Dear God, we are a constitutional democracy again. It feels so strange.
President Obama has rejected the policies of the last administration, both in his words and in his actions. In short order, he has signed orders to close Guantanamo, suspend the military commission system, subject all interrogations to the guidelines in the Army Field Manual, end long-term CIA detentions, require humane treatment of detainees consistent with the Geneva Conventions, and guarantee the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all prisoners held by the U.S. government, and announced a return to the presumption of FOIA disclosure under the Clinton administration. That is a breathtaking list, and the beginning of change that is long overdue.
It really is an amazing system we have in this country. By all rights, the tyrants’s heads should be on pikes, and here we’ve let them leave town unmolested. I still think they should be shipped off to the Hague in a dirty wooden crate or covered with honey and staked to an anthill, but that’s why we elected Obama and not me.
Even Cheney would have habeas corpus rights now, so there goes the wooden crate. But before today, the president could have declared YOU a terrorist and you’d never have been heard from again!
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