[Peace-discuss] Obama promotes a new Dred Scott decision (and of course torture)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[How can Obama's defenders continue to take him seriously?  Only because he's 
shown himself willing to kill and torture people at least as vigorously as his 
predecessors? Or, "If we don't support him, think how terrible the people who 
might replace him might be"?  How much more brutal and murderous must he become 
before people stop saying that?  --CGE]

	Sincerely Yours: Another Legal Triumph for the Obama-Yoo Administration
	Written by Chris Floyd
	Thursday, 17 June 2010 11:45

James Bovard at Antiwar.com points out one of the more egregiously sick-making 
of the many atrocious "arguments" employed by Barack Obama in his successful 
effort to block the efforts of Maher Arar to seek justice for his unjust 
rendition and proxy torture in the Great War of Global Terror.

Obama bade his legal henchmen -- his own personal John Yoos, as it were -- to 
tell the Supreme Court that it should kill the Canadian citizen's case seeking 
compensation for his unlawful arrest by U.S. officials, who then rendered him 
not unto Caesar but to the untender mercies of Syria's torture cells. The Robed 
Ones agreed, dismissing, without comment, Arar's appeal of a lower court ruling 
that quashed his case -- a decision that Scott Horton rightly likened last year 
to the Dred Scott case, which upheld the legality of slavery, even in states 
which prohibited it.

The Arar ruling upholds the "legality" of a new, universal form of slavery, 
i.e., the United States government can deprive anyone in the world of their 
freedom, and dispose of their bodies as it sees fit: torture, "indefinite 
detention," or even "targeted assassination." The fact that it is a man of 
partly African descent who is now outstripping the Southern slavers in this 
extension of servitude to the entire world is one of those poisonously bitter 
ironies with which history abounds.

But grim and depraved as Obama's position is, it is not without its comic 
elements. As Bovard notes, one of the "arguments" offered by the Obama/Yoo 
administration was that the case should be dismissed because it might call into 
question “the motives and sincerity of the United States officials who concluded 
that petitioner could be removed to Syria.” We kid, as they say, you not.

So now cases of monstrous and criminal actions by agents of the United States 
government cannot be heard in court, because this might impugn the "sincerity" 
of the officials involved. And after all, as we all know, it is the inner 
feelings of government officials that are all important in determining the 
legality -- and morality -- of their actions. That is why the murder of more 
than a million Iraqis in an act of naked military aggression is not a war crime; 
it is, at the very worst, just a "tragic blunder," a misdirected excess of good 
intentions gone awry. Because we meant well, didn't we? We always mean well...

[Full article at 
<http://chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/1979-sincerely-yours-another-legal-triumph-for-the-obama-yoo-administration.html>. 
Its conclusion follows.]

...And please note: none of this has changed. None of it. These crimeful, brutal 
abuses of power are becoming more thoroughly entrenched under the rule of the 
progressive Peace laureate now in the White House. What Bush did with winks and 
nods, Obama is openly championing, expanding and codifying into law. And these 
deeply sincere evils will keep reverberating, in ways that we can not even 
imagine, far into the lives of our children and grandchildren, and for 
generations beyond.

	###

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