Posted by
Always To The Right on Saturday, November 15, 2008 2:04:16 PM
Earlier today,
I noted that Barack Obama’s team has started hinting that they will
move back towards John McCain’s position on interrogation techniqiues.
Now supporters of Obama who have criticized the Bush administration’s
position on indefinite detention have begun rethinking that policy as well
“You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone,” said one civil liberties lawyer, David D. Cole, a Georgetown law professor who has been a critic of the Bush administration.
You can’t? That’s all we’ve heard from the close-Gitmo crowd for
the last seven years. Indefinite detention supposedly violates
American values, we’re losing the war if we adapt to the threat against
us, blah blah blah. Certainly Barack Obama never gave any indication
of nuanced thinking along the lines of indefinite detention
during the last two years while campaigning for the presidency. In
fact, Obama made the absolutist case that Cole now belatedly rejects in
June 2007:
“While we’re at it,” he said, “we’re going to close
Guantanamo. And we’re going to restore habeas corpus. … We’re going to
lead by example _ by not just word but by deed. That’s our vision for
the future.
Now that Obama has to live with these decisions and not simply snipe from the sidelines, the game appears to have changed. A month ago,
the NYT’s editorial board scoffed at the Bush administration’s efforts
to keep Gitmo detainees from being released as merely a way to avoid
bad press and not to keep dangerous people from killing Americans.
Suddenly, the New York Times discovers that the American system does
allow for indefinite detention to protect society from dangerous
individuals without full-blown criminal trials — as with the criminally
insane.
So what happens when the incoming Obama administration decides to
continue indefinite detention and back away from Feinstein’s bill on
interrogation techniques? Not only will the MoveOn/Code Pink crowd
utterly revolt, but it will force a re-evaluation of the Bush
administration’s efforts to keep this nation safe from attack — and the
success he had in doing so.