What Sound Does Credibility Hitting The Floor Make?
Splat?
Well while you consider that, this from a Jake Tapper story today:
The Obama Administration today announced that it would keep the same position as the Bush Administration in the lawsuit Mohamed et al v Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc..
The case involves five men who claim to have been victims of extraordinary rendition — including current Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed, another plaintiff in jail in Egypt, one in jail in Morocco, and two now free. They sued a San Jose Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen Dataplan, accusing the flight-planning company of aiding the CIA in flying them to other countries and secret CIA camps where they were tortured.
That’s sure to disappoint the Economist which, in a gushing editorial written a couple of days after Obama’s electoral victory said:
America will certainly change under Mr Obama; the world of extraordinary rendition and licensed torture should thankfully soon be gone.
And, as with most things, this is sure to surprise some liberal blogs who recently assured themselves that the Obama administration wasn’t going to support extraordinary rendition. After claiming the LA Times got punked they soothed themselves into believing that if the CIA isn’t operating the facility then there’s no harm or no foul. If it is a foreign intelligence service operating the facility in a foreign land to which the CIA turns over prisoners, well, then, that’s just not the same thing, you see. But, of course, it’s simply a different shade of gray, isn’t it?
BTW, I believe the questioning of Leon Panetta should have disabused our liberal friends who claim the Bush administration’s use of rendition is any different than the Obama administrations use of that belief.
Should any doubt remain that there may be a difference, Tapper adds:
A source inside of the Ninth U.S. District Court tells ABC News that a representative of the Justice Department stood up to say that its position hasn’t changed, that new administration stands behind arguments that previous administration made, with no ambiguity at all. The DOJ lawyer said the entire subject matter remains a state secret.
Any questions?
How does that go – everybody now – “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
Tapper concludes:
This is not going to please civil libertarians and human rights activists who had hoped the Obama administration would allow the lawsuit to proceed.
Not really. Like the bunch linked above, they’ll simply try to spin it.
More here.
Hope and change.
~McQ
Wow, Obama really is Bush lite. All the flaws, none of the strengths. yikes.
As I said a few weeks ago at Pajamas Media:
SITYS
Speaking of credibility hitting the floor, what a dud of a presser he had tonight.
It’s going to end up very badly for him.
These childish immature idiots, what in the hell did the expect? No nation-state in the history of mankind has, could, or would give up its right to self protection by completely doing away with extraordinary means of gathering intelligence, and any nation which did would not survive long.
This is just more evidence that the proper perspective to be a liberal is to have ones head up ones ass. Give some credit to the Obama administration, they may be lying, pandering, spendthrift jackasses, but at least they are not as stupid and naive as their idiotic supporters.
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Bad move Obama. But notice the amount of criticism coming from the left – and contrast it with the silence on the right when it came to the crimes of the Bush administration.
What’s sad is that a blog dedicated to “Free People” expresses no outrage over a policy in which the United States government was complicit in torture.
This may be hard for you to grasp, but we on the right – absent new information – don’t regard what Bush did as “crimes” any more than we would regard our efforts to read Japanese code transmissions before World War II as “crimes”, or the FBI’s efforts against communist agents during the Cold War as “crimes”. President Lincoln’s suspension of habeus corpus was not a “crime”, nor was his use of force to thwart the cause of Southern self-determination. President Roosevelt’s incarceration of Japanese, Germans, and Italians during World War II was similarly not a “crime”, though I think he went overboard.
Here’s a tip: nobody likes the idea of being rough with terrorist suspects anymore than we like the idea of killing innocent civilians (especially children) in war. However, those of us on the right live in the real world and understand that sometimes such things are necessary to protect our country. It would appear that TAO and the scum that populate his administration are learning this lesson. I hope that his loopy supporters don’t have to also learn it the hard way.
Maybe you should have been here DURING the beginning of the war when we already went OVER what we thought of torture and holding these people in Gitmo. Or should we stage the discussion over and over and over for your satisfaction that there is sufficient outrage. Generally it was decided that we occasionally and unfortunately have to be almost as nasty as the people trying to destroy us. It sucks, but it’s an ADULT view of the world.
I don’t expect you to grasp the significance of the idea that we debated it and discussed it at length before we decided it sucked, but a lot of it was necessary.
Well, I see the usual number of left-leaning sites have missed the entire point. Again.
How do we entertain the notion that the government can just say “state secrets” and get the case dismissed outright? Assuming it does not lead to abuse, shouldn’t the proper response of a court if the government asserts the state secrets privilege to enter a default judgment against the government and grant the remedy the plaintiffs seek?
John Conyers must be crushed as any hope for an Congressional investigation of the previous Executive branch leader is now dead. Naa Na Na NAAA Na
Ted Rall is upset: