Obama to take a stand on detainee rights early
Ali al-Marri is being held in a Navy brig in South Carolina
Late next month we’ll know where Obama stands on one of the most contentious actions of Bush; that the US can indefinitely detain anyone deemed a ‘terrorist’ without charge. He’ll make his thoughts known in a brief due February 20th which will address the specific case of a student from Qatari, who has been held on our mainland since December 2001. “Just a month after President-elect Barack Obama takes office, he must tell the Supreme Court where he stands on one of the most aggressive legal claims made by the Bush administration — that the president may order the military to seize legal residents of the United States and hold them indefinitely without charging them with a crime. The new administration’s brief, which is due Feb. 20, has the potential to hearten or infuriate Mr. Obama’s supporters, many of whom are looking to him for stark disavowals of the Bush administration’s legal positions on the detention and interrogation of so-called enemy combatants held at Navy facilities on the American mainland or at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. During the campaign, Mr. Obama made broad statements criticizing the Bush administration’s assertions of executive power. But now he must address a specific case, that of Ali al-Marri, a Qatari student who was arrested in Peoria, Ill., in December 2001. The Bush administration says Mr. Marri is a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda, and it is holding him without charges at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. He is the only person currently held as an enemy combatant on the mainland, but the legal principles established in his case are likely to affect the roughly 250 prisoners at Guantánamo.” This seems pretty cut and dry to me, we have rights in this country and Bush ignored them; it’s time for Obama to make a clean break and stand up for what this country was founded on.
Join the McCain G00gle b0mb – spread the truth
Moved by Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver? Yeah, me too. I wanted to find out how I could help highlight the differences in Obama’s vs McCain’s stances. Chris Bowers had some great points about finding factual McCain quotes and the easiest way to get these facts in front of voters is to raise their prominence in search engine results; this is my attempt to help. If you have a site and want to participate, read Chris’ comments here. So, lets get on with it:
If you are anything like me, you are sick and tired of the national image of John McCain as some sort of independent, principled, Republican moderate. Examples of McCain’s departure from the Bush administration’s agenda are truly few and far between. Despite reports to the contrary, he has consistently supported and facilitated the most egregiously radical aspects of that agenda. Further, in an attempt to improve his prospects for the Republican nomination in 2008, he has spent much of the last three years sucking up to the theocon wing of the Republican Party that he once decried. Most famously, this included retracting comments he made about Jerry Falwell and then speaking at Falwell’s Liberty University. Pandering to extremists you once denounced in order to improve your electoral prospects hardly sounds “principled” to me.
What especially irks me about McCain’s pure as the driven snow national image is how the Washington pundit elites have continued to help manufacture it. McCain is the most frequent guest on Sunday morning talk shows, whose hosts clearly have done a terrible job of exposing the truth about him. We simply can’t trust the gatekeepers of our conventional wisdom to treat John McCain with any skepticism whatsoever. I am sure we will see much of the same lapdog treatment from the pundit elite when it comes to the McCain doctrine, otherwise known as escalation in Iraq. Already, pundits are bending over backward to label this idea serious, and the people who support it as principled.
Well, I say enough is enough. The line on McCain’s national image will be drawn here, and drawn now. Today, I am proposing a long-term, anti-McCain googlebomb project similar to the Googlebomb the Elections campaign I founded in 2006. The goal on this project is the search engine optimization of articles from established news sources that tell the truth on John McCain. I want to make certain that when people search for information about John McCain online, that they are presented with the truth on John McCain. I hope you will join me in this campaign. Here is what it entails:
Hi, I'm fak3r and I've been online for over 15 years, blogging for 10. I work with open source software, various hardware and whatever else that I can hack on. I enjoy learning by doing, painting infrequently and listening to more music than the law allows. Feel free to follow me and comment on my thoughts and ideas; we're all in it together kid.
