• bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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    19 days ago

    Obama promised he’d close Guantanamo…

    This seems about the same

    Maybe start saying it outside of Muslim heavy areas and more than two days out and it won’t look so much like pandering

    • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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      18 days ago

      Obama was prevented from closing Gitmo by congress. IIRC, a big part of the problem was how to handle the criminal cases; all of the prisoners (“detainees”) in Gitmo have been tortured, the chain of evidence has multiple breaks in it, and it’s highly debatable that they can be tried in any kind of court. Yet intelligence agencies remain convinced that the remaining prisoners are guilty of terrorism. Congress didn’t want to move any of them to the US, because they didn’t want purported terrorists being held on US soil because ???

      The president isn’t supposed to be able to act unilaterally, but we’ve allowed that Overton window to shift towards heavily authoritarian.

      • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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        18 days ago

        He was prevented by language in bills he signed, and that was only after the Republicans took control in 2010. The failure to close Gitmo was just the same dithering and cautiousness that doomed or degraded many of his other optimistic goals. The whole reason Gitmo is bad is because it can be governed by unilateral executive decisions. It’s one of those situations where he had real power to decide how things worked, but wanted everything to process through a slow bureaucracy rather than taking a more active role.

      • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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        18 days ago

        That might all be true but it only really illustrates my point - this too isn’t deliverable. But lying can buy some votes

        • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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          18 days ago

          It’s not lying under any conventional definition of lying though. Saying something is a lie usually indicates deceptive intent, along with a knowledge–or a reasonable belief–that something you’re saying isn’t accurate. If I believe that the earth is flat, and I say so, am I lying? Or am I just wrong?

          Biden said that he would cancel student loans; he’s done everything in his legal authority, and a few things that weren’t, to try an cancel them out. Do you think that the fact that SCOTUS prevented him from doing so makes it a lie? Or was he unable to follow through due to factors that he couldn’t directly control?

      • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        18 days ago

        Who can blame the president for ruling over a hidden torture camp full of innocent people? It’s out of their hands. That’s just how USA works. \s