Broken Promises
4 April 2011
Tags: guantánamo | obama
A telling juxtaposition of headlines on the BBC homepage (click on the image to see the full width):
For a reminder of the first executive order Obama signed after assuming office, see here.
The juxtaposition is indeed evocative, but according to the New York Times, acts of Congress since the closure of Guantanamo have made a civilian trial impossible.
‘since the closure of Guantanamo’? It’s still open…
Sorry. I thought you meant to highlight the contrast between the announced signing of the executive order to close Guantanamo, and today’s announcement that trials for four of those accused for 9/11 will take place there–what an awful symbolic gesture! Is your point, instead, that he appears to have adopted a pragmatic attitude of running on his own broken promise? I think there is a distinction worth making, between changing one’s mind and meeting insurmountable resistance. The bigger problem, to my mind, is not the man but this “organization” in which the change has so far been obstructed.
His cynicism is coming to the fore but no one mentions it. First it was his grand proposal to cut entitlements in the union address and then the omission of the proposed cuts in the actual budget leaving republicans to do the dirty work to blame them later during the election. Now this! This hypocrisy should have been ridiculed everywhere instead it’s glossed over in favor of his cynically timed announcement. Hopefully people see through his histrionics. I do. I have already committed my vote to the republican in 2012 because it won’t be Palin or Huckabee.
That would seem to be not so much jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, but jumping out of the frying pan into the raging furnace.
Obama’s biggest problem is the relative powerlessness of the US president. We keep hearing that the holder of that office is the most powerful person in the world, and that’s because they are in commander in chief of the world’s most powerful army; and wherever they go, they are accompanied by the button which could blow us all up. But domestically, thanks to the separation of power which is one of the main aims of the US constitution, the president may simply be unable to do much that he promised.
What i find most depressing about the forthcoming election is the talk that Obama may have a fighting fund of one billion dollars – that’s not democracy, it’s oligarchy.
What Obama’s many retreats and reversals show is that he was embarrassingly naive or incompetent when he made the statements, in the first place… the American people, by a large majority, are against this sort of show trial for terrorists. It was the people, acting through their representatives in Congress and elsewhere who stopped this nonsense…