A panel of UN experts and a group of 100 legal and human rights scholars have written to the president appealing to him to pardon the 53-year-old prisoner, the first 9/11 detainee to be tortured at the CIA global network of secret prisons.
“His immediate release and relocation to a third safe country are long overdue,” a group of 12 UN special rapporteurs on arbitrary detention, forced disappearances and other human issues, wrote in their letter to the outgoing president.
“Mr Abu Zubaydah suffers serious health conditions, including from injuries sustained during torture that are allegedly exacerbated by the denial of medical attention. In addition, lawyer-client communication has been seriously impeded,” they said.
The electoral college was entirely a compromise to protect the interest of the slave holding states.
The US has a separate mechanism to prevent run offs. If no one wins the election in the first round, the House of Representatives gets to ignore the election entirely and pick whoever they want as president. In another nod to slave states, this vote is done by state declaration, unlike every other vote the House conducts, where each individual member gets to vote.
If they wanted to have a popular vote for the president, they could have easily done so within the logistical constraints of the time. States still send an electoral delegation to the capital to submit. However, instead of those delegations voting, they simply report their state’s election results. Then, the President of the Senate tallies all the state results and announces the result. If no one wins a majority, we fall back on our current stupid procedure in the House of Representatives.