President Obama for all his flowery speeches supposedly defending undocumented immigrants has in fact rounded up and deported far more immigrants than George W. Bush did.
He has done little or nothing to help those undocumented immigrants who sometimes are kept incarcerated for months on end where they are often humiliated, roughed up or even tortured by US prison personnel.
But this is not surprising since Obama claims not to allow torture in fact he does under the definition of torture and abuse of POWs by international Law, including the Geneva Conventions, the special conventions on treatment of POWs and according to the precedents set in the Nuremberg Judgements.
What Obama has done is to only regard an action as torture if as the Bush Regime claimed it might bring about organ failure or death. So Obama instituted Torture Lite aka Enhanced Interrogation Techniques which allows for the humiliation of POWs, attacking their religious beliefs and practices, denying their right to keep a copy of their Holy Text ie Quran or to pray according to their religion's creed. The POWs which the USA now calls "detainees" by this legal bit of trickery supposedly allows for the mistreatment and torture of these prisoners.
President Obama in all of these cases including the case of Bradley Manning argues that the enhanced forms of Interrogation Techniques do not breech International Law when in fact they do. So he disingenuously defends the use of these techniques such as: sleep-deprivation, solitary confinement, verbal assaults, death threats , physical abuse, indefinite detention, the refusal of due process and access to legal council or access to medical and psychological services not controlled by the US government and military or even access to the International Committee of the Red Cross or Red Crescent .
Obama like Bush before him believes International Laws and criminal court have no jurisdiction in the USA or to any American citizen outside the USA. So Obama is not a believer in the basic underlying principles of International Law or of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights these legal instruments he sees as quaint or just no longer relevant.
He has done little or nothing to help those undocumented immigrants who sometimes are kept incarcerated for months on end where they are often humiliated, roughed up or even tortured by US prison personnel.
But this is not surprising since Obama claims not to allow torture in fact he does under the definition of torture and abuse of POWs by international Law, including the Geneva Conventions, the special conventions on treatment of POWs and according to the precedents set in the Nuremberg Judgements.
What Obama has done is to only regard an action as torture if as the Bush Regime claimed it might bring about organ failure or death. So Obama instituted Torture Lite aka Enhanced Interrogation Techniques which allows for the humiliation of POWs, attacking their religious beliefs and practices, denying their right to keep a copy of their Holy Text ie Quran or to pray according to their religion's creed. The POWs which the USA now calls "detainees" by this legal bit of trickery supposedly allows for the mistreatment and torture of these prisoners.
President Obama in all of these cases including the case of Bradley Manning argues that the enhanced forms of Interrogation Techniques do not breech International Law when in fact they do. So he disingenuously defends the use of these techniques such as: sleep-deprivation, solitary confinement, verbal assaults, death threats , physical abuse, indefinite detention, the refusal of due process and access to legal council or access to medical and psychological services not controlled by the US government and military or even access to the International Committee of the Red Cross or Red Crescent .
Obama like Bush before him believes International Laws and criminal court have no jurisdiction in the USA or to any American citizen outside the USA. So Obama is not a believer in the basic underlying principles of International Law or of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights these legal instruments he sees as quaint or just no longer relevant.
Undocumented Protesters Arrested at DNC, Police Pre-emptively Detain Prominent Activist at October2011.org, Sept. 05, 2012
Immigrant Protestors Arrested at the DNC, Feat. Rosario Dawson
Published on Sep 5, 2012 by ReasonTV
CHARLOTTE, N.C.-- Ten undocumented protesters were arrested outside the Time Warner Cable convention center, September 4, 2012, where the Democratic National Convention is being held. The protest was put on by an organization called, Undocumented and Unafraid, and featured a bus tour from Phoenix, AR, to Charlotte, NC.
Protesters were surrounded by police in pouring rain as supporters and reporters looked on. The event never turned violent and the ten arrested protesters were taken away in vans.
The event was meant to bring more attention to deportations by the Obama administration over the last four years. The President has deported 1.4 million undocumented immigrants in his first term, 1.5 times faster than his predecessor, President George W. Bush. The current president recently enacted a deferred action program for young undocumented immigrants to avoid deportation.
"He has deported more people and yet at the same time [President Obama] is doing deferred action for dreamers, so there is always a mixed pot that we get," said actress Rosario Dawson, who attended the protest. "We can never seem to get someone to stand 100 percent and do the right thing."
Actor and activist John Cusack has published his interview of International Law expert Jonathan Turly and Turley accuses President Obama as being no better than George W. Bush and in some ways worse as Obama is creating a totalitarian state with a smiley face.
So much for Obama's false advertising of Hope and Change as the reality is that after four years under the presidency of Barack Obama America and the world have seen more war and more chaos and the trashing not only of the US Constitution and American law but also the trashing and the further undermining of international law.
President Obama and his administration have blatanly ignored international law in various ways for instance by not prosecuting Americans who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.
By not prosecuting or at least investigating the Bush Regime and its thugs President Obama is now guilty of a War Crime and himself should be put on trial. Of course Obama has also committed his own share of criminal prosecutible war crimes and crimes against humanity ie ignoring the sovereignty of other nations ie Pakistan, Libya ,Syria. Obama has permitted the US military to assassinate individuals in other countries without any approval of those governments, Obama has encouraged the bombing of civilians to allegedly take out enemy combatants ie Drone attacks , bombarding of villages and towns, attacking weddings, funerals and attacking those coming to the aid of those injured or killed in a first attack by US forces or drones. They are targetting Good-Samaritans and first-responders as if this were legal or moral which it is not. Obama has shown he is not a man of principle but rather dresses up his immoral and illegal acts in a veneer of faux legality and dubious moral equivalences.
These include an unjustified war of aggression against Iraq the flagrant violations of the geneva Conventions and international treaties to which the USA signed on to and in some cases the USA in effect was the architect of some of these laws dealing with Prisoners of war , due process, torture and mistreatment of prisoners , the disregard for civilians, the wanton destruction of needed infrastructure, the wanton destruction of hospitals, schools , fire departments, sewage and water treatment plants and of power stations while not providing minimal protection of civilians , the use of banned weapons such as phosphorus , land mines.and the unlawful and immoral reprisals killing more innocent civilians to avenge the death of American troops.
So now International Law is to Obama and the USA considered inconvenient and quaint given the threat of foreign terrorists.
John Cusack Interviews Law Professor Jonathan Turley About Obama Administration’s War On the Constitution Truthout.org Interview September 01, 2012
(Cusacks intro:)
To sum it up: more war. So thousands die or are maimed; generations of families and veterans are damaged beyond imagination; sons and daughters come home in rubber bags. But he and his satellites get their four more years.
The AfPak War is more H. G. Wells than Orwell, with people blindly letting each other get fed to the barons of Wall Street and the Pentagon, themselves playing the part of the Pashtuns. The paradox is simple: he got elected on his anti-war stance during a perfect storm of the economic meltdown and McCain saying the worst thing at the worst time as we stared into the abyss. Obama beat Clinton on "I'm against the war and she is for it." It was simple then, when he needed it to be.
Under Obama do we continue to call the thousands of mercenaries in Afghanistan "general contractors" now that Bush is gone? No, we don't talk about them... not a story anymore.
Do we prosecute felonies like torture or spying on Americans? No, time to "move on"...
Now chaos is the norm and though the chaos is complicated, the answer is still simple. We can't afford this morally, financially, or physically. Or in a language the financial community can digest: the wars are ideologically and spiritually bankrupt. No need to get a score from the CBO.
Drones bomb Pakistani villages across the border at an unprecedented rate. Is it legal? Does anyone care? "It begs the question," as Daniel Berrigan asks us, "is this one a "good war" or a "dumb war"? But the question betrays the bias: it is all the same. It's all madness."
One is forced to asked the question: Is the President just another Ivy League Asshole shredding civil liberties and due process and sending people to die in some shithole for purely political reasons?
Excerpts of Jonathan Turley's responses to John Cusack
...I think that what is really telling is the disconnect between what people say about our country and what our country has become. What we've lost under Bush and Obama is clarity. In the "war on terror" what we've lost is what we need the most in fighting terrorism: clarity. We need the clarity of being better than the people that we are fighting against. Instead, we've given propagandists in Al Qaeda or the Taliban an endless supply of material — allowing them to denounce us as hypocrites.
Soon after 9/11 we started (hearing )government officials talk about how the US Constitution is making us weaker, how we can't function by giving people due process. And it was perfectly ridiculous.
...Yeah, all the reports that came out after 9/11 showed that 9/11 could've been avoided. For years people argued that we should have locked reinforced cockpit doors. For years people talked about the gaps in security at airports. We had the intelligence services that had the intelligence that they needed to move against this ring, and they didn't share the information. So we have this long list of failures by US agencies, and the result was that we increased their budget and gave them more unchecked authority.
In the end, we have to be as good as we claim. We can't just talk a good game. If you look at this country in terms of what we've done, we have violated the Nuremberg principles, we have violated international treaties...
... We have refused to accept the jurisdictional authority of sovereign countries. We now routinely kill in other countries. It is American exceptionalism – the rules apply to other countries.
When we cross the border, Americans disregard the fact that Pakistan is a sovereign nation, let alone an ally, and they insist that they have not agreed to these operations. They have accused us of repeatedly killing people in their country by violating their sovereign airspace. And we just disregard it. Again, its American exceptionalism, that we –
...Well, the question, I think, that people have got to ask themselves when they get into that booth is not what Obama has become, but what have we become? That is, what's left of our values if we vote for a person that we believe has shielded war crimes or violated due process or implemented authoritarian powers. It's not enough to say, "Yeah, he did all those things, but I really like what he did with the National Park System."
I think that people have to accept that they own this decision, that they can walk away. I realize that this is a tough decision for people but maybe, if enough people walked away, we could finally galvanize people into action to make serious changes. We have to recognize that our political system is fundamentally broken, it's unresponsive. Only 11 percent of the public supports Congress, and yet nothing is changing — and so the question becomes, how do you jumpstart that system? How do you create an alternative? What we have learned from past elections is that you don't create an alternative by yielding to this false dichotomy that only reinforces their monopoly on power.
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