Wednesday, June 10, 2009

The More Things Change...

Electing a Democrat to the White House was going to change everything.

We are still waging, in three countries now instead of two, a war against a criminal act that is being perpetrated in many other nations which do not feel the need to declare a war against it, or become traumatized by it, or endlessly declare that their entire nation is in danger of being obliterated by it. These other nations regard it as a crime, use law enforcement to track down the criminals who did it, and then employ their legal systems to successfully bring those criminals to justice.

We are still debating whether or not we should torture prisoners “captured” in our “war” on a criminal act, and the debate is seemingly still unresolved. Even those who oppose our own actions still call them “detainees,” of course, and refer to it as “harsh treatment” because the concept of “torturing prisoners” is something that we are unwilling to admit we are were doing even while we are protesting against us doing it.

We are still hiding what we were doing, and may still be doing, behind a wall of “state secrets” and using high court appeals to prevent the release of documents that might reveal the truth on the grounds of “national security.”

While closing Guantanamo, we are still claiming that prisoners detainees at our other overseas bases do not have any rights at all; that we may hold them at will and that our treatment of them is not subject to oversight; and we are appealing court rulings that are contrary to that position.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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