One of the first promises made by President Obama when he first came to power back in 2008 was to close the controversial Guantanamo Bay detention centre. Four years later it is still operational. The former chief prosecutor of the Gitmo military commissions, Colonel Morris Davis, who was thrilled when Obama took office, told RT of his huge disappointment in the US president.
“Candidate Obama said all the right things about justice and American values and closing Guantanamo and doing away with military commissions and applauding the rule of law,” he told RT’s Gayane Chichakyan. ”And then once he gets in office…. If he did just embrace the Bush’s policies, he kissed him on the lips and ran with them. And he advanced them further than President Bush ever did.” “Like killing an American with a drone strike in Yemen. Which is just astounding that an American president can make the unilateral decision that the surveillance agency, the CIA, would go to another country and launch an offensive military operation, fire missile and killing an American and bystanders .I am not aware of any legal justification for that, I think it is called murder to kill another human being deliberately without legal justification,” he stated.
Commenting to RT on Guantanamo, which is still open despite US president’s pledge to shut it, Colonel Davis said Obama might have learnt the things he did not know before or he faced a bigger obstacle than he anticipated. “The slogan “Close Guantanamo” sounds fairly simple. Actually following through and doing it is a much more difficult process,” he said. “Guantanamo is still open, the military commissions have resumed and in my view the president just didn’t have the balls to follow through with doing the right thing.”
Davis also gave his views on a drone weapon system which is currently in operation at the US military. While saying he sees nothing wrong with the drones themselves, there is much more what concerns him. “Drones are being used to avoid compliance with the law and giving people due process and their day in court and that’s a sad chapter in America’s history if that is what we are doing,” he said. “Our strength for 200 years was the law we are now turning out back at. There is a choice between kill and capture and the administration is choosing kill because it’s the easy rout. And it’s a sad commentary on America in 2011".
“And another black spot on American reputation”.
The promise to scrap his predecessor’s hardliner war-on-terror policies, which helped Barack Obama win presidential election, is apparently off the table. The political reality is that the current administration is doing quite the opposite thing. Long before he became US president or the winner of a Noble Peace Prize, Barack Obama was a constitutional law professor. During his election campaign he vowed to reverse the abuses and policies of his predecessor George W. Bush. Three years later, many civil rights advocates, who once cheered “yes, we can,” are finding themselves disillusioned.
“Not only has the Obama administration blocked torture accountability and refused to investigate and prosecute. He has basically maintained indefinite detention. He has revived military commissions. As well he has expanded targeted killings – they’ve increased under the Obama administration manifold and he’s even authorized the killing of a US citizen,” explains Maria LaHood from the Center for Constitutional Rights.
World-renowned author and scholar Noam Chomsky believes the Obama administration has changed gears and accelerated illegal practices into overdrive. “There is a shift between Bush’s policies and the Obama’s on this. Bush’s policy was to kidnap people, take them to Guantanamo or Bagram or some other torture chamber and try to extract some information from them. Obama’s policy is just to kill them. They’re killing them all over the world. And the Bin Laden assassination was a case point,” he told RT. Another was the drone killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric. President Obama described the man as “the leader of external operations for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” Apart from those two are hundreds more killed by US UAVs. The number of drone strikes during the first two years under Obama exceeded the total carried out during Bush’s 10 years. “If a President McCain were doing the exact same thing that President Obama is doing, he would have been denounced by a lot of liberals. It’s one of those dangerous moments in the US history. We saw it a bit with Clinton in the 1990s, where a democrat campaigned and pledged to change the country and the world has actually pushed the right-wing agenda further forward than a republican could have if they took the power,” says New York-based journalist and author Jeremy Scahill.
As Obama gears up for his re-election campaign, civil liberties groups that believed his words the first time around are now left to judge the commander-in-chief on his actions. Source