"Just Like Bush"

A couple of days ago I made a comment about the absurdity of people on the left saying President Obama was just like Bush. What it boiled to to for me was this.

Now call me crazy but I thought the whole reason Bush/Cheney set up GITMO was to keep the detainees away from any kind of Judicial oversight. And there are of course questions about the level of Congressional oversight Bush provided. So again this is approach is pretty much the OPPOSITE of what Bush was doing.

Now don’t get me wrong, many people may not be convinced of President Obama’s words. And lets say they might have good reason. Still if you go by his words his approach is to embrace oversight which was the exact opposite of the Bush approach. So I don’t see how even people who disagree with President Obama’s approach are now saying this is “just like Bush”. Simply put, it isn’t.

Today Jim Hoagland makes, essentially, the same argument

George W. Bush's refusal to work with Congress and other nations to update national and international legal norms to fight al-Qaeda immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, now haunts the nation and his successor. Bush's stubborn rejection of sharing authority, and responsibility, left us to fight a 21st-century enemy with mid-20th-century instruments of justice.

Today the failure to grasp the need for change created by the globalization of crime and punishment has migrated to the opposite end of the spectrum -- to the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics on the left who absurdly accuse President Obama of adopting the Bush agenda on national security as his own. They are now the ones who are stuck in time.

Speaking somewhat caustically at the National Archives on Thursday, Obama implicitly urged these critics not to rush past the obvious.

Unlike Bush, this president insists on oversight of his actions by the courts and Congress. And he wants to collaborate with Congress on detention policies that "should not be the decision of any one man." Obama hinted that among the modifications he would like to see is a form of preventive detention for suspected terrorists who cannot be convicted in U.S. courts but who "remain at war with the United States." He views them as prisoners of war -- but a different kind of war.

Now this criticism is particularly frustrating to me. I worry that by using that kind of hyperbole we end up creating a situation where people in the middle who aren’t political junkies end up really and truly believing that there is no difference between Obama and Bush, no difference between Democrats and Republicans and thats a dangerous situation when you are talking about future elections. If people in the middle get it in their heads that no matter who is in office or what party they are from, the same things are going to happen, then there is a good likelyhood that they won’t go to the polls and vote to keep Democrats in or vote to knock Republicans out. And the truth is while many civil libertarians and human rights activists are dissappointed in Obama, I don’t really believe any of them truly wish we had a President McCain in office instead. Yet in a way they may be helping to push people in the middle to that belief. Thats what is frustrating to me. Not that they are making the argument, but HOW they are making it.

(h/t DougJ)

71

I think one thing has been overlooked that President Obama said in his speech on thursday because of the major pushback on "preventative detention". Allow me to excerpt:

The third category of detainees includes those who we have been ordered released by the courts. Let me repeat what I said earlier: this has absolutely nothing to do with my decision to close Guantanamo. It has to do with the rule of law. The courts have found that there is no legitimate reason to hold twenty-one of the people currently held at Guantanamo. Twenty of these findings took place before I came into office. The United States is a nation of laws, and we must abide by these rulings.

The fourth category of cases involves detainees who we have determined can be transferred safely to another country. So far, our review team has approved fifty detainees for transfer. And my Administration is in ongoing discussions with a number of other countries about the transfer of detainees to their soil for detention and rehabilitation.

Now I take nothing away from the people blowing up about his references to possibly instituting "preventative detention" for the first time in our Country's history. However how is there not an outcry in the liberal and progressive blogosphere to get these 71 detainees out of GITMO ASAP? We don't know yet how long many of these detainees have been there but you would imagine it has been at the least several years. But even though we know that they are "innocent" in some way shape or form, justice has not come to them. I know its hard to imagine sitting in a cell probably being mistreated for years on end without ever being charged with a crime, but imagine all of those things describe your experience AND you have been found to not be guilty and or not be a danger to society yet you STILL sit in the same cell day after day. I hope that we pull ourselves away from the "preventative detention" subject long enough to demand that these detainees get to see the light of day. Last thought on this, those 71 prisoners make up almost 30% of the population of GITMO right now and the process of reviewing cases isn't even over yet. Not only does that expose the level of fail coming out of the Bush Adminstration, but it also exposes the lie that the Republicans have repeated week after week that "only the worst of the worst" are left at GITMO. Something needs to give, and soon!