Amnesty International laments Obama's "limited action" on countererror policies and Guantanamo detentions
WASHINGTON, (AFP) -- U.S. President Barack Obama's record on changing the counterterror policies of his predecessor has been "mixed," said a report by international human rights watchdog Amnesty International.
"On counterterrorism detention policies ... the record of the new administration has been mixed," the rights group said in its annual report to be released on Thursday.
Highlighting the "widespread expectation of change" brought by Obama's swearing-in in January following eight years of George W. Bush's presidency, Amnesty said "early promise and initial important steps to redress violations have been followed by limited action."
The rights group pointed to positives such as Obama's declaration in January that he would end policies called "enhanced interrogation" techniques by the Bush administration, which critics say amount to torture of detainees, as well as his pledge to close the prison camp on the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
But Amnesty lamented the Obama administration's "limited action towards ensuring detentions are brought into line with the USA's international obligations," and said that "a lack of accountability and remedy for past human rights violations remains entrenched."
Sorry, please move this to International News...
Source
The Evil of Indefinite Detention and Those Wanting to De-Prioritze It - by Glenn Greenwald
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/08/the_evils_of_indefinite_detention_and_th...
"This weekend will mark the ten-year anniversary of the opening of the Guantanamo prison camp. Post Boumediene, indefinite detention remains a staple of Obama policy. His plan for closing Guantanamo entailed the mere re-location of its indefinite detention system to US soil, where dozens of detainees, at least, would continue to be imprisoned with no trial.
And of course, the President just signed into law the NDAA which contains - as the ACLU put it - 'a sweeping indefinite detension provision,' meaning - as Human Rights Watch put it - that 'President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.'
As we head into Election Year, there is an increasingly common, bizarre and self-evidently repellent tactic being employed by some Democratic partisans against those of us who insist that issues like indefinite detention (along with ongoing killing of civilians in the Muslim world) merit high priority..."
...and that bizarre and repellent tactic is to argue: