Bush-era policies on detention and interrogation” and urged “Congress to be patient while the administration explores options for relocating Guantanamo detainees.”
CONSERVATIVES WANT TO KEEP GITMO OPEN: Immediately after Obama finished speaking today, former Vice President Dick Cheney attempted to “answer” Obama with a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. Appearing on CBS’s Face The Nation recently, Cheney argued that keeping Guantanamo open was “important” because if captured detainees were brought to the United States, they would “acquire all kinds of legal rights.” Cheney is not the only voice calling for Guantanamo to be kept open indefinitely. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been attacking Obama for weeks over the closure of Guantanamo. According to Politico, McConnell “has needled the president about the issue in 16 floor speeches, a Washington Post op-ed, several Sunday shows, weekly stakeouts, and a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 27 that kicked off the effort.” In his Washington Post op-ed, McConnell claimed that “there are no good alternatives to Guantanamo.” After the Senate vote yesterday, McConnell crowed about the new “bipartisan agreement on Guantanamo.” But Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI), who sponsored the amendment to block the funds, emphasized yesterday that the measure was not a rebuke of Obama’s intention to close the prison, telling the Washington Post that it was “not a referendum on closing Guantanamo.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in War on Terror | Tagged: Guantanamo | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James O'Rourke on May 21, 2009
By Bob Graham
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Since President Obama released the “torture memos” — the legal analysis of the Bush Justice Department on which the CIA predicated its enhanced interrogation techniques — a familiar pattern regarding U.S. intelligence has recurred: We have become fixated on the rear-view mirror to the exclusion of what is coming toward us. While much discussion has focused on what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was told seven years ago, the more important issue is the reform urgently needed in the relationship between the intelligence community, the executive branch and Congress.
For more than a year, I have chaired a congressional commission reviewing U.S. vulnerability to a weapon of mass destruction. The unanimous conclusion of our nine members, Republicans and Democrats, was that it is more likely than not that such a weapon will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere before year-end 2013. The commission made 13 recommendations to reduce this probability, many of which rely on intelligence as the first line of defense.
Avoiding a potentially catastrophic attack using weapons of mass destruction starts at the top, with reform of the interaction between the intelligence community and the executive and legislative branches. Congressional intelligence committees were created in the 1970s to ensure accountability. If the committees were fully informed of the intelligence community’s anticipated activities, the thinking went, a level of accountability would be provided before specific programs were implemented. Brought in early, the committees would share a sense of responsibility and might be less inclined to point fingers in the event of an intelligence failure. The controversy over “enhanced interrogation techniques” demonstrates that this relationship of mutual respect and sharing of consequences has shattered. Indeed, the CIA’s calendar of legislative briefings indicates that even the appearance of congressional notification occurred after waterboarding and other extraordinary methods of interrogation had been in use for weeks. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Opinions | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James O'Rourke on May 21, 2009
By David S. Broder
Thursday, May 21, 2009
No new president finds that every aspect of the job suits him at once; some duties are inevitably more comfortable than others. What we have witnessed in the past few weeks is Barack Obama trying on and fitting himself to the role of commander in chief.
The most controversial decisions of this period — expanding the troop commitment and replacing the commander in Afghanistan, opposing the release of photos of abused detainees, keeping the system of military tribunals and delaying any change in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays — are of a pattern.
In every instance, Obama heeded the advice of his uniformed and civilian defense leaders and in each case but Afghanistan, he abandoned a position he had taken as the Democratic presidential candidate.
The predictable result has been the first sustained outcry from the left, angry denunciations from leaders of constituencies that had been early supporters. They feel betrayed as they watch him continuing, with minor modifications, the policies and practices of his Republican predecessor.
The political cost is not yet high, but those who remember Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter know that over time, it can be dangerous for a Democratic president to lose the support of the liberal activists. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in *Obama Administration | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James O'Rourke on May 21, 2009
=By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted May 21, 2009.
Millions of dollars will be poured into deceptive media ads by the health care industry — will you step up to stop them?
Editor’s note: Click here to help fight Blue Cross and Blue Shield’s deceptive campaign to undermine real health care reform!
The health industry is preparing to launch a lie-packed propaganda campaign in an attempt to rip the heart out of President Barack Obama’s plans for an overhaul of our health care system.
Reports of the campaign come just a week after the health care lobby joined with SEIU to make a weak, unenforceable “commitment” to reduce the spiraling rate of health care costs to “only” 50 percent above the average growth rate of the economy overall.
Big Health said it wanted to be a proactive partner with a “seat at the table”; it’s remarkable how quickly it has shown that its true intent was to derail any serious attempt at reform from a cozy place on the inside of the process.
Only three days after Obama hailed the health lobbyists’ proposal as a breakthrough in the battle for reform, Big Health was already backing away from its vague and noncommittal “commitment.”
According to the New York Times, “Hospitals and insurance companies said … that President Obama had substantially overstated their promise earlier this week to reduce the growth of health spending.” Richard Pollack, the executive vice president of the American Hospital Association, one of the industry groups that made the proposal, stated definitively that Big Health “did not support reducing the rate of health spending by 1.5 percentage points annually” as had been widely reported.
And now we can look forward to a reprise of the infamously dishonest “Harry and Louise” PR campaign that derailed Bill Clinton’s attempt to get the bloated rip-off we call a health care system under control, courtesy of one of the biggest players in the insurance business.
The Washington Post reports that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina — the state’s largest insurer, handling almost $11 billion in claims last year — is preparing a series of ads invoking the bogeyman of a government-run health system in which faceless bureaucrats make health care decisions, people with pre-existing conditions are denied care, and Americans are left to die waiting for urgently needed procedures. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in *Healthcare Issues | Tagged: *Healthcare Issues, Barack Obama, hcan, Health, Health Industry, lobbyists, moveon | Leave a Comment »
