Friday, June 22, 2012

'Toontime: What Goes Around, Comes Around

[credit: Mark Streeter, Savannah Morning News]
Wackydoodle axes, Y'all got a deeper throat?

The next thing you will hear is the Obamanator claiming, "I'm am not a Nixon". But the policy space between them is rapidly eroding. Ask his former jurisprudence professor. His Justice Department, run by the feckless appratchik, Eric Holder, opposed habeas corpus relief for a Guantanomo detainee who succeeded in petitioning a lower federal court to grant his release. The administration appealed to the conservative Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and won an expected reversal of the decision. The equally conservative Supremes upheld the Appeals Court by denying to review their decision. Since 2008  detainees have won two-thirds of their habeas petitions at the federal district court level, but the Supreme Court has now rendered it's Boumediene decision requiring "meaningful" review of detainees' habeas petitions a dead letter. The dissenting judge in the appellate case wrote that to deny the petitioner relief was to deny "meaningful opportunity" to contest his incarceration despite it being based on "multiple layers of hearsay".

No administration in recent history has been as secretive or as ruthless as the Obamanator's, except perhaps Tricky Dick's. Readers will recall Nixon's carpet bombing of North Vietnam intended to terrorize the communists into submission, the secret CIA-run war in Laos and Cambodia, and the multiple claims of executive privilege in response to Senate investigators' subpoenas in the Watergate Affair. That the Obamanator promised unparalleled transparency in his administration before ascending the throne would be ironic, but then irony is as dead as his secret drone victims. One hundred sixty-eight prisoners still languish in America's first gulag which he also promised to close. Eighty-seven prisoners have been cleared for release by our military, but remain incarcerated because they are men without countries. Who needs prisoners with inconvenient legal rights when you have killerbots?