(Watch Part One here.)
Part Two: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts
Category Archives: democracy
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace — Part Three
Liberation technology or full-spectrum dominance?
To hear it from the New York Times (and Hillary Clinton), the US government’s latest efforts to support overseas dissidents are nothing more nor less than the noble expression of the American love of freedom. Perhaps that’s why this article makes no reference to Wikileaks (or Haystack) but does in part rely on information derived from classified diplomatic cables “obtained” by the paper. That presumably means classified information revealed by the administration to journalists who can be relied on to incorporate such information into a government-approved narrative.
The new initiatives have found a champion in Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose department is spearheading the American effort. “We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail response to a query on the topic. “There is a historic opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports,” she said. “So we’re focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world.”
This freedom-narrative gets a bit farcical, however, when we are told that an “independent” cellphone network is being constructed in Afghanistan using towers built inside US military bases. It’s only by paragraph 37 that we are reminded, “The United States is widely understood to use cellphone networks in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries for intelligence gathering.” Indeed.
Which begs a question — a question that the New York Times reporters do not venture to ask: Do the administration’s efforts to provide global revolutionaries with better tools have more to do with enhancing the US government’s ability to monitor these rapidly evolving networks, than with advancing democracy?
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.
The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.
Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.
The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.
In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.
The quaint and obsolete Nuremberg principles
Glenn Greenwald writes:
Benjamin Ferencz is a 92-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, American combat soldier during World War II, and a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, where he prosecuted numerous Nazi war criminals, including some responsible for the deaths of upward of 100,000 innocent people. He gave a fascinating (and shockingly articulate) 13-minute interview yesterday to the CBC in Canada about the bin Laden killing, the Nuremberg principles, and the U.S. role in the world. Without endorsing everything he said, I hope as many people as possible will listen to it.
All of Ferencz’s answers are thought-provoking — including his discussion of how the Nuremberg Principles apply to bin Laden — but there’s one answer he gave which I particularly want to highlight; it was in response to this question: “so what should we have learned from Nuremberg that we still haven’t learned”? His answer:
I’m afraid most of the lessons of Nuremberg have passed, unfortunately. The world has accepted them, but the U.S. seems reluctant to do so. The principal lesson we learned from Nuremberg is that a war of aggression — that means, a war in violation of international law, in violation of the UN charter, and not in self-defense — is the supreme international crime, because all the other crimes happen in war. And every leader who is responsible for planning and perpetrating that crime should be held to account in a court of law, and the law applies equally to everyone.
These lessons were hailed throughout the world — I hailed them, I was involved in them — and it saddens me to no end when Americans are asked: why don’t you support the Nuremberg principles on aggression? And the response is: Nuremberg? That was then, this is now. Forget it.
To be candid, I’ve been tempted several times to simply stop writing about the bin Laden killing, because passions are so intense and viewpoints so entrenched, more so than any other issue I’ve written about. There’s a strong desire to believe that the U.S. — for the first time in a long time — did something unquestionably noble and just, and anything which even calls that narrative into question provokes little more than hostility and resentment. Nonetheless, the bin Laden killing is going to shape how many people view many issues for quite some time, and there are still some issues very worth examining.
One bothersome aspect about the reaction to this event is the notion that bin Laden is some sort of singular evil, someone so beyond the pale of what is acceptable that no decent person would question what happened here: he killed civilians on American soil and the normal debates just don’t apply to him. Thus, anyone who even questions whether this was the right thing to do, as President Obama put it, “needs to have their head examined” (presumably that includes Benjamin Ferencz). In other words, so uniquely evil is bin Laden that unquestioningly affirming the rightness of this action is not just a matter of politics and morality but mental health. Thus, despite the lingering questions about what happened, it’s time, announced John Kerry, to “shut up and move on.” I know Kerry is speaking for a lot of people: let’s all agree this was Good and stop examining it. Tempting as that might be — and it is absolutely far easier to adhere to that demand than defy it — there is real harm from leaving some of these questions unexamined.
Eli Pariser: Beware online filter bubbles
Koch brother buys professors at public university to spread free market propaganda — is public education the Kochs’ next front?
Sarah Seltzer writes:
Usually, when billionaires or millionaires give a large sum of money to a university, even a private one, they can specify where that gift will go — which department or function, facilities, new hires, dorms, or what have you. And it’s no secret that some of those big donations may lead to a little bit of wink-and-nudge affirmative action when it comes time for the little billionaires Jr. to apply to college.
But what these monied donors cannot do, what remains taboo in the academic world, is leverage that kind of gift to influence who gets hired and fired by the faculty and what they teach–until now, thanks to Charles G. Koch.
A recent op-ed in a Florida newspaper brought to light a shady deal by billionaire Koch, one of the Koch brothers, who donated a hefty million-dollar plus pledge to Florida State University, with some very big and ethically compromised strings attached.
According to the St. Petersburg Times‘ Kris Hundley’s thorough report:
A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University’s economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting “political economy and free enterprise.”
Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they’ve funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom.
Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it’s not happy with the faculty’s choice or if the hires don’t meet “objectives” set by Koch during annual evaluations.
Again, to be clear, such conditional donations have been rejected by universities in the past, even when they were not political in nature.
Wall Street tames Washington
Jim Hightower writes:
They came, they saw, they conquered. This line pretty well sums up a little-reported but important story about the new tea partiers in the U.S. House of Representatives.
No sooner had they arrived than the corporate lobbying corps came to visit, saw what these supposed rebels were made of and quickly conquered them without a fight. The forces of big business needed only to lay out some campaign cash — and quicker than you can say, “Business as usual,” the budding lawmakers snatched up the money and immediately began carrying the lobbyists’ corporate agenda.
Check out the financial services subcommittee, which handles legislation affecting Wall Street bankers. Five tea partiers got coveted slots on this panel, and all five were suddenly showered with big donations from such financial lobbying interests as Goldman Sachs. Now, all five are sponsoring bills to undo parts of the recent reforms to reign in Wall Street excesses.
Steve Stivers of Ohio, for example, hauled in nearly $100,000 in just his first two months in office — 85 percent of it from the special interests his committee oversees. He insists that the cash he took from Goldman Sachs and others has nothing to do with his subsequent support of bills that Goldman is lobbying so strongly for. Stivers claims that his sole legislative focus is on jobs for Ohio’s 15th district.
Really? Among the deform-the-reform bills that Steve is carrying is one to let Wall Street giants avoid disclosing the difference in what the CEO is paid and what average employees make. Another would exempt billionaire private equity hucksters from regulation. I can see that these bills are great job extenders for the barons of Wall Street, but how do either of them create a single job in his district?
The courage of ordinary people standing up to Gaddafi
Chris McGreal, who is covering the war in Libya for The Guardian and who as the paper’s South Africa correspondent witnessed the end of the apartheid era, says: “Few revolutions have been more inspiring. After years of reporting uprisings and conflicts driven by ideology, factional interests or warlords soaked in blood — from El Salvador to Somalia, Congo and Liberia – Libya’s uprising seems to me more akin to South Africa’s liberation from apartheid.”
He writes:
The Middle East. A man with a car fashioned into a bomb. He disguises his intent by joining a funeral cortege passing the chosen target. At the last minute the man swings the vehicle away, puts his foot down and detonates the propane canisters packed into the car.
It all sounds horrifyingly familiar. Mahdi Ziu was a suicide bomber in a region too often defined by people blowing up themselves and others. But, as with so much in Libya, the manner of Ziu’s death defies the assumptions made about the uprisings in the Arab world by twitchy American politicians and generals who see Islamic extremism and al-Qaeda lurking in the shadows. Ziu’s attack was an act of pure selflessness, not terror, and it may have saved Libya’s revolution.
In the first days of the popular uprising he crashed his car into the gates of the Katiba, a much-feared military barracks in Benghazi, where Muammar Gaddafi’s forces were making a last stand in a hostile city. At that time the revolutionaries had few weapons, mostly stones and “fish bombs” — TNT explosive with a fuse that is more usually dropped in the sea off Benghazi to catch fish. The soldiers had heavy machine guns and the revolutionaries, often daring young men letting loose their anger at the regime for the first time, were dying in their dozens as they tried to storm the Katiba.
Then Ziu arrived, blew the main gates off the barracks and sent the soldiers scurrying to seek shelter inside. Within hours the Katiba had fallen.
Ziu was not classic suicide-bomber material. He was a podgy, balding 48-year-old executive with the state oil company, married with daughters at home. There was no martyrdom video of the kind favoured by Hamas. He did not even tell his family his plan, although they had seen a change in him over the three days since the revolution began.
“He said everyone should fight for the revolution: ‘We need Jihad,'” says Ziu’s 20-year-old daughter, Zuhur, clearly torn between pride at her father’s martyrdom and his loss. “He wasn’t an extreme man. He didn’t like politics. But he was ready to do something. We didn’t know it would be that.”
Ziu may have been unusual as a suicide bomber, but he was representative of a revolution driven by dentists and accountants, lorry drivers and academics, the better off and the very poor, the devout and secular. Men such as Abdullah Fasi, an engineering student who had just graduated and was in a hurry to get out of a country he regarded as devoid of all hope until he found himself outside the Katiba stoning Gaddafi’s soldiers. And Shams Din Fadelala, a gardener in the city’s public parks who supported the Libyan leader up to the day government soldiers started killing people on the streets of Benghazi. And Mohammed Darrat, who spent 18 years in Gaddafi’s prisons and every moment out of them believing that one day the people would rise up. [Continue reading…]
Big brothers: thought control at Koch
In The Nation, Mark Ames and Mike Elk report:
On the eve of the November midterm elections, Koch Industries sent an urgent letter to most of its 50,000 employees advising them on whom to vote for and warning them about the dire consequences to their families, their jobs and their country should they choose to vote otherwise.
The Nation obtained the Koch Industries election packet for Washington State—which included a cover letter from its president and COO, David Robertson; a list of Koch-endorsed state and federal candidates; and an issue of the company newsletter, Discovery, full of alarmist right-wing propaganda.
Legal experts interviewed for this story called the blatant corporate politicking highly unusual, although no longer skirting the edge of legality, thanks to last year’s Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which granted free speech rights to corporations.
“Before Citizens United, federal election law allowed a company like Koch Industries to talk to officers and shareholders about whom to vote for, but not to talk with employees about whom to vote for,” explains Paul M. Secunda, associate professor of law at Marquette University. But according to Secunda, who recently wrote in The Yale Law Journal Online about the effects of Citizens United on political coercion in the workplace, the decision knocked down those regulations. “Now, companies like Koch Industries are free to send out newsletters persuading their employees how to vote. They can even intimidate their employees into voting for their candidates.” Secunda adds, “It’s a very troubling situation.”
The Kochs were major supporters of the Citizens United case; they were also chief sponsors of the Tea Party and major backers of the anti-“Obamacare” campaign. Through their network of libertarian think tanks and policy institutes, they have been major drivers of unionbusting campaigns in Wisconsin, Michigan and elsewhere.
“This sort of election propaganda seems like a new development,” says UCLA law professor Katherine Stone, who specializes in labor law and who reviewed the Koch Industries election packet for The Nation. “Until Citizens United, this sort of political propaganda was probably not permitted. But after the Citizens United decision, I can imagine it’ll be a lot more common, with restrictions on corporations now lifted.”
Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%
Joseph E. Stiglitz writes:
It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.
Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.
You thought the Koch brothers were bad? Turns out they’re even worse than you thought
Adele M. Stan writes:
You knew they were big. You knew they were evil. From the union-busting actions of their minions in Wisconsin and Ohio to their war on health-care reform, to their assault on the environment and their attacks on the science of climatology, Charles and David Koch have earned their place as the focus of progressives’ scrutiny in the age of the Tea Party — the destructive and regressive movement they bankroll. But a new report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund shows that, as bad as you thought the Kochs were, they’re actually worse. And their reach into virtually every aspect of political, economic and physical life on the planet is probably greater than you thought possible.
In The Koch Brothers: What You Need to Know About the Financiers of the Radical Right, author Tony Carrk, policy director of the CAP Action War Room, lays out a case that is breathtaking in its scope, showing how the Koch brothers are using their billions with the aim of reshaping the global economic system in such a way as to enrich themselves and their heirs at the expense of most other inhabitants of the planet.
It’s the plutocracy, stupid
M J Rosenberg writes:
I received an email from a Capitol Hill aide who thinks my criticism of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, is overly simplistic. He doesn’t dispute the fact that AIPAC has a disproportionate influence on our Middle East foreign policy. He argues, however, that AIPAC is no different than other powerful special interest lobbies.
I think his whole email is worth a read:
I work on Capitol Hill and I disagree with you about AIPAC. You make it seem as if AIPAC is the only lobby that gets what it wants through threats of cutting off campaign contributions, as if only AIPAC dictates legislation through intimidation.
WRONG! My colleague who handles the Israel issue confirms your analysis. But it’s no different on the domestic issues I cover. The issues of jobs, health, taxes, the environment, regulation to protect kids’ health, oil drilling, workers’ safety, education, guns…they are all dictated by lobbies just as overbearing as AIPAC. All we do up here is cater to rich, selfish people and their special interests. And their interest is cutting all social programs so we can keep cutting taxes to make them even richer.
True, most of them don’t brag as much as AIPAC but that doesn’t make them any better or worse, just smarter (AIPAC gets more negative attention because of its swagger). Big deal. The public is getting screwed eight ways to Sunday by special interests and AIPAC is just one of them. Don’t mislead your readers into thinking it is unique. Not only is it not unique, it’s insignificant in the sense that it’s not the guys robbing the poor to put money in their own pockets. They own US Middle East policy. But the real fat cats own everything else.
I agree with everything my correspondent writes. The American democracy we learned about in school no longer exists. It’s been sold to the highest bidders. And the highest bidder is not, as the Tea Partiers like to say, “We The People.”
Cornel West and the fight against injustice
Inside Story – True democracy for Egypt?
Why the Egyptian revolution is more significant than the American revolution
Sam Haselby writes:
How does the revolution in Egypt compare with the American Revolution? There is no comparison. It is more impressive and more important. So far.
In the United States, the American Revolution is sacred history. As a result, Americans tend to associate its slogans and symbols with the whole concept of revolution. If the peculiarities of this habit help prevent Americans from recognising the significance of events in Egypt, both countries will pay a price.
For the leaders of the American Revolution, colonial North America had been a place of social mobility and prosperity. In a European context, the American patriots belonged to the minor gentry class.
No European society allowed members of the minor gentry the prominent roles in political life that the British colonies had offered Americans. When they rebelled against Great Britain, over taxes and in the name of freedom, they were the freest and least taxed people in the western world.
As to the much-noted hypocrisy of slaveholders rebelling in the name of freedom, the English writer Samuel Johnson gave the line for the ages, when he asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
In contrast, the people of Egypt for decades lived under a cruel military dictatorship. The Mubarak regime almost destroyed a once vibrant Egyptian middle class. The Mubarak family, according to recent reports, accumulated as much as $70bn worth of assets, held mostly in foreign banks and real estate. In contrast to the free and prosperous American revolutionaries, Egyptian resistance broke out from an impoverished and oppressed people.
For just an extra $20 billion from US taxpayers, Israel can offer “stability” in defense against the Arab democratic threat
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Israel will need to boost military spending and may seek an additional $20 billion in U.S. security assistance to help it manage potential threats stemming from popular upheavals in the Arab world, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Monday.
Still, he said Israel shouldn’t fear changes in the region or the risk of offering bold concessions in a renewed bid to achieve peace with the Palestinians.
“It’s a historic earthquake…a movement in the right direction, quite inspired,” Mr. Barak said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, surveying the youthful revolts in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and the Gulf. “It’s a movement of the Arab societies toward modernity.”
In the short term, however, Israel worries that adversaries Iran and Syria “might be the last to feel the heat” of regional unrest, he said, and that public pressure could push new leaders in Egypt away from that country’s 1979 peace treaty with the Jewish state.
“The issue of qualitative military aid for Israel becomes more essential for us, and I believe also more essential for you,” said Mr. Barak, a former prime minister. “It might be wise to invest another $20 billion to upgrade the security of Israel for the next generation or so….A strong, responsible Israel can become a stabilizer in such a turbulent region.”
Egypt’s syndicalist future?
Nathan Brown writes:
What Egyptians have termed their “revolution” is now beginning to look like one. Seen from afar, it appears that the military rulers have struggled successfully to hold most state institutions intact and slow the pace of change, but the Egyptian political order is still being fundamentally rewritten. The core constitutional demands of a diverse opposition-for freer and more democratic politics-are not being silenced or diverted.
Yet if Egyptians will find their political system freer, it may not be in a fully liberal sense. There is already far greater pluralism and greater freedom of both expression and organization. Such trends are likely to entrench themselves more deeply. But from a purely institutional perspective, something else seems to be happening as well: a variety of strong actors are escaping from presidential control and finding their own voices. Egypt was always a state of strong institutions–when seen from the bottom up. From the top down, all those institutions have been dominated by a strong presidency. Labor unions, professional associations, parts of the judiciary, the parliament, large parts of the press, the military, the security apparatus, the ruling party, and even legal opposition parties have all been silenced, brought to heel, or remolded to serve presidential will. With the presidency vacant and Egypt now ruled by a military committee that governs by Facebook posts and short communiqués, all those institutions are now struggling to act on their own. And leaders within those bodies too associated with the old ways are coming under intense pressure and many may be tossed out. In many of Egypt’s institutions, mini-revolutions seem to be brewing against leaders who had been co-opted into cravenly serving the president.
The emerging outcome of Egypt’s revolution thus might be as much syndicalist as liberal. “Syndicalism” is a dimly remembered term at best, referring to a way of organizing society in strong and autonomous (generally class-based) constituencies; it was a leftist ideology that served as an alternative to communism and sometimes merged with anarchism. But Egypt’s syndicalism-as it is emerging-is neither fully leftist nor entirely class based. It is anything but anarchic. And its driving force is not a nineteenth century European ideology but a twenty-first century sense that those who have exercised political and economic power have done so only in their own personal interests; this is seen as a time to make them responsive instead to the needs of various groups in society.
Obama is the change Bush could believe in
Thanks to Antony Loewenstein for the headline.
Politico reports:
The Obama administration, which famously pledged to be the most transparent in American history, is pursuing an unexpectedly aggressive legal offensive against federal workers who leak secret information to expose wrongdoing, highlight national security threats or pursue a personal agenda.
In just over two years since President Barack Obama took office, prosecutors have filed criminal charges in five separate cases involving unauthorized distribution of classified national security information to the media. And the government is now mulling what would be the most high-profile case of them all – prosecuting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
That’s a sharp break from recent history, when the U.S. government brought such cases on three occasions in roughly 40 years.
The government insists it’s only pursuing individuals who act with reckless disregard for national security, and that it has an obligation to protect the nation’s most sensitive secrets from being revealed. Anyone seeking to expose malfeasance has ample opportunity to do so through proper channels, government lawyers say.
But legal experts and good-government advocates say the hard-line approach to leaks has a chilling effect on whistleblowers, who fear harsh legal reprisals if they dare to speak up.
Not only that, these advocates say, it runs counter to Obama’s pledges of openness by making it a crime to shine a light on the inner workings of government – especially when there are measures that could protect the nation’s interests without hauling journalists into court and government officials off to jail.
The New York Times reports:
President Obama reversed his two-year-old order halting new military charges against detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Monday, permitting a resumption of military trials under rules he said provide adequate rights for defendants but implicitly admitting the failure for now of his pledge to close the prison camp.
Mr. Obama said in a statement he remains committed to closing Guantánamo some day and to charging some terrorist suspects in civilian criminal courts, as occurred throughout the administration of George W. Bush administration and has continued under Mr. Obama. But Congress has blocked the transfer of prisoners from Guantánamo to the United States for trial, undermining at least for the time being the administration’s plan to hold civilian trials for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, and other accused terrorists.
An executive order signed by the president on Monday sets out new rules requiring a review of all detainees’ status within a year and every three years after that to determine whether they remain a threat to Americans. The order also requires compliance with the Geneva Conventions and the international treaty that bans torture and inhumane treatment.
Civil liberties advocates, who had been expecting the moves since they were forecast in an article in The New York Times in January, expressed deeply mixed feelings about the new policies. On the positive side, some said that the executive order may permit detainees imprisoned for years without trial to have their cases heard and potentially settled by plea agreement. In addition, the executive order avoids enshrining a system of indefinite detention in law and is restricted to the 172 prisoners currently held at Guantánamo.
But Elisa Massimino, president of Human Rights First, said that despite those factors, the continuation of detention at Guantánamo and military commissions more than two years after Mr. Obama took office is a disappointment.
“This is a step down the road toward institutionalizing a preventive detention regime,” Ms. Massimino said. “People in the Mideast are looking to establish new rules for their own societies, and this sends a mixed message at best.”