From Phillip Adams

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The judgment of history? I’d prefer the judgment of a War Crimes Tribunal for the lot of them – Bush, Cheney and the repugnant Rumsfeld. Yet I’m with Frank on one issue. Bush did achieve something truly and wholly remarkable. While shredding the US Constitution, while ignoring the lessons of his friends at Enron and allowing the US economy to drag the world towards Depression, while battering the environment with infinitely greater power than Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans, and by the monstrous failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, GWB achieved the impossible. He got an African-American – and a comparative radical – elected president.

Thus we are in Bush’s debt. Barack couldn’t have happened without him. He couldn’t have been a contender, let alone a victor. Bush’s appalling record on everything, his total failure on every front from Baghdad to Wall Street, put the wind beneath Barack’s wings. Without the thundering blunderings of Bush a black presidency would have remained a dream for another decade.

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See toon at top... Read more of Phillp Adams at the Australian.

from the BBC

The US has stopped running its global network of secret prisons, CIA director Leon Panetta has announced.

"CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites," Mr Panetta said in a letter to staff. Remaining sites would be decommissioned, he said.

The "black sites" were used to detain terrorism suspects, some of whom were subjected to interrogation methods described by many as torture.

President Obama vowed to shut down the facilities shortly after taking office.

see toon at top.

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.

When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them.

“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and supports the Illinois plan. He added that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration.

And Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who also supports shutting it, said the effort is “on life support and it’s unlikely to close any time soon.” He attributed the collapse to some fellow Republicans’ “demagoguery” and the administration’s poor planning and decision-making “paralysis.”

The White House insists it is still determined to shutter the prison. The administration argues that Guantánamo is a symbol in the Muslim world of past detainee abuses, citing military views that its continued operation helps terrorists.

“Our commanders have made clear that closing the detention facility at Guantánamo is a national security imperative, and the president remains committed to achieving that goal,” said a White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt.

Still, some senior officials say privately that the administration has done its part, including identifying the Illinois prison — an empty maximum-security center in Thomson, 150 miles west of Chicago — where the detainees could be held. They blame Congress for failing to execute that endgame.

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see toon at top and ponder....

A sharply divided federal appeals court on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit [PDF] involving the Central Intelligence Agency's practice of seizing terrorism suspects and transferring them to other countries for imprisonment and interrogation. The ruling handed a major victory to the Obama administration in its effort to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy power.

Gosh. Can't understand why Obama's approval ratings keep falling.

In any case, the heart of this matter is the Government's "alleged" right (the President of the United States' actually) to use the so-called "state secrets privilege" to keep victims of alleged torture from ever even having a day in court - even when one of those victims, as in this case, charges that his torture included "cutting his penis and other body parts with a scalpel and then pouring stinging liquid on the wounds."

Good thing none of this was done by Iran. We'd be outraged...

This case was brought by the ACLU on behalf of five former prisoners who claim to have been tortured in the CIA's rendition program. The man who says his penis was cut claims that he was repeatedly tortured during the more than six years that he was held, in three different countries (including at Gitmo), before being freed.

Unless the finding of the appellate court is overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the man, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and legal resident of the United Kingdom, will never even get his day in court, thanks to the work of both Presidents Bush and Obama, as Savage reports. In today's finding "a narrow majority endorsed the broader view of executive secrecy powers, concluding that the lawsuit must be dismissed without even a trial that would be limited to already-public information."

"To this date, not a single victim of the Bush administration's torture program has had his day in court," [the ACLU's Ben] Wizner said. "That makes this a sad day not only for the torture survivors who are seeking justice in this case, but for all Americans who care about the rule of law and our nation's reputation in the world. If this decision stands, the United States will have closed it courts to torture victims while providing complete immunity to their torturers."

Court Sides With Bush/Obama in Favor of Torture, Secrecy, Against Rule of Law

In the book itself, Bush says: "Five years later I can barely write those words without feeling disgust... The suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low."

Lauer, who also hosted the Hurricane Katrina fundraiser when Kanye West made the remark, warns Bush that he might be criticised for putting a personal insult at the top of his list of worst moments.

"You're not saying that the worst moment in your presidency was watching the misery in Louisiana. You're saying it was when someone insulted you because of that. People might give you some heat for that."

Bush responds: "The misery in Louisiana affected me deeply as well."

Age: 10 years.

Appearance: Butlins gone wrong.

Gitmo? Is this the jaunty nickname given to the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba? It is, derived from the military abbreviation GTMO. You may remember George W Bush establishing the facility on the ingenious premise that he could torture people there as long as no one called them soldiers.

Clever. Yet never totally convincing. It's a good thing that nice Mr Obama signed an executive order promising that the camp "will be closed no later than one year from now" on 22 January 2009. Ye-es ... It would be, except it's still open, and continues to house 169 detainees at an annual cost of $800,000 each.

Oh. Well, I'm sure they'll close it soon. Actually, it's having a multimillion-dollar refit, potentially equipping it to stay open for many more years.

What? They can't get rid of all their prisoners, you see.

Have they tried just opening the doors? I'm afraid it's not so simple. Some are waiting to stand trial in military courts, but Congress won't let them be transferred to American prisons. Others are already eligible for release, but no other country will accept them.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/shortcuts/2012/jun/10/pass-notes-3190-gitmo

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Obama did not try very hard... see toon at top.... Meanwhile, instead of catching the "culprits of whatever", Obama decided to kill them first.. Saves on lengthy dubious court cases and minimizes the paperwork...