Obama's Nobel

While accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, Barack Obama confirmed that “adhering to standards, international standards, strengthens those who do and isolates and weakens those who don’t.”

The next year, American drones killed close to 1,200 in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia without any kind of trial. That’s 25 times more than the number of people executed in the same year throughout the whole of the U.S.

Is that what the Nobel committee had in mind when it awarded the prize? A justice system where rights are all one-sided, where government officers can sentence people to death with just a click without being held accountable?

In his speech, Obama referred to the Geneva Convention, stating: “Even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. […] We honor those ideals by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.”

It is he who set the principles upon which we must now judge him. The promised closure of Guantanamo never happened. Mr. Obama has moved onto other business and his country no longer cares.

Even if he puts an end to certain abuses committed on the Cuban island, 166 prisoners still remain there, of which more than half have had the green light for years to leave the camp, though that has made no difference. As for the rest, the military has brought no charge against the majority of them. Guantanamo only exists through the authority of the U.S. It is a legal and judicial black hole where two-thirds of the prisoners are on hunger strike, of which many have to be force fed.

Shaker Aamer is one of those prisoners who should be free today. He has been beaten and tortured for 11 years, though no charges have been brought against him. He has delivered a poignant account of his desperation in a letter which was just published in a British magazine. He quotes a passage from “1984,” the novel by George Orwell, which he has read and reread in captivity: “Power is not a means; it is an end. […] The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

The prison breaks down the prisoner by taking away any possibility of personal choice, writes Aamer. Refusing to return inside when they gave him the order was a sort of personal choice for him. “They would send the FCE [Forcible Cell Extraction] goons to beat me up. Sure, that hurt physically, but it meant I was not just their robot, their slave.” Now, he says, “I have been deprived of everything but my life. So that’s the only decision I have left: to live or to die.”

The U.S. has given itself the power to kill anywhere, as well as the power to torture. During the first three years of Obama’s administration, drone attacks killed between 300 and 500 civilians, of which 60 were children, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has revealed. Some attacks targeted the funerals of people killed in a previous attack — a tactic as inhumane as the Tsarnaev brothers’.

Guantanamo is a mere mockery of justice. With the drone attacks, justice totally disappeared from the equation.

A certain number of the ex-detainees from Guantanamo would have reunited, on various levels, with terrorist networks. Since Obama’s first election, however, the figure is less than 10 percent of ex-detainees. Is that a reason to refuse freedom to all the others?

The danger doesn’t come from within Guantanamo. Every new death creates as many, if not more, enemies. That must make teeth grind in Oslo.