Wasting no time

Well, our new President wasted no time in getting down to some of the business he promised during the campaign:  Obama issues directive on detainees, interrogation, Guantanamo.

The national security orders mandate that interrogation techniques in the Army Field Manual be used by all intelligence and law enforcement services; call for a task force to look at closing the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within the year; and order a strategy be developed for handling detainees in the future. The presidential directive also orders a stay in the case of Ali Al-Marri, the only person being held by the military as an enemy combatant on U.S. soil.

(snip)

The executive order says everyone in custody should be questioned under the Army Field Manual, which is intended for honorable combatants, meaning POWs in a military conflict. The rule would prevent trained interrogators at the CIA from using lawful interrogation techniques against terrorists who have been trained to withstand Army Field Manual techniques.

(snip)

According to sources in the law enforcement community, the executive order on interrogation does not declare “enhanced interrogation techniques” to be torture; the order is silent on that.

“This allows for a lot of flexibility, a lot of wiggle room,” said one source.

(snip)

Administration officials indicated they do not want detainees outside of the U.S. to get habeas corpus rights or rights similar to those enjoyed by U.S. citizens. The Obama administration will likely go to Congress for what it wants to accomplish.

This was expected, really.  He’d said he was going to make closing Gitmo a priority.  But that begs the question of what to do with the residents.  That last paragraph above tends to indicate to me that really, not all that much is going to change, and that’s confirmed by the rest of the article (yes, it’s Fox News, go read it anyway, you won’t catch Murdoch cooties if your anti-virus and firewall are up to date).  If they don’t get habeus corpus rights, that sounds like they won’t be tried in US courts.  So what’s different from the military tribunals, and if they’re removed, what replaces them?  They’re still working on that part.  It’s going to take a while to unravel it all.  And it’s made more complicated by the fact that even if Obama wanted Gitmo closed tomorrow and all the detainees released, many of them can’t be.  Nobody will take them back, or they’re very likely to get tortured in their home countries.

As for the interrogation changes…no problems here.  I’m not comfortable with waterboarding or some of the other techniques being used, except in the direst Jack Bauer-esque circumstances.  Again, this was expected.

And finally, for those of us that are pro-life like me and Wife Unit, a taste of what we (and the unborn) can expect from the Obama administration:

Separately, the administration issued a reversal of a ban on federal funding for non-governmental organizations working outside the U.S. that offer abortions or abortion counseling.

Obama signed the executive order on the 36th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion in all 50 states.

Success versus failure

It’s been a common refrain the past couple of months, and it’s intensified now that Barack Obama has moved into his new digs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.  People wondering if those of us of the conservative persuasion “want Obama to succeed.”

It’s a loaded question…sort of the 2009 version of Groucho Marx’s old “when did you stop beating your wife?”  If we say “yes, we want him to succeed,” we’re acquiescing to his left-wing socialist-lite agenda.  If we say “no,” we open ourselves up to the old “how dare you, do you want your country to fail?!?!”

As an answer to this, I found a pretty good summation from an odd source–Ann Coulter.  Yes, that Ann Coulter.  Put down the pitchfork, take a Valerian, and just read this little passage from her latest column; if you can get by the usual Coulteresque barbs, I think she sums it up pretty well:

When will the first reporter ask President Obama to admit that he has made mistakes? Try: Never.

No, that question will disappear for the next four years. It will be replaced by the new question for conservatives on every liberal’s lips these days: Do you want Obama to succeed as president?

Answer: Of course we do. We live here, too.

But merely to ask the question is to imply that the 60 million Americans who did not vote for Obama are being unpatriotic if they do not wholeheartedly endorse his liberal agenda.

I guess it depends on the meaning of “succeed.” If Obama “succeeds” in pushing through big-government, terrorist-appeasing policies, he will not have “succeeded” at being a good president. If we didn’t think conservative principles of small government and strong national defense weren’t better for the country, we wouldn’t be conservatives.

As a conservative, basically, I don’t believe in a lot of what Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress have said they want to do.  I don’t buy their arguments about stimulus packages.  I don’t trust what they want to do on many social issues.  I think his public statements on Iran sound squishy.  I believe in free markets and small government, and looking at the people in the Obama administration, I don’t think we’re going to get either of those.  So in that respect, no, I don’t want him to succeed.  I want him to fail spectacularly like Bill and Hillary failed in 1993-1994 when their pseudo-nationalized health care strategy went down in flames.

I want us as a country to succeed–just like 99% of Americans do.  I don’t want Jimmy Carter II:  Electric Boogaloo.  Whatever happens, I want America and Americans to be prosperous, free, strong, and still the beacon that the rest of the world can look up to–Reagan’s “shining city on the hill.”  To some, that means Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid skipping arm-in-arm down the Yellow Brick Road of hopey-changey rainbows, leading us toward a brighter tomorrow.  To me, it means hanging on as best we can until we can convince the people of this country to wake up out of their deluded dream and get back to the conservative principles that made us the greatest nation in the world.

That’s the beauty of opinions.  Even in a new era of Hope and Change, we all still get to have our own.