Law & Justice: November 2009 Archives
Since Obama made the promise I've asserted that there was no chance of him actually closing the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility in January, 2010... and I was right! (Along with many other people.)
President Obama directly acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay will not close by the January deadline he set, but he said he hoped to still achieve that goal sometime next year.Obama refused, however, to set a new deadline. ...
Despite the slow trickle of prisoners out of the facility, Obama insisted in the interview that the facility will be shuttered eventually.
"We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantanamo will be closed next year," he said. "I'm not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend on cooperation from Congress."
Unless I'm mistaken, Obama can move those prisoners to domestic federal prisons without permission from Congress. Is there some legal obstacle I'm not aware of?
I think the fact of the matter is that Obama is now beginning to realize that the promises he made during his candidacy were naive. I suppose I could be more cynical and say that he never intended to keep any of these promises at all, but even giving him the benefit of the doubt reveals that he was not even vaguely ready to be President.
The Obama administration is apparently negotiating a secret copyright treaty whose absurd contents have been leaked.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
That's just the start of the badness. The whole thing is completely impossible to enforce, so I'm not particularly worried about it. intellectual property is dead and a piece of paper won't bring it back to life.
(HT: RD.)
