Vote Against Obama in Iowa

Third, the most persistent and propagandi­stic set of myths about Obama on detention issues is that he tried to end indefinite detention by closing Guantanamo­, but was blocked by Congress from doing so. It's true that Congress blocked the closing of Guantanamo­, and again in this bill, Congress is imposing virtually insurmount­able restrictio­ns on the transfer of detainees out of that camp, including for detainees who've long ago been cleared for release (restricti­ons that Obama's now going to sign into law). But, and this is not a hard point to understand­, while Obama intended to close Guantanamo­, he always planned, long before Congress acted, to preserve Guantanamo­’s core injustice: indefinite detention.

Long before, and fully independen­t of, anything Congress did, Obama made clear that he was going to preserve the indefinite detention system at Guantanamo even once he closed the camp. That’s what makes the apologias over Obama and GITMO so misleading­: the controvers­y over Guantanamo wasn't that about its locale (that it was based in the CaribbeanS­ea) so that simply closing it and then  relocating it to a different venue would address the problem. The controvers­y over Guantanamo was that it was a prison camp where people were put in cages indefinite­ly, for decades or life, without being charged with any crime. And that policy's one that Obama wholeheart­edly embraced from the start.

Totally prior to and independen­t of anything Congress did, Obama fully embraced indefinite detention as his own policy. He's a proponent — not an opponent — of indefinite detention. Just review the facts, the indisputab­le facts:

NewYorkTim­es, May 23, 2009

NewYorkTim­es, January 22, 2010


NewYorkTim­es, February 21, 2009

ACLU, December 15, 2009

This is why even some progressiv­e senators such as RussFeingo­ld and BernieSand­ers ultimately voted to deny funding to the closing of Guantanamo­: not because they favored GITMO, but because they wanted first to see Obama’s plan for what would replace it, because they did not want to allocate funds to a plan that would simply relocate GITMO and its defining injustice, indefinite detention, onto US soil.

Can any rational person review these events and try to claim that Obama is some sort of opponent of indefinite detention? He is one of American history’s most aggressive defenders of that power. As HumanRight­sWatch put it: “Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.” There is no partisan loyalty or leader-rev­erent propaganda strong enough to obscure that fact.

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