Mr. Obama: Resign Now

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:20:41 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Ted Rall at Yahoo! News - President Obama has not even come close to keeping his campaign promises, says Mr. Rall, but his proposal of "preventative detention" makes him unqualified to hold office. Only dictators in totalitarian states hold people without charges or trial. If he has a shred of decency left, Obama should resign. [root]

Why is it, exactly, that some prisoners "cannot be tried"?

The Old Grey Lady explains why Obama wants this "entirely new chapter in American law" in a boring little sentence buried a couple past the jump and a couple of hundred words down page A16: "Yet another question is what to do with the most problematic group of Guantánamo detainees: those who pose a national security threat but cannot be prosecuted, either for lack of evidence or because evidence is tainted."

In democracies with functioning legal systems, it is assumed that people against whom there is a "lack of evidence" are innocent. They walk free. In countries where the rule of law prevails, in places blessedly free of fearful leaders whose only concern is staying in power, "tainted evidence" is no evidence at all. If you can't prove that a defendant committed a crime--an actual crime, not a thoughtcrime--in a fair trial, you release him and apologize to the judge and jury for wasting their time.

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Torturing Democracy

Submitted by Arto Bendiken on Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:04:29 GMT

Have you watched Torturing Democracy yet?

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