Hacker News Reader

Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

You know, I've always thought that the Barack "Hussein" Obama political attacks that allege that he's not a citizen, he's a muslim, and he's part of some conspiracy to bring down the USA are particularly crazy insomuch as we have the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. whose job is to investigate people to keep our country safe.

I've always thought that if the allegations were somehow true, that someone at one of those groups would have leaked something that would keep Obama from being president or from continuing as president. Yet, that never happened despite the fact that he obviously would have been investigated by plenty of people in those spy organizations.

So, the fact that Obama was spied on should not come as a surprise. It would surprise me if people in power weren't spied on.

View on HN

Maybe it's not surprising, but it's bad. It puts the non-elected agency officials in a position of power over the people who are supposed to be their bosses and make sure they aren't going out of line. It basically nullifies a lot of checks and balances if the agency officials want to blackmail or threaten to blackmail elected officials.

Not to mention that the state spying on its citizens without probable cause and judicial review is unconstitutional, illegal and anti-democratic.

I don't think the Constitution really made it into this century with us. Sad really. The footnotes and exceptions on the Bill of Rights due to executive orders is probably longer than the whole Constitution.

Or they found something and use it against him to keep him in check and get what they want.

This system is all about control and preserve power.

So if spying on people in power is good, who spies on the people in charge of the NSA?

It kind of makes you rethink the whole Petraeus ordeal. Everyone commented on how the director of the CIA couldn't keep his own communications secret. Maybe he pissed off the NSA somehow? Not sure how closely the organizations work together.

Not saying the NSA couldn't have been involved, but I thought it was the FBI that got Petraeus's google account.

The NSA often passes information to the FBI

China.

Their employees.

The Watchmen.

But wait, who watches..

It is up to us.

Maybe. But someone who would have been disqualified from the presidency might prove useful to those who hold the information. It would explain the 180 on Gitmo, ferinstance.

What 180 on Gitmo? Obama's stance on it has never waivered, congress blocked his attempts to close it.

He's still the commander in chief and he could still order the end to the detainment program even if he can't cause the base to be closed. And yet he didn't.

Sounds like you're criticizing him for not solving a problem that you fail to even understand. No, he cannot fix this by himself, it requires the cooperation of congress as well as either other countries or other prisons willing to take those who can't be released and he's gotten no cooperation in attempting to close it. The "commander in chief" is not as powerful as you seem to think he is.

Without funds to move them, what would he do with the former prisoners? Just let them sleep and starve on the streets of Guantanamo?

It supposedly cost the Clinton administration some $42 million for a 12 day trip to Africa (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/india-on-200-m...). That same article suggests that today it might cost double or triple the $3.6mm/day for Obama to make a trip. Lets go easy and suggest it's only $5mm per day.

Obama regularly makes trips to various parts of the world for at least a few days. Let's say that for the rest of his presidency he spends ten days less on the road. That's $50mm saved.

Wikipedia says there are around 50 permanently detained persons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp#D...

That leaves around $1mm per detainee to wind down gitmo. I know it's the government so everything is expensive (especially when the military is concerned) but I don't remember commercial flights costing anywhere near $1mm each. Let's say we fly them first class, that's $20k per person, tops. Add in $50k of cash we just hand to them in a bribe to not hate us forever (foolish I know, but what they hell!) a grand for the travel agent, a couple grand for new clothes and such, and that leaves over $900k for lawyering.

Seems fairly doable to me.

He could make a deal with their home countries and the government of Cuba, and send them home. Why does he need extra money to free them?

Because nothing in life is free.

Even if their home countries were to agree to foot the bill for airfare back to their home countries, how are you going to get them to agree to that? You'd need someone to negotiate details. That someone costs money.

Detainees will need to be processed by customs before being released. Custom's officers don't work for free. Do detainees even have their passports? Where are replacement passports going to come from, and who's going to pay for that?

Whatever your views on Guantanamo Bay, to think that it's not going to cost anything is simply naive. That's not to say that sufficiently motivated home countries couldn't pay for it, but it's going to cost someone somewhere.

If the government can bail out American banks, it can send a few detainees back home on its own nickel.

Except if the home countries won't take them. Or if they will execute them if given the chance.

Nothing in politics (or life, even) is simple, so you might as well start by assuming it's hard and conclude it's simple after you've eliminated all the things that could make it hard, rather than the other way around.

Yes, it can, but it won't. Congress controls the purse, and Congress said no way.

Congress not only said no way, they said don't even bother spending money to even think about closing the detainee camp.

Maybe he could do the same thing he did to fund NATO attack on Libya, reroute Pentagon discretionary funds. I don't know if that's feasible, but I find it funny that he can find ways to do a double backflip to fund things he really really wants to get funded but then just throws it back in our faces on Guantanamo.

I have a vague recollection that Congress actually explicitly prohibited spending money on Guantanamo closure, rather than just neglecting to allocate it. I could be way off, but that would be the difference if so.

You are correct:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/dec/8/congress-deal...

Maybe ask for private-sector volunteers to help evacuate them?

Yup. There would be no problem raising _reasonable_ costs to relocate them.

To where? No one wants them, not home countries and not stateside prisons. This was well publicized at the time, it's not as simple as a little money to move them. Politics isn't that simple.

I'm not saying any of this is good, I'm saying it's not surprising.

If you really want to think like a conspiracy theorist, then they would LET him win so that they had a completely controllable puppet in office.

Regarding the idea that someone would have leaked something, WorldNetDaily seems to get a lot of leaks from the CIA. This raises several questions about any of these stories starting with how fake is it, what kind of person would leak to WND, and are they trying to plant a story or suppress one?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com