Category Archives: Video

Obfuscation is the art of saying what it isn’t.

For the so-called “free and the brave,” it is worth noting that ten years and two consecutive flagpin-wearing Presidents later, the government of the United States of America still does not dare call the individuals incarcerated in Cuba what they are.

“Prisoners” – be they civilian or military – have rights. Even a Palin knows that.

So, you call them something else. You create a new label. You call them “detainees,” thereby delaying – for years (definitely through the next election cycle and possibly forever) – the risk of accountability that defines judicial or administrative review. You do this by knowingly and disingenuously creating a false question of law, the disproval of which relies on the conscience of some anonymous defense lawyer, bent on rescuing those who have been summarily and unlawfully stripped of the right to counsel, thereby restoring (if only for a moment) the rule of law.

Who better to perpetuate the relativism that such individuals have received their due, than a shrewd, politically-expedient, Harvard-educated constitutional law professor, who views the Bill of Rights as the Bill of Potentially Plausible Exceptions.

If “this election is about jobs,” what about the job President Peace Prize has done on the remnants of the United States Constitution, by normalizing the nomenclature carved out of whole cloth by the Harvard Business School Cartel from Crawford?

Obama – 2012′s most, least undesirable candidate – could order the execution of the men incarcerated in Cuba, Bernie Sanders would express his concerns, the rest would remain silent, and all would be re-elected. Some political culture!

As noted today by USC Law Professor Mary Dudziak:

“[T]here is a disconnect today between the wars that are ending and the ‘war’ that is used to justify ongoing detention of prisoners…Mr. Obama is trying to have it both ways. Ending major conflicts in two countries helps him deliver on campaign promises. But his expansive definition of war leaves in place the executive power to detain without charges, and to exercise war powers in any region where Al Qaeda has a presence. By asserting, for political purposes, that the nation’s two wars are ending while planning behind the scenes for a longer-term war against Al Qaeda terrorists, the man who pledged to bring America’s wars to an end has instead laid the basis for an endless battle.”

Gordon Hirabayashi passed away last month at 93.

Hirabayashi was convicted for defying the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast during World War II and, four decades later, not only cleared his name but helped prove that the government of the United States had falsified the reasons for the mass incarceration. As Time Magazine writes:

“In the months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a presidential order allowed the U.S. military to force 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast into inland internment camps. Gordon Hirabayashi, who died Jan. 2 at 93, refused to register, was convicted of violating the order and served 90 days in prison. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internment. ‘Our Constitution was reduced to a scrap of paper,’ Hirabayashi said in 1985, after appealing his case a second time. Two years later, a federal court overturned his conviction, and in 1988, the government apologized and paid $1.2 billion in reparations to the affected citizens. Hirabayashi, who became a prominent sociologist, concluded ‘It wasn’t necessarily the Constitution that failed me.  It was the people who were placed in the responsibility of upholding the Constitution.’”

The thing about obfuscation is that eventually, Mr. President, you find yourself down to the last word, on the last page of the Thesaurus, thereby revealing the truth of who the individuals at the Guantanamo Bay Extrajudicial Maximum Security Prison Detention Camp have been since January 11, 2002: prisoners.

Do parents still brag when their kid gets into Harvard.