Obama—Overseer of Bush's Plantation

Barack Obama is rapidly establishing himself as nothing more or less than the overseer of Bush's human-rights-violation plantation.

From saying "yes" to rendition and torture; to just kind of forgetting to stop Bush's terrorizing wars against Iraq and Afghanistan; to expanding Bush's war into Pakistan; to now affirming Bush's position that prisoners in US-run foreign torture camps, like Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, a place described as worse than Gitmo, have no rights to appeal their confinement, not even in a US court; Barack Obama seems more intent on giving us continuity we're all too familiar with than change we can believe in.

---

"...the Red Cross said dozens of prisoners had been held incommunicado for weeks or even months in a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells at Bagram...the prisoners were kept from its inspectors and sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions..."

—From NYT Story, "Foiling US Plan, Prison Expands in Afghanistan"

---

Understand that these are "detainees", AKA prisoners, often picked up as human pelts when they get traded for money to the US military by people selling "terrorist" suspects to Americans. There may be no evidence whatsoever that these are in fact terrorists other than that somebody expecting to get paid for saying so does say so.

In Bush's wars, that was considered justice, because after all who has the time to check out facts when it comes to protecting America from poor people who couldn't do much more than toss a rock (they often don't have shoes) at the United States even if they wanted to.

---

"Bounty hunters, including police officers and local people, have captured individuals of different nationalities, often apparently at random, and sold them into U.S. custody...they were sent to the U.S. naval prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the U.S. Bagram air base in Afghanistan or secret detention centres run by the U.S. but based in other countries."

—CBC News, quoting Amnesty International Report

---

While the Supreme Court has already affirmed the rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay to sue the US government to challenge their imprisonment, these same rights have not so far been extended to the prisoners held in many detainment or concentration camps set up by the United States military to hold and torture thousands of people who have not been convicted of anything.

When Barack Obama's Justice Department, which people thought might have been different than Bush's version of the JD, was recently given the opportunity to voice its opinion about the rights of detainees at Bagram Airfield, they instead affirmed that there are no constitutional rights in effect for any detainee in anyplace the United States says is an "overseas war zone". The concern is that "releasing enemy combatants into the Afghan war zone, or even diverting U.S. personnel there to consider their legal cases, could threaten security."

Yeah, well, so could letting any Afghans actually walk around free without dropping bombs on them—as the United States and NATO regularly do—to show them who is boss.

Anybody who voted for Barack Obama thinking he was the "peace" candidate, or that he would restore some sense of respect for human and constitutional rights, was just a damned fool.

Not that this should be a difficult thing for those people to handle. Americans, especially the ones waiting for somebody to do the right thing in Washington, D.C., have been fools now for a very long time. They seem to be getting quite used to it.