Broken Campaign Promise: Why dosen't Barack Obama close Gitmo? Because he can't

President Obama cannot close the Bush-created prison at Guantanamo Bay, or try the remaining detainees still stuck in that island gulag, on his own. Guantanamo Bay  is a creature of Congress, and only Congress can kill it.


On his second full day in office, President Obama issued an executive order to review the disposition of prisoners being held at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and ordered that the detention facility be closed within a year.
 Sources:
Whitehouse.gov, Executive Order: Review and Disposition of Indiviuals Detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval base and Closure of Detention Facility , Jan. 22, 2009

Congress balks at Obama's plan

 Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 |  President Barack Obama's plan to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has run into significant opposition, most notably from members of his own party who stripped millions of dollars to shutter the facility from a war funding bill.

Closing the prison has been one of Obama's signature issues since he was a candidate. On January 20, 2009, the day he was sworn in, he directed prosecutors to file a motion to suspend legal proceedings against the suspected terrorists held at the facility. Two days later, the administration issued an executive order to review the disposition of the prisoners and ordered that the facility be shut down within a year.

House Democrats refused to include the $80 million requested by the administration to close the facility in the war spending bill. Senate Democrats initially included the money in their $91.3 billion version of the measure, but then stripped it out by a 90-6 vote on May 20.

Sources:
CQ Politics, Sen. Mitch McConnell's Comments on Guantanamo Bay , May 19, 2009
CQ Politics, Sen. Harry Reid's comments on Guantanamo Bay , May 19, 2009
White House, Transcript of Briefing of Press Secretary Robert Gibbs , May 19, 2009

Friday, September 25th, 2009

President Barack Obama promised to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Two days after he took office, he vowed to close it within a year — by Jan. 22, 2010.

But his effort has been slowed by the difficulty in finding a place to house the approximately 240 prisoners held there and resistance from Congress. In May, the Senate refused to fund Obama's efforts to close the center until he provided more detail on what, exactly, he intended to do with the detainees housed there. Now, Gregory Craig, the White House insider who was put in charge of the effort, is being removed from the project, according to a Sept. 25, 2009, Washington Post article.

The Post article, co-written with ProPublica, said the White House will have difficulty meeting the deadline four months from now.

So, closing the detention center continues to encounter difficulties.

Sources:
Washington Post and ProPublica, White House regroups on Guantanamo , Sept. 25, 2009


Review-
President Obama came into office in January 2009, and two days after his inauguration, he signs his first executive order, calling for the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay within one year.
- Less than five months later, Congress — controlled by Democrats — votes overwhelmingly to neutralize that executive order, and to keep Gitmo open, by choking off the funds needed to enact the executive order by building new facilities, seeking deportations, etc. The vote in the Senate was 90 to 6.
- In November 2009, the Obama administration tried another tactic: they planned to move 100 remaining Gitmo detainees  to an all-but abandoned, state-of-the-art prison in Illinois. The rural town wanted the deal, and the jobs that would come with it. Again, the deal was blocked  by Congressional Republicans, and as of today, the “Gitmo North” plan seems to be dead on arrival.
December, 2010, Congress went in for the kill:

Congress on Wednesday signaled it won’t close the prison at Guantanamo Bay or allow any of its suspected terrorist detainees to be transferred to the U.S., dealing what is likely the final blow to President Obama’s campaign pledge to shutter the facility in Cuba.
The move to block the prison’s closure was written into a massive year-end spending bill that passed the House on Wednesday evening on a vote of 212-206, part of a last-minute legislative rush by Democrats to push through their priorities before ceding the House to Republican control in January.
News of the Guantanamo provision brought a quick and sharp rebuke from the Obama administration Wednesday.
“We strongly oppose this provision,” Department of Justice spokesman Matt Miller said in a statement. “Congress should not limit the tools available to the executive branch in bringing terrorists to justice and advancing our national security interests.”
Current law allows the Justice Department to bring detainees to the U.S. for trial as long as the Justice Department gives Congress 45 days notice of the transfer.

Family law judge beats own daughter for using the internet

2004: Aransas County Court-At-Law Judge William Adams took a belt to his own teenage daughter as punishment for using the internet to acquire music and games that were unavailable for legal purchase at the time. She has had ataxic cerebral palsy from birth that led her to a passion for technology, which was strictly forbidden by her father's backwards views. The judge's wife was emotionally abused herself and was severely manipulated into assisting the beating and should not be blamed for any content in this video. The judge's wife has since left the marriage due to the abuse, which continues to this day, and has sincerely apologized and repented for her part and for allowing such a thing, long before this video was even revealed to exist. Judge William Adams is not fit to be anywhere near the law system if he can't even exercise fit judgement as a parent himself. Do not allow this man to ever be re-elected again. His "judgement" is a giant farce. Signed, Hillary Adams, his daughter.

Robert Reich: OWS has transformed public opinion. For the first time since the Great Depression, the majority of Americans favor wealth redistribution.

OWS has transformed public opinion

For the first time since the Great Depression, the majority of Americans favor wealth redistribution

By Robert Reich 

 

This originally appeared on Robert Reich's blog.

A combination of police crackdowns and bad weather are testing the young Occupy movement. But rumors of its demise are premature, to say the least. Although numbers are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests the movement is growing.
As importantly, the movement has already changed the public debate in America.
Consider, for example, last week’s Congressional Budget Office report on widening disparities of income in America. It was hardly news – it’s already well known that the top 1 percent now gets 20 percent of the nation’s income, up from 9 percent in the late 1970s.
But it’s the first time such news made the front page of the nation’s major newspapers.
Why? Because for the first time in more than half a century, a broad cross-section of the American public is talking about the concentration of income, wealth and political power at the top.
Score a big one for the Occupiers.
Even more startling is the change in public opinion. Not since the 1930s has a majority of Americans called for redistribution of income or wealth. But according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an astounding 66 percent of Americans said the nation’s wealth should be more evenly distributed.
A similar majority believes the rich should pay more in taxes. According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, even a majority of people who describe themselves as Republicans believe taxes should be increased on the rich.
I remember the days when even raising the subject of inequality made you a “class warrior.” Now, it seems, most Americans have become class warriors.
And they blame Republicans for stacking the deck in favor of the rich. On that New York Times/CBS News poll, 69 percent of respondents said Republican policies favor the rich (28 percent said the same of Obama’s policies).
The old view was anyone could make it in America with enough guts and gumption. We believed in the self-made man (or, more recently, woman) who rose from rags to riches – inventors and entrepreneurs born into poverty, like Benjamin Franklin; generations of young men from humble beginnings who grew up to became president, like Abe Lincoln. We loved the novellas of Horatio Alger, and their more modern equivalents – stories that proved the American dream was open to anyone who worked hard.
In that old view, being rich was proof of hard work, and lack of money proof of indolence or worse. As Herman Cain still says “if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.”
But Cain’s line isn’t hitting a responsive chord. In fact, he’s backtracked from it (along with much of the rest of what he’s said).
A profound change has come over America. Guts, gumption, and hard work don’t seem to pay off as they once did – or at least as they did in our national morality play. Instead, the game seems rigged in favor of people who are already rich and powerful – as well as their children.
Instead of lionizing the rich, we’re beginning to suspect they gained their wealth by ripping us off.
Mitt Romney is defensive about his vast wealth (reputed to total a quarter of a billion). He’s reverted to scolding his audiences on the campaign trail for “attacking people based on heir success.”
The old view was also that great wealth trickled downward – that the rich made investments in jobs and growth that benefitted all of us. So even if we doubted we’d be wealthy, we still gained from the fortunes made by a few.
But that view, too, has lost its sheen. Nothing has trickled down. The rich have become far richer over the last three decades but the rest of us haven’t. In fact, median incomes are dropping.
Wall Street moguls are doing better than ever – after having been bailed out by the rest of us. But the rest of us are doing worse. CEOs are hauling in more than 300 times the pay of average workers (up from 40 times the pay only three decades ago), as average workers lose jobs, wages, and benefits.
Instead of investing in jobs and growth, the super rich are putting their money into gold or Treasury bills, or investing it in Brazil or South Asia or anywhere else it can reap the highest return.
Meanwhile, it’s dawning on Americans that in the real economy (as opposed to the financial one) our spending is vital. And without enough jobs or wages, that spending is drying up.
The economy is in trouble because so much income and wealth have been going to the top that the rest us no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services we would produce at or near full employment.
The jobs depression shows no sign of ending. Personal disposable income, adjusted for inflation, was down 1.7 percent in the third quarter of this year – the biggest drop since the third quarter of 2009. Housing prices have stalled, home sales are down.
The only reason consumer spending rose in September is because we drew from our meager savings – mostly in order to pay medical bills, health insurance, and utilities. That’s the third month of savings declines, according to the Commerce Department’s report last Friday.
This can’t and won’t continue. Savings are now down to 3.6 percent of personal disposable income, their lowest level since the recession began.
Americans know a rigged game when they see one. They understand how much money is flowing into politics from the super rich, big corporations, and Wall Street — in order to keep their taxes low and entrench their privileged position.
The Occupy movement is gaining ground because it’s hitting a responsive chord. What happens from here on depends on whether other Americans begin to march to the music — and organize.

Source

Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. He is also a blogger and the author of "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future."More Robert Reich