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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: Minority Report a l’Obama If Obama had stated that preventive detention would not apply to anyone apprehended going forward, he would have offered a decisive - not to mention, for people like me, more acceptable - policy directive. The fact that he did not make this distinction cannot help but make one wonder whether the remedies created to address the unfortunate and unacceptable baggage of the Bush years may carry over into his own era. If that is the case, we might well ask ourselves, what other good intentions might choose to hide behind a legacy that begs for closure? via The major missing piece in Obama’s new Gitmo policy. I had an interesting discussion with a close friend of mine yesterday, a former journalist who quit the business years ago to get a real job. We were talking about our early impressions of Obama, and while I kept harping on the bailouts and Obama’s bizarre decision to hand the Treasury over to Goldman, Sachs, my friend kept coming back to Gitmo. He said he could understand how Obama, a young president with no background in economics continually blasted for his lack of experience, could be bullied into handing over his economic policy to worn-out Wall Street gorgons like Larry Summers and Bob Rubin. Politically, you can see how that could happen. It’s not as if, my friend pointed out, Obama could just hand over the Treasury to Paul Krugman and Simon Johnson and expect the Democratic Party honchos to go for it without complaint. The Rubin/Summers axis was always going to be the default policy setting for a Democratic president, and it would require spending a lot of political capital to switch to a new paradigm. Of course there’s the other notion, which is that these pro-Evremonde economic policies are actually an accurate reflection of who Obama is. Everywhere I go I keep hearing people say, “How come Obama is letting X happen or Y happen, how come he’s letting his underlings do Z? It seems so unlike him!” It reminds me of the way people view leaders in Russia. Going back centuries, Russian peasants wrote impassioned letters to the Tsar, sure he was completely unaware that his Grand Dukes were all thieves and his okhranka agents were rapists and torturers. Now that Obama’s on the scene a lot of Americans are demonstrating a similar public desire to believe in the good king. Obama seems so decent and intelligent, it’s hard to imagine that his act is just a big sales job, that he’s really just a smooth-talking shill for a bunch of Wall Street bankers and Pentagon generals. So people tend to scramble for the exculpatory explanation: he’s being tricked, he’s unaware, his hands are tied, and so on. You can sort of see that, maybe, with the economic policies. If you were bent on clinging to the good-king fantasy, you could hold your nose and imagine that Summers/Rubin cast a spell on poor Barack. But this Gitmo thing is different. It’s not like Barack Obama doesn’t know what habeas corpus is. The guy was a freaking constitutional law professor (or “senior lecturer,” if that controversy over his academic title still rankles you). And yet Obama seems to be determined to preserve the whole concept of preventive detention, which is every bit as jarring and upsetting as the preemptive invasion concept Bush introduced. In fact this whole Gitmo episode should serve as a reminder that the upper crust of the current Democratic leadership has not, for the most part, even publicly renounced preemption. While John Edwards a couple of years ago said that preemption was “wrong on the merits, wrong on the morals, wrong for America,” both Hillary and Obama have carefully avoided taking any public stance against it. True, back during the original war vote, Hillary did say that her “yea” vote should not be taken as a “vote for any new doctrine of preemption” — except that that’s exactly what that vote was, an endorsement of the preemption policy outlined in Bush’s notorious “National Security Strategy of the United States” paper. Moreover Hillary’s top foreign policy staffer at the time, Lee Feinstein, wrote soon after that “the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough.” When Kerry ran for president he specifically endorsed pre-emption, only parsing it with one of his classic waffle jobs, saying that any decision for a pre-emptive strike would have to pass some kind of unspecified “global test.” And Obama has never really gone near the topic: he did talk about the U.S. having the right to respond to “imminent” threats, but he’d always seemed to mean a genuinely imminent threat, not the “They might have some kind of unnamed weapon with or without a delivery system in thirteen or fourteen years, we better invade now” standard that Bush went by. Getting back to preventive detention: it’s important to remember that what’s going on at Gitmo has to be construed as a specific, public endorsement of preventive detention. For we all know that there has always been preventive detention of one sort or another in this country, ever since America became a world power: suspected spies whisked off in the middle of the night, political dissidents in foreign countries busted on trumped-up charges and quietly flown to someplace like Syria or the Phillipines for the car-battery-to-the-balls treatment. Hell, even here on American territory, we have a legal framework through FISA to quietly do all sorts of things to suspected miscreants. Where there is a will, and a loathed enough suspect, there has always been a way in America, no matter what the actual law is or has been. At the same time we’ve tried never to allow ourselves to openly legalize these practices. When we have, like during the era of the Palmer raids for instance, it’s always been a black time our history. Keeping preventive detention and extrajudicial punishment illegal puts a brake on their use: it forces the government that would use these tactics to enter a legal gray area, to risk scandal and exposure, and to take all the responsibility for crossing the line. When a thing is illegal and has to be hidden from the general public, one assumes that governments will try to exhaust every conceivable alternative before resorting to its use, or better yet will avoid using it at all. But making it legal not only transforms preventive detention into a part of all of us, a conscious expression of who we are, it suddenly makes it an easy option for governments to choose. If they don’t have to hide it, and just throwing velvet bags over suspects’ heads and carting them to Gitmo (or whatever replaces Gitmo) remains easier than crafting a case and building evidence and making a real arrest, the government will use the former technique more and more, until eventually it becomes routine. And next thing you know it’ll become a basic fact of our society, this idea that our government snatches people off the streets and dumps them in faraway jails without trials. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t get what Obama is doing here. He could have closed Gitmo, created some sort of tribunal system for the current inmates, and then stood up on a pedestal and announced that the United States is no longer a country that detains people without due process. And as soon as he finished that speech he could have gone on doing what presidents have done for decades before Bush, finding the soft spots in international criminal/military law to basically arrest and detain anyone whom they considered a genuinely dangerous suspect. But what he’s done instead of that, seemingly, is specifically endorse preventive detention. He apparently is anxious for people to know that that is in fact what he stands for. Which to me is just… weird. I don’t get it. What does he gain from making this move? I know what we lose, but what does he gain? Votes in Alabama three years from now? Is that really what this is all about?
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#1. To: Ada (#0)
To people who lack discernment maybe.
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. |
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