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:: Issues > Obama | ||||||||||||
![]() The Obama administration’s double standards
Lawrence Davidson views a prime case of US double standards: the failure of the Obama administration to prosecute prominent US Republicans for lending support to an Iranian group that is on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, while simultaneously prosecuting Americans with connections to Palestinian and Colombian resistance organizations.
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Saturday, January 8,2011 17:09 | ||||||||||||
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Here is an interesting piece of news from the Washington Post (dated 23 December 2010).
As described by the Washington Post, it must have been quite a spectacle. There were "former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, former White House Homeland Security Adviser Frances F. Townsend and former Attorney-General Michael Mukasey (let’s call them the Paris Four) publicly demanding that "Obama … take the controversial Mujaheddin-e Khalq opposition group off the US list of foreign terrorist organizations and incorporate it into efforts to overturn the mullah-led government in Tehran". In other words, these four stalwart defenders of the homeland from terrorism were lending material support to a designated terrorist organization through speech that was coordinated to enhance the cause of that group. As Giuliani put it, "The United States should not just be on your [the MEK’s] side. It should be enthusiastically on your side. You want the same things we want." On the face of it, such speech makes the Paris Four self-proclaimed felons. David Cole, one of the best civil rights lawyers in the US, explains the situation in a New York Times op-ed (dated 2 January 2011):
As Cole points out, this law is a serious infringement of the First Amendment rights of US citizens and it was recently challenged in the courts in the case "Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project". It was the Obama administration that successfully upheld the law before the Supreme Court. Subsequently, the FBI has been issuing subpoenas and raiding homes of people in Chicago and Minneapolis who allegedly have connections with Palestinian and Colombian resistance organizations.
Maybe it has always been this way. Clarence Darrow once observed that "the law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business." And that certainly can be taken as the motto of our last administration. George W. Bush and his cronies violated domestic and international law with such regularity that we came to expect it of them. Their behaviour readily matched their personalities and they sought out others just as corrupt to be their subalterns. So we were disgusted, but not particularly shocked. It is somehow worse when such behaviour comes out of the Obama administration. We did not expect it of him (after all, the man is a constitutional lawyer) and such behaviour does not seem to fit with the person we thought he was. But, alas, we may have been wrong. Source: Redress Information & Analysis (http://www.redress.cc). Material published on Redress may be republished with full attribution to Redress Information & Analysis (http://www.redress.cc) |
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tags: Obama / Iran / White House / Tehran / Bush / US Policy / / Lawrence Davidson / Obama Administration / Bush Administration / US Government / Lawrence Davidson / White House / Washington Post / US Policy /
Posted in Obama , Iran , Democracy |
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