Some quick thoughts before reading anybody else's take. My concern all along has been that what happened during the last eight years be repudiated and that the quasi-authoritarian infrastructure Bush/Cheney put in place be dismantled. Obama's speech was directed toward people with my concerns, and it was a very strong indicator that he shares those concerns. He clearly repudiated the policies of the last eight years, and has said that he is committed to creating a new framework that is constitutional, transparent, and accountable by its reliance on checks and balances among the co-equal branches of government. I applaud that goal. Let the debate begin about whether his plans to achieve that goal will be effective.
He also said that he does not want to re-litigate the last eight years, and neither do I if I can be convinced that future administrations will know that they cannot break the law the way this crew has done the last eight years and get away with it. I'm not interested in a media circus along the lines of the Clinton impeachment, but I'm not sure how future lawbreakers and war criminals will know they will be held accountable if current lawbreakers and criminals are not. This is not a matter of vengeance or political payback; it's about precedent and doing what has to be done to insure this kind of thing never happens again.
He defended the refusal to release the photos and his plans for using the military commissions, and I'm willing to be persuaded that those decisions were justified, but I suspect more is going on here than meets the eye or that was admitted to in this speech. I don't personally care about the photos themselves, but what the real message of his reversing himself on their release means is in light of several other decisions that he has made, which are troubling. So we'll see how that plays out.
But the main takeaway from this speech is that Obama gets it. We're not dealing with an ideological idiot or a paranoid delusional. That's a refreshing change. He's using his bully pulpit not as a propaganda platform but as a place to explain and educate. He's treating us like adults who, whether we agree with him or not, don't have to hold our nose at the raw stench of b.s that we have been exposed to every time an administration official gets in front of a camera.
More later.
***
UPDATE: I'm going to wait for more details on the "pre-emptive detention" idea. It doesn't sound good. But without knowing more about how these particular prisoners differ from those who can be accused and tried, I'll wait before getting all bent out of shape about it. I could be wrong, but it sounds like they are more in the POW category from the Afghan war than in the terrorist category. Terrorists are criminals who can be indicted and tried and imprisoned. POWs you just keep incarcerated until the war is over because you want to prevent them from resuming their hostile behavior in support of their cause.
POW camps are preventive detention camps, are they not? Soldiers are guilty of nothing except having a commitment to defeat their enemies by violent means. POWs are not criminals, and they cannot be charged with crimes. All you can do is keep them off the battle field until hostilities cease. So is the nature of Obama's dilemma that since they cannot be convicted of crimes, they can't be tried, but neither can they be released because they are known to have hostile intent, and as such it would be irresponsible to release them? I could see that as a legitimate problem for which there is no easy solution, if that's in fact what's going on.
I'm willing to cut Obama slack on these issues if it can be clearly shown that he is working to develop a new framework that remains within the constitutional system. A lot of the civil liberties groups say that some of these ideas are worse than Bush's. It could be, but I'm not convinced yet about that.
Leave a Reply