That is the title of a damning article by Asim Qureshi published in yesterday's Guardian of London.
In the article, Qureshi writes that in a little over a year after being sworn in as president, Barack Obama has not only squandered the goodwill of the international community, but he is now emerging as being even more hawkish than George W. Bush when it comes to his human rights record. Regarding Guantánamo, for example, instead of closing the base as he had pledged to do during the campaign, Obama is getting ready to do exactly what George W. Bush did:
The lawyers for the Guantánamo detainees with whom I am in touch in the US speak of their dismay as they prepare for Obama to do the one thing they never expected - to send the detainees back to the military commissions - a decision that will lose Obama all support he once had within the human rights community.
Qureshi goes on by calling the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama a "false dawn," and by saying that, in many respects, this president's policies are worse that those set by his predecessor:
[T]he extensive use of drones under Obama have taken the death count well beyond anything that has been seen before.
And so, here we are, a year after Obama's inauguration with a liberal leaning foreign newspaper calling him worse than Bush. And I know I'll get hammered for writing this, but you can keep shooting the messenger as much as you want, but you won't change the fact that people around the world see that our foreign policy never changes, no matter which party is in charge:
The laws of war do not allow for the targeting of individuals outside of the conflict zone, and yet we now find that extrajudicial killings are taking place in countries as far apart as Yemen, the Horn of Africa and Pakistan. From a legal and moral perspective, the rationale provided by the State Department is bankrupt and only reinforces the stereotype that the US has very little concern for its own principles.
Despite the legalities of what is being conducted, the actuality of extrajudicial killings, especially through UAVs is frightening. The recent revelations by WikiLeaks on the killing of civilians by US Apache helicopters in Iraq has strongly highlighted the opportunities for misuse surrounding targeting from the air.
The most damning part part of the article, is where Qureshi writes about what he calls the Obama Doctrine, or the targeting and assassination of US citizens. In this, the author says, Obama has gone where even Bush did not dare to go:
A further twist to the Obama Doctrine is the breaking of a taboo that the Bush administration balked at – the concept of treating US citizens outside of the US constitutional process. During the Bush era, the treatment of detainees such as John Walker Lindh, Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padilla showed reluctance by officials to treat their own nationals in the way it had all those of other nationalities (by, for instance, sending them to Guantánamo Bay and other secret prisons). The policy of discrimination reserved for US citizens showed that there was a line the US was not willing to cross.
At least, today, we can strike discrimination off the list of grievances against the current president. The National Security Council of the US has now given specific permission to the CIA to target certain US citizens as part of counter-terrorism operations. Specifically, Anwar al-Awlaki has been singled out for such treatment, as it has been claimed that he was directly involved in the planning of the Major Hasan Nidal killings and the Christmas Day bomber attacks. Indeed, it is claims such as this that bring the entire concept of targeted assassinations into question. The US would like us to believe that we should simply trust that they have the relevant evidence and information to justify such a killing, without bringing the individual to account before a court.
Article like these make me wonder. Is this the change we were promised? The change that I worked so hard for? Asim Qureshi doesn't seem to think so. He concludes his article by saying what is obvious to every liberal who dares to ask herself the question. That the United States is basically morally bankrupt, and that since 9/11 it has lost whatever fig leaf of moral high ground it might have had. George W. Bush first, and Barack Obama now, are simply pursuing a naked imperial policy, where America imposes its will at the barrel of a gun:
The assumption that trust should be extended to a government that has involved itself in innumerable unlawful and unconscionable practices since the start of the war on terror is too much to ask. Whatever goodwill the US government had after 9/11 was destroyed by the way in which it prosecuted its wars. Further, the hope that came with the election of Barack Obama has faded as his policies have indicated nothing more than a reconfiguration of the basic tenet of the Bush Doctrine – that the US's national security interests supersede any consideration of due process or the rule of law. The only difference – witness the rising civilian body count from drone attacks – being that Obama's doctrine is even more deadly.
"[E]ven more deadly." That's how little it took for Obama to surpass George W. Bush, at least in the eyes of the author of this article. People here will probably ask for my head on a stake for reporting this, or will say that Asim Qureshi is some kind of muslim terrorist. But the fact remains that this article has been published by the Guardian of London, not Al Jazeera or some fanatical publication. So, the choice is ours. Do we keep pretending that Obama is the liberal that we would like him to be? Or do we seriously start pulling him in the right direction? Because right now, the man has lost his way and we are the only ones who can straighten him up before it's too late.
UPDATE: Many thanks to Battle4Seattle for the following.
The L.A. Times reported on March 21st, that the White House "is considering housing international terrorism suspects at Bagram air base, as is done at Guantanamo Bay."
That the option of detaining suspects captured outside Afghanistan at Bagram is being contemplated reflects a recognition by the Obama administration that it has few other places to hold and interrogate foreign prisoners without giving them access to the U.S. court system, the officials said.
Without a location outside the United States for sending prisoners, the administration must resort to turning the suspects over to foreign governments, bringing them to the U.S. or even killing them.
In a way, the article is making it sound as if we should be happy for this development, because otherwise these suspects might end up dead:
In one case last year, U.S. special operations forces killed an Al Qaeda-linked suspect named Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in a helicopter attack in southern Somalia rather than trying to capture him, a U.S. official said. Officials had debated trying to take him alive but decided against doing so in part because of uncertainty over where to hold him, the official added.
This is the kind of stuff that Osama Bin Laden dreams about when he goes to sleep at night and the US military is serving it to him on a silver platter.
As Glenn Greenwald reported today:
American troops in mid-February entered a village in the Eastern Afghan province of Paktia, killed five civilians (a male government official, his brother, and three female relatives, including two pregnant women and a teenager) and then lied about what happened. ABC News this week described the efforts of U.S. Special Forces to apologize to Haji Sharabuddin -- the 80-year-old patriarch of that family who lost two sons, two daughters and a granddaughter in the attack -- by offering him two sheep (a gesture of begging forgiveness in Pashtun custom), and the article included this:
Presenting sheep is such a powerful form of requesting forgiveness that the father is now obligated not to take revenge, even though he has told reporters he wanted to become a suicide bomber. . . . But the incident so inflamed the family, the father initially vowed to take revenge, "even if it breaks me into pieces."
"I have lost patience. I am obliged to revenge my martyrs," he told an ABC News cameraman on March 18. "I will destroy everything I have and will launch my own suicide attack. My heart is burning."
