Obama’s To Do List
By: JP Sottile Wednesday November 26, 2008 8:07 am
snip//
1. End Torture: Okay, you’ve promised to shut down Gitmo. But that was sorta in the cards, so no props for that. How about re-defining torture along the lines of the Geneva Convention? Issue an Exec Order...or prod Congress to pass a law that includes waterboarding, extreme stress positions...all of it...as torture. Stop the semantic games about "enhanced interrogation," which Naomi Wolf points out in my film--The Warning--is what the Nazis called torture. Shut down all secret prisons, too. And how about a commission to investigate the claims by those who were "rendered" to other countries and those who we, often using private contractors, tortured. They deserve justice.
2. Recind Executive Orders: Team Bush was like a drunken sailor with a fist-full of dollars in a strange port when it came to using Exec Orders and signing statements. Stop the insanity. Stop the abrogation of Constitutional precepts, like Separation of Powers. They did a bunch of Continuity of Government planning, ramping up the establishment of a shadow government that can take over in the case of an emergency. Rep. Peter DeFazio-D of Oregon tried and tried to get the White House to let the Congress know what they were doing. Let Congress know. Let the people know. There were orders on all sorts of things, but this order seems to state that the president can declare national emergency--economic, natural disaster, terrorist attack, etc.--and gather all of the powers of the federal government into the office of the president. In other words...make the President the supreme dictator and pull the plug on Congress. I suggest you rescind that. Immediately.
3. Publicly Renounce the Unitary Executive: It only took John Yoo, then at the Justice Dept., two weeks after 9/11 to issue a memo that asserted the supreme will of the president in the time of war. It’s a “secret power” that Yoo "found" in the Constitution which allowed the Commander-in-Chief to ignore Congress, ignore legislation and the laws of the land, and green-light the prosecution any "war" however he see fits. Just issue a statement saying that "the Unitary Executive" is wrong, un-Constitutional and no longer operative in American governance. Re-assert the Separation of Powers. Just to get it on the record. Don’t be bashful about looking into the emails and documents that Team Bush doesn’t destroy or hide...find out what other interesting powers they have created and used…and abused.
4. End the "War on Terror": Language matters. We've seen it with "rendition" and "enhanced interrogation." But it’s the “Global War on Terror" that is the linguistic foundation of all the illegality and abuse we've seen over the last seven-plus years. First, they didn't call it “terrorism” for a reason...they called it "terror." So open-ended. So amorphous. You cannot make a war on "terror." Are we going to fight the makers of the Saw film series? A war on those who stage frightening practical jokes? On those who want to stage a revival of Starlight Express? No. We are not. We are not fighting terror. Terror-ism...is a tactic. It has always been with us. Probably always will. Wherever a lesser force fights a greater force, you find terrorism. How about un-declaring the war in terror and using precise language: the War in Afghanistan (which you seem so hot and bothered to escalate); the War on Al Qaeda (most everyone will support that); the Iraqi Civil War (which, you should admit, we illegally unleashed but have taken sides and hope it continues to fade). The "global" war on terror must end. We are not making progress or friends fighting fear everywhere it can be found around the globe.
5. Renounce the doctrine of Pre-emptive War: Phillip Zelikow, before he man-handled the 9/11 Commission and wrote the report despite the protestations of the Commissioners, came up with this swell idea of declaring war before a war was declared. See the Unitary Executive...handy to have both of these things going if you want to take over everything. Let's get you to write a new doctrine that re-establishes our tradition of not attacking those who don't attack us first. It's a better idea. Safer. Makes more friends, and less enemies. If you get some intel that Canada is about to invade, and you can see them massing on the border? Let them take a step over the line...then roll out the shock and awe. But this pre-emptive stuff just makes everyone who disagrees with us a target. Stop it.
more...
http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/2047
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