I am going to withhold complete judgment about Obama’s “prolonged detention” until all the details are out, but it doesn’t look good and I’m not optimistic it will be.
The one question that Obama has consistently answered in a way that grated me was about the President’s main duty. He always gave the good PC answer that it is to keep the American people safe. It’s not. Nowhere in the oath of office does it ask the President to protect people, it says the Constitution. Unalienable American ideals have primary importance over short term challenges, and that’s the way it should be.
As a brief aside, I know many will claim that this only applies to non-US citizens, so it’s not a constitutional issue. That is unclear at the moment, but even if it does then there is no way that holding someone indefinitely without charges isn’t against treaties we’ve signed — and there is no way that the GWOT meets the international definition of “War” in order for these to be POWs. It’s Kafkaesque that the last Administration tried to claim they weren’t POWs to take protections away from them and the new one looks like it will change them to POW status to take away other protections. I think it’s very clear there there is a Constitutional imperative to obey treaties as if they were domestic laws and the President agrees in principle, so it’s still a breach of upholding the Constitution.
Freedom is not always easy, and it is not always safe. Neither is doing the right thing. Nonetheless, we ought to be willing to try. I wish I saw the slightest reason to believe that we are.
Which while true, I still think plays into the traditional false dichotomy of security/ideals. I think security is a function of trust and justice, and where there is no justice there is no real security. I will go as far to say that the concept of justice is not universal, and China may have a very different idea of what’s just than the US. Heck, even Britain has a very different view of what’s just and a lot of our principles were created in opposition to what our Founding Fathers saw as shortcomings of British justice.
But there is one universal aspect of Justice, and that’s consistency. I don’t think most people appreciate how much inconsistency is tarnishing our image. A lot of foreigners I speak with are more internally in agreement with our open system over China’s closed system, but externally are far more angry (or in disbelief) about our hypocrisies than China’s more formalized brutality. This severely degrades international cooperation and makes us more unsafe. It is also is one of the greatest terrorist recruiting tools because it gives the air of imperialistic smugness. This not only causes some people to radicalize, but more importantly it freezes the populace from working to marginalize and expose the radicals, since they don’t see us as honorable.
We see a similar thing in our own cities. In areas where the police are corrupt and justice is inconsistent, good people opt out from helping root out crime because they have no faith that their efforts will be rewarded. It’s not that they approve of the drugs and violence, but that if they stay quiet and do the right things then both the criminals and police will ignore them, while if they stand up then they often have to fear elements of both sides. In the current environment where there is a chance that you could be “indefinitely detained” for appearing to have sympathies, someone would have to be crazy to come out and tell the Americans that yes they know something, and risk having false accusations levied against them.
I also am far more worried about this attitude about justice making me more unsafe in the long wrong than of the (few) terrorists that may be let go. There may come a time where things get so bad that we have to suspend our ideals — and there is a Constitutional provision for that — but when it’s thousands of times more probable to get killed in a car crash than terrorist attack, I don’t think we’re quite there. On the other hand, a lot of this legal murkiness could be used to very bad affect, and may limit our ability to pull through a period of rising sociopolitical tension intact…especially if there is another domestic terrorist attack. It is a mistake to believe that it couldn’t happen here because of American Exceptionalism.