Forbidden Donut

I feel better about Obama's plan for trials than Bush's, but I hardly see the difference. My beef with gitmo isn't its locale, and my beef with the trials were not that they were military tribunals (both of which are entirely legal if you're working under the assumption that we're at war). I have a tremendous problem with the rights of people being limited in the name of "national security," and it appears like Obama intends to do the same thing at least for some of the detainees.

I disagree. I think the idea of even taking some of them out and holding real honest to goodness trials is the first step towards closing it altogether. He can't just pardon people, and he can't get all of them on trial at once. If he did I think that would be slower even than a phase-out like this. I read into that totally differently I guess. You say that Obama wants to continue the same policies for some prisoners, I say he wants to end it for many.

Glass half-full, meet glass half-empty.

What would you rather see happen?

/The glass is just twice as big as it needs to be?

I also believe that taking people out is the first step toward closing gitmo, but my issue isn't with gitmo as an institution, it's the circumstances surrounding the detainment of its prisoners. I guess I'll break down exactly what my two concerns are with his plan.

First, he wants to move the prisoners to the United States. For one, I don't see this as a solution to just about anything. In fact, I see it as supporting the idea that somehow the location of the prison is important in determining the rights of its inmates. And that is exactly why I am upset with the Bush administration in the first place! Location shouldn't matter -- we're the United States, and all of our operations should abide by our own high expectations regardless of where it takes place in the world. If you support that the location matters, you might as well say that torture is OK so long as it happens somewhere else.

Second, he wants to set up a "special" court to try certain inmates due to "national security" reasons. So once again, regardless of his intentions, he's talking about limiting the rights of certain people in the name of the greater good. It doesn't matter if it is one person or a thousand people, it's completely bogus. He's demonstrating the exact same rationale that Bush used to start this mess in the first place -- that's it's OK to infringe upon the rights of people so long as Americans feel safer. That is my real beef with the situation at gitmo, and he's doing absolutely nothing to curb it. What that means is, even if Obama is totally awesome and does everything right with his expanded power to infringe on the rights of people, he hasn't curbed that power at all (and in using that power at all, he's inherently solidifying it), so the next G.W. that comes along will be able to do an equal or greater amount of bad.

I already said that I think Obama's plan is better than Bush's, at least it will speed up the trials for those detained. But ultimately, his policy doesn't change anything. He's still accepting as necessary the very thing that is awful about the detention of these prisoners. This is the type of thing I'm most afraid of in the Obama administration. He's going to "fix" the problems this country faces with extraordinary short-term plans that do absolutely nothing to help this country in the long run. The exact same thing happened under the Clinton administration. Things in the short term were really awesome because his plans were extremely good in the short term. But the second he left office, the consequences of his unprecedented expansion of executive privilege in the name of the greater good swept the nation in the name of Bush. Obama's presidency will be worthless if all he does is sweep the dirt under the rug, and that's all this policy of his is doing.

I'd argue that acknowledging that Bush has made it so the location matters is not the same thing as supporting the idea. Other than that yeah... this is merely a motion in the right direction, not a solution. But on the bright side, the guy HAS indicated that he'll be redefining the roles of the executive branch to re-align with the constitution. By no means does this mean that he will be completely undoing all the extra powers his office was granted... but I've always thought of that as a pipe dream. Sure, it's fine and dandy to want to get rid of that power when you're running for PotUS, but when you ARE PotUS... what's the motivation (greater good of course but we're talking human nature)

Of all the people we had available to us, only Ron Paul instilled any confidence in me as far as his conviction to return the state of the President to it's original levels of authority. And even then I don't know how he'd react when those powers were dropped in his lap... (FWIW, I think Obama/Biden were #2 in that list, with McCain and Palin somewhere down near 5 or 6, behind Barr and Nader.)

I think at the very least, this policy is a peak into his priorities. And for a guy who was elected PE less than a week ago, I think he's doing a bang up job of keeping a transparent view into his transition and of actually doing some planning and preparation.

Honestly I don't remember because I wasn't paying much attention at the time, but did W. do anything near this level of stuff while simply President Elect?

No, but he didn't have anything really to work with. He came into power when everyone was fat and happy.

change.gov went from having huge agenda plans laid out on the weekend to saying just this:

There are some cached/stored pages of his plans before they were removed (like on Urban Policy, http://74.125.45.104/search?q=cache:lZ5nLB...;cd=1&gl=us ), but I dare you to find the healthcare plan saved anywhere!

Actually, I went through each cached page and found that the sections on economy, ethics, foreign policy, healthcare, homeland security, service and technology dont have old versions up. How do old versions exist for some categories and not for others?

It just depends on what pages that particular bot indexed. If the bot isn't sophisticated enough, it could easily have hit a link off the website somewhere before it indexed further in the site.

well i just searched the page on google and hit cached version..are you saying the google bot randomly indexes things and doesnt work methodically?

Random is a bad word to describe it, but the algorithm it chooses to follow is not as simple as "which link is next in the html?" It places values on the links on any given page based on a variety of data and follows the links that it deems to be the most useful or most in need of an update. The methodology of the bot is not to index entire websites at a time, it's to index all of the most important content as fast as possible.

gotcha, thanks for the info, now I know shit isnt being hidden on purpose.

Well, at least not from the cache. As you mentioned, you've seen first-hand large amounts of information disappearing from the site itself. Also, and I haven't spent the time to go through the site source and look, it is also possible for websites to tell bots such as googlebot not to index their content on a page-by-page basis. That is a good preemptive way to ensure your site content is not searchable on the major search engines.

I noticed that too. I'm curious as to what the deal is with the constant revision. The site just keeps getting more vague... I wonder if changes to the changes are in store? boo.

The agenda is being modified because there were some things that sucked.

I don't understand how this is a problem.

Changing his plans to suit the circumstances is entirely reasonable, but doing so under a veil of secrecy is the exact opposite of the governmental principles that Obama ran on. It worries me, and I assume it also worries those that have spoken about it, that he's being awfully nontransparent with any changes he's making to his previous promises. Perhaps it will all come out before he takes office, but until it does, I'll remain skeptical.

This.

Obama's letting lobbyists work in his transition committee, but they have to sign an ethics code thingy.