No More ‘Enemy Combatants’ — But Is Obama Merely Rebranding Bush’s ‘War on Terror’?
AlterNet >> 17th March 2009
Words matter, as Obama said on the campaign trail. But when it comes to his detention and counterterrorism policies, his actions are speaking louder.
The most pervasive early criticism of Barack Obama, aside from his inexperience, was that he was all rhetoric, no substance, an allegation he eloquently dismissed.
“Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” Obama declared on the campaign trail last February. ” ‘I have a dream.’ Just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words?” (That particular turn of phrase led to cries of plagiarism, but that’s another story.)
Arriving in the Oval Office, Obama immediately announced a number of executive orders whose language carried enormous promise. He pledged to close Guantanamo. He suspended the military commissions process. He reiterated that the United States does not torture.
At the same time, he moved away from the discredited terminology of the Bush administration. In January, the Associated Press reported that, with a sole exception, Obama had not uttered the term “war on terror” since assuming the presidency. “Obama has made it clear in his first days in office that he is … making what is at least a symbolic shift away from the previous administration’s often more combative tone,” it reported.
Then, last week, the Obama administration announced that it was getting rid of the label Bush used to brand terrorism suspects — good news, it would seem, if it weren’t for the context: “The Obama administration said Friday that it would abandon the Bush administration’s term ‘enemy combatant’ as it argues in court for the continued detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in a move that seemed intended to symbolically separate the new administration from Bush detention policies,” reported William Glaberson of the New York Times.