Oh, Obama!

If you didn’t know it, or if you didn’t believe it when they told you, now you have plain proof that it is true.

In the White House, the rank and the uniform of the captain can be flaunted, but the owners of the shipping company decide the course of the ship.

Hence, a president can say on television that a jail for “enemy combatants” instituted at an illegal naval base in Guantanamo never should have existed – or remember that, during his campaign, he promised to eliminate it, but the certainty is that the great imperial interests decided to the contrary. Period.

Suddenly, even the Democrats in Congress are opposed to the president’s project and deny him the billions of dollars necessary to close the penitentiary and move the prisoners to other incarceration establishments inside the United States, or even to send them out of the country.

Despite this, the leader has fought not to divulge new cases of torture in American prisons, related to the so-called war on terror, and exempted the interrogators of the CIA from responsibility for their excesses. Even the Supreme Court of Justice concurred with the plan of the Oval Office occupant not to conduct trials of high ex-officials who ordered such abhorrent practices.

Nor was it good that he might approve the continuation of special military tribunals created by George W. Bush to judge “enemy combatants.”

So the electoral promise of the White House chief seems at least doomed for ostracism, in the midst of his first days at the helm of the nation.

The fear spread by Republicans about the presence of Guantanamo prisoners on American soil and the everlasting doubtful attitude of Democrats seem to have been the precipitating combination for this presidential failure – which mars the nation’s leader in the eyes of human rights advocates, who at one time, had listened hopefully to his words of opposition to the illegal practices of his predecessor.

But certainly, within circles of power, extraneous points of ethics are unimportant issues. When all is said and done, the president is there, because they approved him. If he does not fit the established mold, he goes or they take him out.