Comments on: Minority Report a l’Obama

By: Barack the Dictator | Lew Rockwell

Barack the Dictator | Lew Rockwell — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 20:37:06 +0000

[...] Read the rest of the article This entry was posted in Articles by Matt Taibbi. Bookmark the permalink. [...]

By: The Terror Card, Torture and You or, The Evil of Banality

The Terror Card, Torture and You or, The Evil of Banality — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 23:17:55 +0000

[...] as Matt Taibbi points out here, has gone from not exactly distinguishing himself in this matter (as well as waffling on the [...]

By: bringing back the torture (question) « christopher de la Torre

bringing back the torture (question) « christopher de la Torre — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:41:01 +0000

[...] Via Taibblog: Minority Report a l’Obama [...]

By: Buckrun Outdoors » Blog Archive » The Anti-Obama Left

Buckrun Outdoors » Blog Archive » The Anti-Obama Left — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:01:11 +0000

[...] “good king fantasy” regarding Obama while failing to see that he’s merely “a smooth-talking shill” for the Power Elite who is amassing the powers of a [...]

By: CthuluRisin

CthuluRisin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:11:41 +0000

If you look at Obamas actions(more truthfully non-actions) since the election with the idea in mind that maybe, just maybe he is the same kind of puppet as Bush, Clinton, and the rest, working for the same masters, it all becomes alot easier to understand. My bet is that when Obamas run in office is finished and you look back and compare his policies with Bush’s, the differences will be slight

By: Thinking Long « Tethered Swimming

Thinking Long « Tethered Swimming — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:03:34 +0000

[...] Taibbi had an interesting post up this week. He was puzzling over just why Barack Obama (freshly inaugurated, insanely popular, Savior of the [...]

By: hfsmithiii

hfsmithiii — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 02:12:52 +0000

He got caught out by his pre-election pledge to close Guantanamo. He realized too late,that this would mean he’d have to endorse preventive detention. Or perhaps he imagined that most of the people he couldn’t just let go from Grantanamo he could fit into other procrustean legal beds that would allow them to be held.

By: burndtdan

burndtdan — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 01:20:50 +0000

I don’t agree with his apparent thinking on the topic of what to do with these detainees at all, but I also don’t think his first priority is just to shove them in a legal black hole. If he wanted to do that, like you said, he wouldn’t have gone about it this way.

I suspect he thinks (and I suspect he’s wrong) that there is a legal way to go about this, that would be somehow in keeping with current legal structures. In fact, I think he has the prisoner of war paradigm in his head about these men. And I think he basically said he wants Congress to help him figure out a way to square the circle to make it all kosher.

And that’s what I think he gets from doing it openly like this. He gets an above-board debate about it. That way, if he does do what he feels he’s going to need to do, he’ll be able to say it’s all within the law.

Now I just hope that his thinking is corrected by Congress.

By: clintonius

clintonius — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:22:54 +0000

Mr. Alwaysvote,

You seem to have forgotten about Jose Padilla. Yes, rounded up in the dead of night and whisked away to an undisclosed location. No need to hang around, your savior in chief already made this a reality.

Oh, and I’ll let you in on a little secret. If the Guantanamo detainees are brought to US soil they will not be released to live amongst the citizenry. But I’m assuming you know this, and are just being ridiculous. The supermax prison where we currently keep serial killers is a little more secure than your neighbor’s double-wide.

By: Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:31:18 +0000

Okay, right. So we’ve never had detainees sent to places like the Mulhaq al-Mazra prison in Egypt, or Bagram in Afghanistan, or the “Palestine wing” of the Syrian intelligence jail, or to foreign jails in Oman, the Phillipines, Qatar, or Azerbaidjan, or Thailand. Let me ask you something: the U.S. has admitted to arresting over 4,000 al-Qaida suspects alone. Only 350 are at Gitmo. Where do you think the rest are? Florence, Colorado?

And Jesus, nobody is saying that anyone wants real terrorists let loose. All we’re saying is that there has to be some kind of process. Even Nazi prisoners were held under the Geneva convention. Would you be in favor of the police being allowed to simply pick people up off the streets in the U.S. and throw them in jail forever without any kind of due process? If your answer is yes, that’s one thing — you’re basically crazy if your answer is yes. If your answer is no, then how is it any different in a foreign country? You’d really be in favor of allowing the CIA to wander the earth throwing people in vans and disappearing them forever, without any sort of trial? Really?