Replies

Yep.

In his recent speech on terrorism, Obama spoke about his concern for a “legitimate legal framework, with the kind of meaningful due process and rights for the accused that could stand up on appeal.” Yet in the very same speech, Obama went on to say, “even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States.” Obama, in other words, endorsed the idea of indefinite detention without trial.

The President continues to focus most of his outrage on a technique, waterboarding, that was stopped when he was still a state senator from Illinois. He prides himself on wanting to shut down Guantanamo Bay – even though the Supreme Court has ruled that habeas corpus rights extend to detainees being held there, meaning they are unlikely to receive any more rights if held in America than if they are held in Cuba. Under his leadership, the U.S. is continuing renditions, military commissions, and targeted killings of suspected al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And as Jack Goldsmith has written, the Obama Justice Department has “filed a legal brief arguing that the president can detain indefinitely, without charge or trial, members of al Qaeda, the Taliban, ‘associated forces,’ and those who ‘substantially support’ these groups, no matter where in the world they are captured.” All of this from a man who says he believes “with every fiber of my being that in the long run we also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values” – values which once upon a time he thought were undermined by these practices.

Barack Obama promised to make transparency a hallmark of his presidency – yet his Administration has resolutely refused to declassify documents requested by former Vice President Cheney that speak to the efficacy of enhanced interrogation techniques (Obama, it should be emphasized, was quite willing to release previously classified memoranda on the techniques themselves).

- Wow, that last paragraph really swings.

Obama/legal brief/indefinite detention

http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/documents/memo-re-det-auth.pdf