The Fruit Of Fearmongering

By Steve Hynd

Two reports today say that Americans are "overwhelmingly opposed" to closing Gitmo, don't have a favorable opinion of Moslems and don't much care if Moslems have an equally unfavorable opinion of interventionist Americans.

Is anyone surprised after so many years of fearmongering and American exceptionalism?

Yet American opinions are often based solely on that fearmongering for political ends - and Obama hasn't exactly been a shining star in rolling it back. Today, even as theformer CIA station chief for Pakistan says that claims of torture saving lives are false and that repeated claims torture foiled attacks only aid terrorists recruitment plans, Obama has been told that he cannot keep unclassified Gitmo evidence secret.

A federal judge rejected on Monday a U.S. government request to keep secret the unclassified evidence that it says justifies the continued imprisonment of more than 100 Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan ruled the government cannot keep the documents known as factual returns from public disclosure and must seek court approval to keep specific information secret....The sealed court documents outlined the government's case for the continued holding of the detainees.

The judge ordered the U.S. Justice Department to publicly file its unclassified records or show the court what specific information it wants to keep secret by the end of next month.

Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, hailed the ruling.

"For far too long, the government has succeeded in keeping information about Guantanamo secret and used secrecy to cover-up illegal detention and abuse," he said. "The decision marks an important step towards restoring America's open court tradition that is essential to both accountability and the rule of law."

Americans are forming opinions based upon fear, lies and deception - and Democrats simply aren't interested in pushback against that, calculating that it might hurt them politically to do so. It's enough to launch Matt Taibbi on a truly righteous rant:

This is what this generation of Democrats does every time: every time they come to a fork in the road, they try to take it.

There�s always some sort of semantic twist involved with their policies, an asterisk, some kind of leprechaun trick to get around doing the simple right thing. They�re all for gay rights, and then once the lights come on, they�ve basically codified the closet by ushering in Don�t Ask, Don�t Tell.

They campaign against the war in Iraq, promise to get us out, and say they were against it all along � and then once they get in power, they start using words like eventually and in 4-6 years and once the situation stabilizes. Later it turns out that what they meant by being against the war all along was their conviction that we should have invaded on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday, or some such bullshit.

Now there�s this Gitmo business. This, folks, just isn�t that tough a call. The prison (and the much less publicized archipelago of hard sites in foreign countries where more terror suspects are held) was a symbol of everything wrong and stupid about the Bush administration. Snatching people up by force and dumping them in rocks on the middle of the ocean without due process is the kind of thing that was last done by �civilized� cultures back in the days of the Roman Empire; since then it�s been the exclusive province of sociopathic third-world dictators like Stalin and Mobutu Sese Seko. It was absolutely imperative, from a public relations standpoint if nothing else, that Obama immediately repudiate these practices, design some kind of due process to deal with the already incarcerated prisoners, and show the world that what happened during the Bush years was an insane aberration, a result of our having accidentally elected an emotionally retarded sadist to the White House.

Instead, Obama is on his way to doing exactly the wrong thing. He�s going to make a show of closing the base, but retain the underlying idea by keeping some of the prisoners in indefinite legal purgatory. In some ways this is worse than what Bush did, because Bush at least took a clear stand � he was nuts and thought this was the right thing to do. No matter how you look at Obama�s decision, it�s weighed somewhere along the line by political calculation. Either he thinks indefinite decision is right and he�s bowing to public appeals by closing the base, or else he thinks it�s wrong and is bowing to opposition outcry by maintaining the old policy.

Hey Matt? You are here.