Human Rights Have Deteriorated Under Obama

Since the 9/11 attacks, the realm of U.S. domestic intelligence has expanded in an unprecedented manner, and the surveillance of society in minute detail spares no aspect of privacy. But under the Obama administration, which is rapidly drifting towards the Republican far right, the violation of civil rights and the Constitution go hand in hand with hunting immigrants on an unprecedented and alarming scale. What is worse is that nothing is being done to oppose states in which Republicans are trying to “cleanse” the electorate of voters who least favor them. A stormy session is looming at the UN Human Rights Council on Wednesday.

In 1986, Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, an update of the 1968 legal provisions that were, even then, intended to limit the government’s access to private communications. However, the Patriot Act, signed by President George W. Bush on Oct. 26, 2001 in the post-9/11 fever, gradually gutted all safeguards designed to limit the administration’s abuse. On May 26, 2011, Barack Obama himself extended the main provisions of the Patriot Act for another four years. In the U.S., there is no longer any form of private communication whatsoever. Calls, emails and text messages are localized, filtered and analyzed from algorithms in every communication in order to establish a score, upon which any potential threat is detected by individuals, businesses or organizations. Social networking sites and others, such as Wikipedia, are analytically monitored to register any person deemed suspect, and the list goes on. The courts can also use an individual’s request for personal data deletion against them. But there are even worse issues.

The Acceptance of Torture

On Dec. 31, 2011, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, authorizing, for the first time in the history of the U.S., indefinite detention without cause or a pre-hearing process by the military. The provisions of this act authorize de facto the abduction of any person, military or civilian, including those outside the sphere of military operations, without justification or the right for that person to be informed and without a time limit. This applies anywhere in the world, as Eric Holder, the New York Attorney General and head of the Justice Department at the White House, has recently reminded us.

However, a few days ago, on Feb. 28, an incident occurred that lit the fuse and sparked a great deal of commotion among civil organizations fighting against the U.S. administration’s abuse. While they had welcomed, the following day, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s examination of the problems caused by the National Defense Authorization Act as a good thing, they were surprised to see Steven Bradbury’s name appear on the list of the four witnesses summoned to the hearing. Steven Bradbury, who was Head of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice under the Bush administration, is the author of the infamous textbooks written for the CIA, in order to teach them the best “acceptable” ways of torturing detainees. In particular, the content of these books shows how to throw people against walls, how many times they can be subjected to water-boarding (6 times, Bradbury estimated) and the right methods to use to slap or cold shower (9˚C) detainees under interrogation.

Probable Closure of Guantanamo… Due to Elections

Of course, Guantanamo has not been closed down to this day despite Obama’s election promise made in 2008. On the tenth anniversary of the opening of this “detention” center (if it is permissible to classify it as such), the New York Times opened up its columns to Lakhdar Boumedienne, a refugee with his family in France who he was separated from for nine hellish years after his abduction in Bosnia, where he was working for the Red Crescent. Boumedienne’s American lawyers had succeeded in bringing his case before the Supreme Court for the first time, and the case Boumedienne vs. Bush, now famous in the U.S., eestablished the right of a Guantanamo prisoner to challenge his detention and ordered his release. However this has not altered in any way the complete opacity with which Guantanamo is run under Obama. However, in a movement similar to an extreme cosmetic procedure designed to prepare him for re-election, Obama’s entourage at the White House have implied that the closure will in fact take place, no doubt this summer, accompanied by explanations of the difficulties that his administration must confront in order to achieve this “success.” The White House is full of such pure cynicism these days.

Segregation is Worsening

The next phase in the uproar against the U.S. government takes place in Switzerland on Wednesday, March 14 before the United Nation Human Rights Committee. Leaders of the legendary NAACP, founded in 1909 and at the forefront of the struggle for the rights of African Americans for over a century, will stand firmly before the assembly denouncing the new laws on the right to vote which are re-establishing an increasingly intolerable segregation in the U.S. The movement’s current leader, a famous lawyer and civil rights advocate, intends to point the finger at the large number of American states that, during the past year alone, have multiplied the number laws allowing numerous voters to be deprived of their right to vote. He is especially aiming at Republicans, who, in their headlong rush to gain the most conservative, right-wing votes, continually create laws in order to “whitewash” the electorate.

The Suppression of Five Million Undesirables

More than 30 states have modified their laws to include, for example, the requirement to possess a card in order to be able to vote, bringing an end to the possibility of registering on voting day, prohibiting all ex-offenders from recovering their right to vote or requesting ever more stringent and elaborate evidence to prove American citizenship. An in-depth study published by the Brennan Center for Justice has shown that these new laws will remove no less than 5 million voters from the electorate, particularly affecting the young, minorities, the disabled and those with the lowest incomes. These groups are often seen as being pro-Democrat when it comes to voting, but these measures are said to be taken to reduce electoral fraud. However, as law professor Justin Levitt points out in the respected Election Law Journal, “There have been allegations of fraud, but they remain limited… The proponents of these laws are basing them upon nine cases since 2000, while 400 million votes have been cast in this country during this period, which brings the alleged rate of fraud through identity theft to 0.000002%.”*

*This quote, while accurately translated, could not be verified.