“No part of President Obama’s agenda has been as thoroughly repudiated as the one regarding terrorist detainees,” the Wall Street Journal has editorialized. That verdict seems reasonable given Mr. Obama’s unfulfilled pledge to close Guantanamo Bay, the administration’s reversal of the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan, and the near acquittal of Ahmed Ghailani in a civilian trial earlier this year.
But the editorial also reports this: White House aides say they are working up an executive order to allow the U.S. to hold enemy combatants indefinitely. “One reason Mr. Obama has been forced to allow indefinite detention is because he seems unwilling to allow more military commission trials at Guantanamo,” according to the Journal.
That is an extraordinary turn of events. Mr. Obama ran for president by lacerating his predecessor for acting in ways that were, he said, lawless and unconstitutional, in violation of basic human rights, and an affront to international law, and in ways that discredited and disgraced America’s name around the globe. And now we learn that Mr. Upholder of International Law himself, Barack Obama, is going to continue his policy of holding enemy combatants indefinitely.
At least the Bush policy of military tribunals, which was based on wartime precedent and previous Supreme Court rulings, allowed suspects a lawyer and a trial by jury. When in 2006 the Supreme Court struck down military tribunals (in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld), the Bush administration and Congress effectively rewrote the law, passing the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The administration was trying to find the right balance between indefinite detention on the one hand and not providing suspected terrorists with the full array of constitutional rights an American citizen possesses on the other. (The Supreme Court’s 2008 terribly misguided ruling in Boumediene v. Bush, which for the first time in our history conferred a constitutional right to habeas corpus to alien enemies detained abroad by our military force in an ongoing war, made striking this balance far more complicated.)
President Obama, because he appears unwilling to allow military commission trials at Guantanamo, seems to have settled on indefinite detention. This is a significant moral step backward.
Under the Obama regime, suspected terrorists have no rights and no recourse. It also means that terrorists who deserve to be convicted and punished for their malevolent acts will avoid that judgment. In the withering words of the Journal editorial, “Nazis Hermann Goering and Adolf Eichmann were sentenced to hang for their crimes, but KSM and Ramzi bin al Shibh get three squares a day and the hope that someday they might be released.”
Even allowing for the fact that governing is a good deal more difficult than issuing campaign promises, the Obama administration’s incompetence is striking, its course of action indefensible. The president has once again made a hash of things.
This Ron M fellow is as dumb as a post.
“that his integrity would be my safety net”
– LMAO !!!!! Expecting integrity from a Chicago politician is like expecting integrity from a thief.For some one who switched off the AVS system while collecting money online for his campaign, integrity is just another loser quality.
Am I in crazy land? Obama rarely does what he says he will.
Obama has never served in an executive capacity, so on what basis does Ron M base his confidence in him? Why on earth would he “spend hours working on the Obama campaign” other than the proverbial hope and change fluff?
As for the seat fillers in the Obama administration, what is it about Rahm Emmanuel that inspires hope for an non ideological approach? Rahm is a partisan sharp shooter schooled and benefited from the Chicago Way.
The experience of Deval Patrick is instructive here. Gov. Patrick learned that having no practical executive experience prior to taking office (like Obama) is a very troubling road. Even in a Democrat controlled Mass Congress, Patrick ran into ideological battles within his own party. The party bosses had their own set of priorities, and they were often inconsistent with Patrick.
Obama hasn’t even taken office yet. He will eventually become a figure head letting others supplement his lack of executive experience or will attempt to fill the bill of goods he promised during his highly ideological campaign. To believe that Ron M worked on behalf of the Obama campaign and didn’t realize the highly ideological platform that Obama ran on is inconceivable.
He’s going back on a great deal of what he said in the election. Most of that is a good thing, but still….
Did Obama not say something about public funding and then went the other way? Were you still with his campaign, before and after the switch?
“Even though he is not a conservative”, Mr Ron M feels that Mr Obama “will give us a period where no ideology will dominate”.
This is exactly what will happen: as our future president has disclosed yesterday, it will be his vision that will be the guiding force behind all and any executive decision.
But, isn’t this exactly the “method of governance” that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the former USSR had so brilliantly demonstrated for so many decades? You do not remember that glorious historic experience? You do not remember that it was the Soviet CP who, having not less shamelessly and unhesitatingly proclaimed itself to be the “intellect, honor and consciousness or our era”, also had “the audacity” of ferociously implementing its “vision” into the generations of the people whose ancestors had once also succumbed to a temptation of “change and hope”?
Had you have a memory of this recent historic experience (as the hundreds of thousands of those who – like myself – fled from that bastion of “freedom and hope” that the USSR and the enslaved satellite countries kept shamelessly to proclaim themselves to be), I doubt that you would spent hours working for the BO campaign.
#1: Or, perhaps, the post is as dumb as the perpetrator.
To all, and especially to Mr. Talonov, thanks for taking the time to try to stamp out this perncious (and insidious) nonsense.
Pedant,
What, exactly, has Obama “gone back on?”
INaqua, here are some things he has gone back on: His announced loyalty to Rev. Wright, his partnership with Bill Ayers, his willingness to talk with McCain about campaign funding, his insistence that we withdraw troops from Iraq in X months (the number changed several times), his insistence that babies born alive after an abortion not receive medical care. Most recent–his belief that the recent farm bill including subsidies–he voted for it as a senator, and now denounces it as wasteful spending.
Of course, he isn’t in office yet, so give him time. . . .
Margo,
I believe that Pedant was trying to draw a distinction between what Obama said during the campaign and what he has said post election.
I don’t see it, although the gaffe about the farm bill was amusing. I am afraid that Obama remains the committed left ideologue that Joshua Muravchik’s excellent article describes.
To be sure, necessity will temper what he can do, like not being able to raise individual tax rates during a recession, but the leftist impulse seems intact.
Obama will say whatever is expedient for as long as it is expedient. His bad plans may go onto the back burner, but that doesn’t mean he has abandoned hope of implementing them at the opportune moment.
“But if you listen to him carefully and accept him at his word, he does seem to do most things just the way he says he will.”
I guess I haven’t been listening carefully.
All it takes is 60 million of these to elect a president, and by G*d, we’ve got ‘em.