Left News and Views

As a candidate for president, Obama promised a new direction. While pledging to maintain national security, Obama said that “we also want to make sure that we’re protecting the Constitution, and that we’re not excessively providing the president with a sort of a ‘blank check’ when it comes to dealing with national security,” he told ABC’s This Week.

But just two months into his presidency, the “hope” and “change” many thought Obama represented seems to be evaporating. The litany of disappointing actions on civil liberties taken by the Obama administration seems to grow longer by the week.

• Defending government eavesdropping without a warrant.
• Arguing that prisoners of the U.S. held overseas don’t have the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
• Claiming that victims of CIA kidnapping shouldn’t have their cases heard because of “national security” interests.
• Pre-empting a Supreme Court ruling on whether a legal resident on U.S. soil can be imprisoned indefinitely without trial as an “enemy combatant”

Rather than repudiating Bush’s shredding of the Constitution, the new White House is embracing some of the worst abuses carried out by the Bush administration in the name of national security and the “war on terror.”

In one of his first acts in office, President Barack Obama ordered the closure within one year of Guantanamo Bay, where about 245 people are held and which has been widely viewed as a stain on the U.S. human rights record. But Obama has yet to decide what to do about the jail at Bagram, where more than 600 prisoners are held, or whether to continue work on a $60 million prison complex there.

There is no “middle ground” on these questions. Those involved in the torture of detainees should be held accountable–starting with George W. Bush. Citizens should have a right not to be spied on by their government. Detainees should have rights under international law, including the right to a trial.

“Seven years after 9/11 it is time to take stock and repeal abusive laws and policies,” the former Irish president, Mary Robinson, said, warning that harsh U.S. detentions and interrogations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba gave a dangerous signal to other countries that could easily follow suit. “There has been severe damage and it needs to be addressed,” she told a news conference in Geneva. “We are not more secure. We are more divided, and people are more cynical about the operation of laws.”

“We all have less rights today than we had five or 10 years ago, and if nothing happens, we will have even less,” Arthur Chaskalson, former chief justice of South Africa, told a Geneva briefing to launch an International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) report on counter-terrorism and human rights.

The report found that many undemocratic states have referred to U.S. counter-terrorism practices to justify their own abuses; a trend Robinson said was particularly alarming. Counter-terrorism policies worldwide should be put under the microscope, according to Robinson.

Those who justify, condone, participate in and order the torture and abuse of human beings, for any reason, should be held accountable. People should have rights under international law. Those rights should be strictly enforced to protect us all.

We can argue about civil liberties, but no one should be allowed to violate human rights.