[Peace-discuss] Obama & the Bushes

[C. G. Estabrook]

"My foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional realistic policy of 
George Bush’s father, of John F. Kennedy, of in some ways Ronald Reagan..." 
--Barack Obama (i.e., massacres in Central America, SE Asia, SW Asia)

	Louis Proyect
	February 3, 2009
	Rendition Lite

On February first, the Los Angeles Times reported that renditions will continue 
under the Obama administration:

"The CIA’s secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques 
are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept 
naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.

"But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an 
equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.

"Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to 
carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of 
prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States."

Not long after the article appeared, it was discredited as a hoax by Obama 
supporters Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings and Harper’s Magazine Scott Horton, an 
expert on extralegal abuses during the Bush administration, who wrote:

"The Los Angeles Times just got punked… It misses the difference between the 
renditions program, which has been around since the Bush 41 Administration at 
least (and arguably in some form even in the Reagan Administration) and the 
extraordinary renditions program which was introduced by Bush 43 and clearly 
shut down under an executive order issued by President Obama in his first week.

"There are two fundamental distinctions between the programs. The extraordinary 
renditions program involved the operation of long-term detention facilities 
either by the CIA or by a cooperating host government together with the CIA, in 
which prisoners were held outside of the criminal justice system and otherwise 
unaccountable under law for extended periods of time. A central feature of this 
program was rendition to torture, namely that the prisoner was turned over to 
cooperating foreign governments with the full understanding that those 
governments would apply techniques that even the Bush Administration considers 
to be torture. This practice is a felony under current U.S. law, but was made a 
centerpiece of Bush counterterrorism policy.

"The earlier renditions program regularly involved snatching and removing 
targets for purposes of bringing them to justice by delivering them to a 
criminal justice system. It did not involve the operation of long-term detention 
facilities and it did not involve torture. There are legal and policy issues 
with the renditions program, but they are not in the same league as those 
surrounding extraordinary rendition. Moreover, Obama committed to shut down the 
extraordinary renditions program, and continuously made clear that this did not 
apply to the renditions program."

Horton’s reassurances to the contrary, I for one would not use Bush 41’s 
renditions program as a benchmark for human rights. He states that the earlier 
program “regularly involved snatching and removing targets for purposes of 
bringing them to justice by delivering them to a criminal justice system.” Is 
that what Obama’s election was about? Restoring the values of the Bush and 
Clinton administrations? Well, actually…

"Barack Obama promised that his foreign policy would be a return to what he says 
was the realist approach practiced by George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

"'My foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional realistic policy of 
George Bush’s father, of John F. Kennedy, of in some ways Ronald Reagan,' he 
said Friday.  A voter at the town hall in Greenburg had asked Obama to respond 
to charges that his foreign policy was naïve.

"It is George Bush who has been naïve and it’s people like John McCain and 
unfortunately some democrats that have facilitated him acting in these naïve 
ways that have caused us so much damage in our reputation in the world,' Obama 
said."

Drawing on the example of the first Gulf War, Obama said that the first 
President Bush had “conducted a Gulf War with allies that ended up costing 
twenty billion dollars and left us stronger because they were realistic.”

In an interview with the Washington Post on November 4, 1989, George H.W. Bush’s 
CIA director William H. Webster explained what “rendition” would amount to:

The administration hopes to locate, seize and bring back to the United States 
for trial the terrorists responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on 
Dec. 21 that caused the deaths of all 259 people aboard and 11 others in 
Lockerbie, Scotland, where it crashed.

Anticipating the possibility of such action, the Justice Department, he said, 
has created a new term, “rendition,” to describe the act of capturing and 
bringing back to the United States a criminal suspect. Webster confirmed that 
the United States believes it has the legal basis for kidnapping a terrorist in 
another country even without the knowledge and permission of its government.

So what we have here is Scott Horton trying to reassure fellow liberals that 
Obama is merely restoring the norms of Bush the elder, even if it meant that the 
CIA would be able to kidnap “a terrorist in another country even without the 
knowledge and permission of its government”. Far be it for me to resist the 
blandishments of the pro-Obama left, but I fail to see much difference between 
Bush the father and Bush the son. Indeed, if the father had been president when 
the WTC and Pentagon were attacked, you can assume that the CIA would be 
kidnapping “terrorists” left and right, even if it couldn’t prove that its 
captives ever did anything wrong.

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