Restitutor Orbis

MSNBC offers a good start to the day:

The relatively violence-free Iraqi elections mean “substantial” numbers of U.S. troops will be able to return home from Iraq within a year, President Barack Obama told NBC News on Sunday.

“We are in a position to start putting more responsibility on the Iraqis, and that’s good news for not only the troops in the field but also their families, who are carrying an enormous burden,” Obama said in an interview with Matt Lauer, anchor of NBC’s TODAY show.

The article goes on to say that "Obama gave no details, but he said his administration would make its intentions on troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan known in coming days."
This is good news to Americans. Obviously, some of these soldiers will be going to Afghanistan instead, but over all we will still see a significant reduction in the numbers of US soldiers deployed overseas. The Iraq war has been ghastly in terms of lives and dollars and we'll be well out of there. Then there is the loss of Iraq as a recruiting ground for Al Qaeda. Once we are no longer there to stir up tensions, they will find fewer people willing to sign on for their global war. Contrary to Bush rhetoric, we will be safer from terrorism when we're out of Iraq.

On another front, Obama is being accused (rather gently, I think) of having broke his first campaign promise.

Really, every complaint I've heard about Obama so far, since he has taken office, is either petty or an outright lie. And when you consider what Bush and his cronies did to this country, it's really outrageous that anyone is complaining at all. I'm not used to seeing so much information made public. It's night and day compared to the Bush Whitehouse, which hid every damn thing it could lay its hands on.

Apropos of lies, Harpers ran a piece today condemning some tomfoolery, as they call it, in the Sunday Los Angeles Times.

n a breathless piece of reporting in the Sunday Los Angeles Times, we are told that Barack Obama “left intact” a “controversial counter-terrorism tool” called renditions. Moreover, the Times states, quoting unnamed “current and former U.S. intelligence figures,” Obama may actually be planning to expand the program. The report notes the existence of a European Parliament report condemning the practice, but states “the Obama Administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.”

Rendition, also known as "extraordinary rendition" and "irregular rendition" (I do love euphemisms) are, according to the definition on Wikipedia, "terms used to describe the apprehension and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one state to another,[1] and the term "torture by proxy" is used by some critics to describe situations in which the US has transferred suspected terrorists to countries known to employ harsh interrogation techniques that may rise to the level of torture."
In the words of Harpers, "The Los Angeles Times just got punked."

In the course of the last week we’ve seen a steady stream of efforts designed to show that Obama is continuing the counterterrorism programs that he previously labeled as abusive and promised to shut down. These stories are regularly sourced to unnamed current or former CIA officials and have largely run in right-wing media outlets. However, now we see that even the Los Angeles Times can be taken for a ride.

Of course, the Right Wingnuts are having a field day with all this. They're so eager to find anything wrong with Obama that they're clutching at straws, making up lies when one cannot be found. I've haven't seen such an outpouring of hatred and racism since the 60s when I was a little boy. It's frightening to see there is still so much of it.