In Selling Its Version of the "War on Terror," Obama Is Adopting Bush's Playbook

By Andy Worthington, AlterNet. Posted March 17, 2009.

I added, “If President Obama is genuinely concerned with justice, he needs to act fast to tackle this squalid state of affairs, which does nothing to undo the previous administration’s disdain for and mockery of the laws on which the United States was founded.” That was just seven weeks ago, but now, despite his fine pronouncements in August 2007, when he declared, “We will again set an example to the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary,” it seems that Barack Obama doesn’t care, and that his sympathies are far more in line with the arbitrary justice instigated by those “stubborn rulers” -- George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, David Addington and Donald Rumsfeld -- than they are with the military judge and the military jurors involved in Salim Hamdan’s case, who, effectively, set a seven-year limit on the detention of minor players in the “War on Terror” by giving Hamdan a short sentence, despite convicting him of “providing material support for terrorism.”

In analyses over the years, intelligence officials have stated that no more than 50 of the prisoners at Guantánamo had any meaningful connection with al-Qaeda, the Taliban or other terrorist groups. By that rationale, the Obama administration should be working flat-out to release the other 190 prisoners as soon as possible. Under its own definition of “significant support” for these organizations, however, the administration has, instead, raised the possibility that, after seven years’ imprisonment in conditions that ought to be a source of shame to any civilized society, a large number of these prisoners -- these “Nobodies Formerly Known as Enemy Combatants” -- still have a long way to go before they can hope to see the end of their ordeal.

See more stories tagged with: habeas corpus, afghanistan, barack obama, department of justice, enemy combatants, taliban, al-qaeda, salim hamdan, guantánamo, authorization for use of , richard leon, ghaleb nasser al-bihani

Andy Worthington is a writer and historian, and author of The Guantánamo Files.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Rights and Liberties! Sign up now »