Liberty Maven

A year ago when the Presidential election was in full swing the main buzzword we heard out of the Obama camp was “change”.  In fact, “change you can believe in”.  At the time we were pretty sure it was all hogwash and his first year in office has proven that assessment to be true.

A piece by Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com a few weeks ago points out many examples how so much of Obama’s talk of change was just that: talk.

“When it comes to uprooting (‘changing’) the Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism and civil liberties — the issue which generated as much opposition to the last presidency as anything else — the Obama administration has proven rather conclusively that tiny and cosmetic adjustments are the most it is willing to do.

“They love announcing new policies that cast the appearance of change but which have no effect whatsoever on presidential powers.

“With great fanfare, they announced the closing of CIA black sites — at a time when none was operating.

“They trumpeted the President’s order that no interrogation tactics outside of the Army Field Manual could be used — at a time when approval for such tactics had been withdrawn.

“They repudiated the most extreme elements of the Bush/Addington/Yoo ‘inherent power’ theories — while maintaining alternative justifications to enable the same exact policies to proceed exactly as is.

“They flamboyantly touted the closing of Guantanamo — while aggressively defending the right to abduct people from around the world and then imprison them with no due process at Bagram.

“Their ‘changes’ exist solely in theory — which isn’t to say that they are all irrelevant, but it is to say that they change nothing in practice:  i.e., in reality.”

Then a week later, Greenwald posted an update, saying:

“Isn’t it so interesting how the phrase ‘Patriot Act’ was the symbol of everything Democrats claimed to find so heinous during the Bush years, but now that there’s a Democratic President, Senate and Congress, it’s absolutely certain that the Patriot Act will continue, and civil libertarians are reduced to hoping that there may be some tiny modifications to it, and even that’s highly unlikely?”

Indeed.