The promise to erase the ill effects of his predecessor George W. Bush’s hardliner war-on-terror policies, which helped Barack Obama win presidential election has crumbled. The political reality is that the current US administration is doing quite the opposite.
Washington / NationalTurk – Long before he was elected US president or the winner of a Noble Peace Prize, Barack Obama was a constitutional law professor. During his presedintial campaign he vowed to reverse the abuses and policies of his predecessor George W. Bush.
Obama vs Bush : The changes in his 3 years: Himself
Three years later, many civil rights advocates, who once cheered “yes, we can,” are finding themselves disillusioned.
“Not only has the Barack Obama administration blocked torture accountability and refused to investigate and prosecute. He has basically maintained indefinite detention. Military commissions has been revived under Obama’s commision. As well he has expanded targeted killings – they’ve risen under the Obama administration manifold, and he’s even authorized the killing of a US citizen,” explains Maria LaHood from the Center for Constitutional Rights.
World-renowned author and scholar Noam Chomsky believes the Obama administration has changed gears and accelerated illegal practices into overdrive.
“There is a dramatic change between Bush’s policies and the Obama’s on this. Bush’s policy was to kidnap people, take them to Guantanamo or Bagram or some other torture chamber and try to extract some information from them. Obama’s policy is just to exterminate them. They’re exterminating them all over the globe. And the Usama Bin Laden assassination was a case point,” he stresses.
Us Drone Killings : New state of war by Obama
Another was the drone killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric. President Barack Obama described the man as “the leader of external operations for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”
”The tip of the iceberg” say diplomats. Apart from those two are hundreds more killed by US UAVs. The number of drone strikes during the first two years under Barack Obama exceeded the total carried out during Bush’s 10 years in the driving seat.
“If a President McCain were doing the exact same thing that President Obama is doing, he would have been denounced by a lot of liberals. We live dangerous moments in the US history. We saw a prelude with Clinton in the 1990s, where a democrat campaigned and pledged to change the country and better its loathed image and the world has actually pushed the right-wing agenda further forward than a republican could have if they took the power,” says New York-based journalist and author Jeremy Scahill.
Barack Obama : Us Presidential Elections : US Voters demand blood, Obama delivers
As Barack Obama gears up for his re-election campaign, civil liberties groups that believed his words the first time around are now left to judge the US commander-in-chief on his actions.
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