President Barack Obama had this to say, also, in that…speech:
We unequivocally banned torture, affirmed our commitment to civilian courts, worked to align our policies with the rule of law, and expanded our consultations with Congress.
Let’s see how he did that:
He banned interrogation techniques that produced results, after torture had already been banned for years.
He’s been pushing for five years to try terrorists and other illegal combatants as common criminals and to try Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in New York courts or to release them outright.
He interrupts interrogations in progress in order to read the prisoner his Miranda “rights.”
He had his Attorney General drop a voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panthers and their white voter victims after the particular NBP miscreants had pled out.
He’s done nothing material about his DoJ’s program of running guns to Mexican drug cartels.
He’s had his HHS Secretary “encourage” fund “contributions” to his federal health insurance exchange from the insurance companies she regulates.
He’s doing nothing material about his Treasury Department’s IRS (which he falsely claims is an “Independent Agency”) program of targeting Americans and groups of Americans of whom he disapproves for the special treatments of tax audits, invasion of their donor lists, deliberate and prolonged delays on finalizing their tax exempt status applications.
He’s actively covering up his and his State and Defense failures in the run-up to the Benghazi terrorist attack in which an American ambassador and three men attached to him were murdered, their failures during the attack, and their failures in the aftermath.
He’s doing nothing material about his DoJ’s assault on our free press via secret seizure of phone records, emails, and obtaining search warrants by falsely accusing individual journalists of criminal activity.
He’s played a couple of rounds of gold with the House leadership and invited them to dinner, and then he’s castigated them for not kowtowing to him and giving him everything he wants.
That’s a powerful alignment.