1.  Closing Guantanamo "the Biggest Sham in American Politics"

Barack Obama's thinly veiled plans to strip rights from detainees by imprisoning them at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan instead of Guantanamo is "the biggest sham in American politics," the prominent liberal columnist Glenn Greenwald writes at Salon. The Department of Justice filed court documents Monday that argue that the detainees at Bagram have zero constitutional rights, not even the right to habeas corpus. The move reveals the duplicity in Obama's decision to close Guantanamo and his praise of the 2008 Supreme Court decision that returned certain constitutional rights to Gitmo prisoners, Greenwald says. "Obama apparently sees 'our core values' as nothing more than an absurd shell game," Greenwald writes, "where the U.S. Government can evade the limits of the Constitution by simply moving the locale of its due-process-free detention system." Closing Guantanamo, "only to re-create its core tyrannies in Bagram ... is worse than useless: it's actively misleading."

Read original story in Salon | Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2009