Warren: Obama’s “Preventive Detention” Plan Goes Beyond Bush Admin Policies

snowdays

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Sat May-23-09 10:00 AM
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Warren: Obama’s “Preventive Detention” Plan Goes Beyond Bush Admin Policies

I recall a news article posted here on du about a few rights attorneys leaving the meeting upset. Amy Goodman show interviewed one just yesterday.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/22/vince_warren

May 22, 2009

Human Rights Attorney Vince Warren: Obama’s “Preventive Detention” Plan Goes Beyond Bush Admin Policies

We get reaction to President Obama and Vice President Dick Cheney’s dueling speeches on torture from Vince Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Warren took part in a secret meeting Wednesday between Obama and several human rights groups. Warren says although he welcomes Obama’s willingness to hear critical views, he’s disappointed in Obama’s new support for preventive detention.

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Guest:

Vince Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

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AMY GOODMAN: Vince Warren joins us now. He’s in San Francisco, though he’s usually based in New York, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He met with President Obama earlier this week, the day before President Obama gave his speech at the National Archive yesterday.

Vince, welcome to Democracy Now! And start off—well, explain why this meeting that you, representing CCR, and other human rights groups had was supposedly originally a secret meeting. And then, what happened? And where did you meet? Tell us all the details.

VINCENT WARREN: Well, I’m not—still not allowed to talk about the substance of the meeting, but it was a meeting in which we met at the—in the Cabinet Room of the West Wing. And there were a number of high-level officials that were there at the meeting.

And what was sort of shocking about it is we were told that we should not at all talk about the meeting, but right promptly afterwards, the press started calling us, because the White House Press Office told everybody about the meeting.

But it was—in my sense, it was something that President Obama wanted to do to be able to talk and to hear our views, the views of some of the human rights organizations like CCR, and to really embrace his critics, which I think is a wonderful hallmark of this administration.

The problem is that he goes out the next day, and he has a speech in which he not only embraces the opposition, meaning George Bush’s policies, but then he comes out with things that even George Bush didn’t come out with, like preventive detention.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Vince, while you’re saying you can’t talk about the substance of the meeting, were you surprised at all, after the meeting you had, about the positions that he took, or did you have at least some indication that this was going to happen beforehand?

VINCENT WARREN: Well, with respect to how I felt about it, the military commissions piece was something that he had come out with earlier than the meeting. And so, the Center had opposed that very vigorously. You know, putting a few due process protections on an old George Bush policy is like rehabbing a house on a toxic waste site. You know, it really didn’t make a whole lot of difference. And you can’t make the military commissions better................