Obama Policy Failures

A person on Tumblr points out that Obama has done the following: 1. Reinstating the Patriot Act after vigorously campaigning against it. 2. Refusing to investigate or prosecute any of the Bush/CIA officials who ordered and committed torture - blocking investigations of war crimes is a violation of international law. 3. Continuing to use torture by proxy and the extrajudicial transfer of “prisoners” to secret CIA black sites. 4. Signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 as it was, which expands Executive authority to include the power to order the U.S. military to arrest and detain U.S. and non-U.S. citizens, and makes it nearly impossible to close GITMO, among other very serious violations. 5. Assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son via drone strikes without due process of law and emphasizing the Executive’s “legal right” to convict individuals without judicial review. 6. Continuing to deny habeus corpus to prisoners outside of Guantanamo. 7. Continuing to employ State Secret’s Privilege and expanding its use. 8. Expanding Homeland Security’s authority to lease under a private contractor, media monitoring and data collection, including personally identifiable information and “items of interest.” 9. Embracing racial profiling as official policy. 10. Continuing warrantess surveillance of activist groups, particularly religious groups (mostly Muslim), anti-racism groups, leftist groups, etc. 11. Criminalizing whistleblowing which does not threaten national security. 12. Expanding the “War on Terror,” which may be the Obama administration’s most egregious violation of civil liberties - the most blatant policies being drone strikes/military targeting of civilians in non-war zones and indefinite detention programs.