White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel stops Bushs last-minute regulations. Emanuel signs a memorandum ordering all agencies and departments to stop all pending regulations until a legal and policy review can be conducted by the Obama administration.
The new White House website unveiled by President Barack Obama's team Tuesday includes a shot at former President Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina.
Under the "agenda" portion of the site regarding Katrina, it reads: "President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur."
"President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina," the statement on the site continues. "Citing the Bush Administration's ‘unconscionable ineptitude' in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims."
The site also points out that Obama "visited thousands of Hurricane survivors in the Houston Convention Center and later took three more trips to the region" and worked with the Congressional Black Caucus to help rebuild in the aftermath of Katrina.
Nilibanwa na maandalizi ya inauguration... 😀
Sasa nimerudi kama part of JF O team, sipotei sana from now on....
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Jan. 20 -- In one of its first actions, the Obama administration instructed military prosecutors late Tuesday to seek a 120-day suspension of legal proceedings involving detainees at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- a clear break with the approach of the outgoing Bush administration.
The instruction came in a motion filed with a military court in the case of five defendants accused of organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The motion called for "a continuance of the proceedings" until May 20 so that "the newly inaugurated president and his administration [can] review the military commissions process, generally, and the cases currently pending before military commissions, specifically."
The same motion was filed in another case scheduled to resume Wednesday, involving a Canadian detainee, and will be filed in all other pending matters.
Such a request may not be automatically granted by military judges, and not all defense attorneys may agree to such a suspension. But the move is a first step toward closing a detention facility and system of military trials that became a worldwide symbol of the Bush administration's war on terrorism and its unyielding attitude toward foreign and domestic critics.
The legal maneuver appears designed to provide the Obama administration time to refashion the prosecution system and potentially treat detainees as criminal defendants in federal court or have them face war-crimes charges in military courts-martial. It is also possible that the administration could re-form and relocate the military commissions before resuming trials.
The motion prompted a clear sense of disappointment among some of the military officials here who had tried to make a success of the system, despite charges that the military tribunals were a legal netherworld. Military prosecutors and other commission officials here were told not to speak to the news media, according to a Pentagon official.
"It's over; I don't want to say any more," said one official involved in the process.
But the action was cheered by military and civilian defense attorneys.
"We welcome our new commander-in-chief and this first step towards restoring the rule of law," said Army Maj. Jon Jackson, a military defense attorney for Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, one of the Sept. 11 defendants.
"This is a good step in the right direction, although we still think that the unconditional withdrawal of all charges and shutting down this tainted system is warranted," said Jamil Dakwar, director of the human rights program at the American Civil Liberties Union. "The president's order leaves open the option of this discredited system remaining in existence."
Pretrial hearings for the 9/11 defendants were scheduled to resume Wednesday. Another case, involving Omar Khadr, a Canadian accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan when he was 15, was also about to begin.
The Bush administration opened a cluster of chain-link cages called Camp X-Ray on this naval base seven years ago, and on Jan. 11, 2002, a military flight delivered the first 20 suspected terrorists and Taliban fighters. In the ensuing years, nearly 800 prisoners would arrive.
But the military commissions system devised by the administration to try the detainees ran into numerous setbacks. The Supreme Court ruled that, contrary to administration claims, detainees at Guantanamo were entitled to challenge their detentions and that the naval base was not beyond the reach of federal law.
Eventually more than 550 detainees were released; only three were ever put on trial and convicted.
Global opinion turned dramatically against U.S. use of the facility. Organizations such as Amnesty International called it a "gulag." And both Obama and his opponent for the presidency, Sen. John McCain, said they wanted it closed -- as, finally, did former president George W. Bush.
But former vice president Richard B. Cheney said late last year that Guantanamo should be kept open until "the end of the war on terror" -- a time, he noted, that "nobody can specify."
President Obama has acknowledged in recent interviews that shutting the facility is likely to be prolonged and complex. And the administration now faces a number of potentially daunting challenges to following through on the president's campaign promise. Obama is expected to sign an executive order soon that will lay out in detail his plan to empty the facility
The O team also didn't wait too long to ensure that President Obama sets the tone for the his administration. As one of the few political candidates who made very good use of the internet, Obama has unveiled new website that includes a number of issues but this criticism of Bush is noteworthy:
The new White House website unveiled by President Barack Obamas team Tuesday includes a shot at former President Bushs response to Hurricane Katrina.
Under the agenda portion of the site regarding Katrina, it reads: President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.
President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina, the statement on the site continues. Citing the Bush Administrations unconscionable ineptitude in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims.
The site also points out that Obama visited thousands of Hurricane survivors in the Houston Convention Center and later took three more trips to the region and worked with the Congressional Black Caucus to help rebuild in the aftermath of Katrina.
Obama admin gives waiver for Lynn
Friday, January 23, 2009 5:24 PM by Mark Murray
Filed Under: White House, Obama WH Transition
From NBC's Ken Strickland
The Obama administration has given an ethics waiver for Bill Lynn, a Defense Department nominee who is a former lobbyist.
In a written statement released moments ago, Armed Service Committee Chairman Carl Levin said the administration "has removed an obstacle to the confirmation of Bill Lynn to be Deputy Secretary of Defense by waiving the provisions of President Obama's Executive Order on Ethics Commitments that would have precluded Mr. Lynn's service."
Yesterday, Levin said he would have to delay Lynn's confirmation process because as a former defense lobbyist for Raytheon, Lynn's service would conflict with the Administration's new ethics rules. Those rules prohibit former lobbyist from working in the area they once lobbied, unless a waiver is given.
Even with the waiver, Levin said today the committee "will continue to insist that Mr. Lynn comply with a strict set of ethics rules... including the requirement to recuse himself, for a period of one year, from any decisions involving his prior employer, unless specifically authorized to participate by an appropriate ethics official."
The move immediately drew criticism from Sen. John McCain, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee. "I am disappointed in President Obama's decision to waive the 'revolving door' provisions of the executive order for Mr. Bill Lynn," he said in a written statement. "While I applaud the President's action to implement new, more stringent ethical rules, I had hoped he would not find it necessary to waive them so soon."
McCain also said he would need to ask Lynn "to clarify for the record what matters and decisions will require his recusal" before he decided to support his confirmation.