hatman | (no subject)

This makes me happy.

Also this.

And this

Oh, yeah. This, too.

There's some overlap between them, but still...

Some highlights:

President Barack Obama moved quickly Thursday to reshape U.S. national-security policy, ordering the Guantanamo Bay prison camp closed within a year, forbidding the harshest treatment of terror suspects and naming new envoys to the Middle East and Afghanistan-Pakistan.

President Barack Obama is executing the clean break from the Bush administration that he promised in his campaign and his inaugural address, with a dizzying series of events highlighting openness, inclusiveness and ethics.

The man known for speaking so eloquently now seems hellbent on doing things, dispensing a flurry of executive orders on his first full day in office Wednesday, even if he had only just seized the levers of government and his top aides had yet to turn on their computers.

Whereas George W. Bush and his vice president were known for secrecy and tightly held decisions, Obama issued federal worker guidelines that he said will make government "transparent, so that the American people can know exactly what decisions are being made" and "how they're being made."

And if that weren't enough symbolism, he opened the White House to visitors a day after its previous occupant left for Texas.

It's hardly surprising that a Democrat who ran against Bush's unpopular policies would change course. But the speed at which Obama is moving, and the sharpness with which he outlined his differences on Tuesday, are notable in a city known for snail-paced policymaking and rhetorical obfuscation.

In a first-day whirlwind, President Barack Obama showcased efforts to revive the economy on Wednesday, summoned top military officials to the White House to chart a new course in Iraq and eased into the daunting thicket of Middle East diplomacy.

"What an opportunity we have to change this country," said the 47-year-old chief executive, who also issued new ethics rules for his administration, hosted a reception at the presidential mansion for 200 inauguration volunteers and guests selected by an Internet lottery and even took the oath of office again after it was flubbed Tuesday.

Former presidents would face limits in their ability to block the release of sensitive records of their time in the White House, under an executive order issued by President Barack Obama.

Former presidents may ask to have certain documents kept private, but they no longer may compel the National Archives to do so, Obama said.

The executive order also makes clear that neither former vice presidents nor relatives of former presidents who have died have authority to keep records private.

In other news:

Indian security personnel are seen on camels during a rehearsal for the Beating Retreat ceremony in New Delhi, India, Monday, Jan. 19, 2009. India maintains battle trained camels to patrol hundreds of miles of border it shares with Pakistan in the deserts of the western Indian state of Rajasthan. The Beating Retreat ceremony on Jan. 29 officially marks the end of India's Republic Day festivities. In the background is seen the dome of India's presidential palace. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

(Emphasis mine.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I want a battle-trained camel!

Guantanamo scares me just because I know the scary, scary people that are there from my dad's buddy that used to work there. I'm all for implementing standards--I'm very much in the anti-torture camp, but what are you going to do with all those guys if you close the center? Or I suppose my real question is, and I suppose it's everyone else's too, what countries are going to want to take charge of some of these guys? I'm hugely interested in what the task forces will report in a few months.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Camels! "Let's kick some hump!"

Guantanamo is a tough issue. Closing the place won't be easy, which is why he gave it a year. There are hard questions to be answered. I think many of the prisoners will end up being released, truth to tell. The evidence against them is slipshod, at best, in many cases, and not kept in any organized fashion. I believe I heard that a fair amount of it went missing, too. Few of them have had anything like a trial, and the tribunals were closed down as invalid. The trials that were heard were tainted with questionable practices and shady background pressures. And the woman Bush had in charge of deciding which cases to pursue said that we can't prosecute at least one of the more dangerous prisoners because he was tortured, and that invalidates the whole case.

A lot of those people are, I believe, innocent. I don't know how they'll feel now, after having been imprisoned without trial and kept in those conditions for more than a few years, but... I've heard of more than a few who were picked up for such arbitrary reasons. And the prisoners who have been released to date have not become (or returned to being) terrorists in any provable way. The administration claimed that some had, but it turns out they were doing things like counting an entire group who had gone peacefully back to their teacher... a man who had happened to write some vaguely incendiary opinion some time back.

Even so, some of them are scary people. But I don't know what we can legally do with them. Charge them legally, if there's sufficient evidence which hasn't been lost or invalidated by torture. Otherwise... release them. No, it's far from ideal, but... what else can we legally do? And, when you get down to it... having that place there is doing us a lot more harm than good. The mere fact of its existence has driven a lot of people to join the fight in Iraq... on the other side.

But, like you said... we'll see what they come up with. I'm sure they'll do their legal best.

*applauds obama* that's the kind of thing i like to see.