Obama lagde efter sin indsættelse ud med at erklære, at man ville lukke Guantánamo, og man har rullet en række specielle beføjelser, præsidenten havde tilranet sig efter 11. september, tilbage. Man har nu også erklæret, at man ikke længere vil tilbageholde “enemy combattants” på ubestemt tid.
Men hvor dybt stikker ændringerne? Ikke særligt dybt, skriver Glenn Greenwald på Salon.com:
Bush’s asserted power to detain as “enemy combatants” even those people who were detained outside of a traditional “battlefield” — rather than charge them with crimes — was one of the most controversial of the last eight years. Yet the Obama administration, when called upon to state their position, makes only the most cosmetic and inconsequential changes — designed to generate headlines misleadingly depicting a significant reversal (“Obama drops ‘enemy combatant’ label”) — while, in fact, retaining the crux of Bush’s extremist detention theory.
Or consider the new policies of transparency that Obama announced during his first week in office, ones that prompted lavish praise from most civil libertarians (including me). When it comes to a civil liberties restoration, few things are more important than drastically scaling back the Bush adminstration’s endless reliance on frivolous national-security-based “secrecy” claims as a weapon for hiding virtually everything the Government does. Excessive secrecy was the linchpin of most of the Bush abuses.
Last year, several privacy groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, became alarmed at what appeared to be an emerging, new Draconian international treaty governing intellectual property, the so-called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. As Wired‘s Dave Kravets reported, the treaty as negotiated by the Bush administration — government summaries of which were leaked to and posted on Wikileaks — “would criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, subject iPods to border searches and allow internet service providers to monitor their customers’ communications.”
Despite the fact that drafts of the treaty have been leaked; that the terms have nothing to do with national security; and that the agreement was being circulated among 27 different nations, the Bush administration — typically enough — rejected FOIA requests for documents pertaining to the treaty (.pdf) last January on multiple grounds, including “national security.” Based on Obama’s new pledges of transparency and new FOIA policies, EFF and others re-submitted the FOIA request last month. But in a March 10 letter (.pdf), they received a virtually identical response, this time from Obama’s Chief FOIA Officer in the Office of the Trade Representative …
Finally, consider Obama’s headline-generating announcement earlier this week that he would “limit” the use of presidential signing statements, one of Bush’s principal instruments for literally ignoring the law. That announcement generated much celebration among Obama supporters, such as this poetic pronouncement by a front-page writer at Daily Kos:
All hail the U.S. Constitution. It seems to be coming back to life through some vigorous resuscitation.
Yet two days later — literally — Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill and appended to it a signing statement claiming that he had the Constitutional authority to ignore several of its oversight provisions.
Meet the new guy, same as the old guy? Obama skal selvfølgelig have en chance, men specielt hemmelighedskræmmeriet omkring ACTA-traktaten (hvad er det, offentligheden ikke må få at vide, som de store lobbyister fra medicinal- og underholdningsindustrien gerne må få at vide?) og tvetydigheden omkring retten til at smide “terrormistænkte” ned i et sort hul og smide nøgleb væk er stærkt bekymrende.
Det er snart tid for Obamas berømte græsrødder at begynde at lægge pres på ham, hvis der skal til at ske noget.
Link: Obama’s “enemy combatant” policy: following a familiar pattern