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Monday, Jun 21, 2010 11:22 AM UTC2010-06-21T11:22:00Zl, M j, Y g:i A T The Obama administration and its pundit-defenders

As the civil liberties abuses pile up, establishment Democrats demand that progressive criticism of Obama cease

By Glenn Greenwald

President Obama and (clockwise from upper left) Ezra Klein, Jonathan Alter, Lanny Davis and Jonathan Chait

Topics:Washington, D.C.

(updated below - Update II – Update III [reply to Chait])

Even in the context of America’s wretched civil liberties abuses over the last decade, the case of Mohamed Hassan Odaini stands out. He was 17 years old in 2001 when his father sent him from Yemen to study at a religious university in Raiwand, Pakistan, and when a campus house in which he was staying there was raided by Pakistani authorities in early 2002, he was turned over to the U.S. and shipped to Guantanamo, where he has remained without charges for the last eight years (he’s now 26). A federal court this month granted his habeas petition for release, finding that the evidence ”overwhelmingly supports Odaini’s contention that he is unlawfully detained.” Worse, the court described the multiple times over the years — beginning in 2002 and occurring as recently as 2009 — when the U.S. Government itself concluded that Odaini was guilty of nothing, was mistakenly detained, and should be released (see here for the court’s description of that history).

Despite that, the Obama administration has refused to release him for the past 16 months, and fought vehemently in this habeas proceeding to keep him imprisoned. As the court put it, the Obama DOJ argued “vehemently” that there was evidence that Odaini was part of Al Qaeda. In fact, the Obama administration knew this was false. This Washington Post article this weekend quotes an ”administration official” as saying: ”The bottom line is: We don’t have anything on this kid.” But after Obama decreed in January that no Yemeni detainees would be released — even completely innocent ones, and even though the Yemeni government wants their innocent prisoners returned – Obama DOJ lawyers basically lied to the court by claiming there was substantial evidence to prove that Odaini was part of Al Qaeda even though they know that is false. In other words, the Obama administration is knowingly imprisoning a completely innocent human being who has been kept in a cage in an island prison, thousands of miles from his home, for the last 8 years, since he’s 18 years old, despite having done absolutely nothing wrong.

It really is hard to imagine many things worse, more criminal, than imprisoning people for years whom you know are innocent, while fighting in court to keep them imprisoned. But that’s exactly what the Obama administration is doing. Every day that Odiani is kept in a cage is a serious crime. Just imagine what has happened to his life by being shipped off to Guantanamo for 8 years, starting in 2002 during that camp’s darkest days, with absolutely no justification. As the court put it:

I honestly don’t understand how any Obama DOJ lawyer or official could involve themselves with anything like this. If you’re willing to work to keep a person whom you know is innocent imprisoned, what aren’t you willing to do? What decent human being wouldn’t be repulsed by this? I don’t care how many times someone chants “Pragmatism” or “The Long Game” or whatever other all-purpose justifying mantras have been marketed to venerate the current President; these are repellent acts that have no justification.

Of course, none of this is new for the Obama administration; it’s consistent with their course of conduct from the start. I highlight this today only because there is an obvious, concerted effort by a slew of Democratic Beltway pundits over the last month or so to attack the so-called “Left” for daring to express displeasure with the Obama administration, and to demonize those objections as unserious, shrill, irrational, purist and all the other clichés long used by this same cadre of party apparatchiks for the same purpose. This is all coming from a homogeneous clique of Democratic Party pundits who have strikingly similar demographics and background, most of whom supported the Iraq War, and who spend a great deal of time talking to one another in public and private and reinforcing their talking point platitudes, and have spent years railing against the Left. Just look at who is purporting to lecture liberals on how to promote progressive goals.

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