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Shamefully, Gitmo lives on!........

Obama has, once again, shown his true colors. Big on an announcement.......poor in execution, if any at all. Gitmo is just one example of talk and no action - as this piece on CommonDreams so clearly spells out......

"With the appalling news that Obama's State Department is reassigning Daniel Fried, the envoy supposedly working to close Guantánamo, not replacing him and closing his office - in other words, abandoning all pretext that Gitmo will close any time soon, if ever - critics are blasting what Glenn Greenwald calls "vintage Obama: a pretty symbolic gesture designed to enable Democrats to feel good while retaining the core powers that constituted the injustice in the first place." More including Esquire's Charles Pierce, who nails it.

Obama's cowardice and Congress' obstinance, writes Pierce, "are only part of a systemic failure of faith in the institutions that we feel safe in bragging about to the world, but not in allowing them to work the way they're supposed to work here. The institutions failed because the politicians failed, and the politicians failed because we let them. The prison is still open because, fundamentally, and in the only way open to us, we as a nation expressed a desire that it stay open. Period."

 

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