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May 24, 2009
The cartoon refers to former Michigan Governor John Engler recently suggesting last week that the more than 200 prisoners currently housed at the soon-to-be-closed Guantánamo Bay, Cuba prison be relocated to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the home of the Big 3 auto companies. Michigan must be in a bad way, economically, with Chrysler and General Motors in, or facing, bankruptcy.
Mike Thompson
Meanwhile, Obama's fine rhetoric about the US Constitution, American values, transparency, oversight, the state secrets privilege, and the rule of law sits uncomfortably with his policy of a system of "preventive detention" without a trial, to keep locked up indefinitely people who, in his words, "cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. That is at odds with the US system of the rule of law that is based on charges or proof of any crime having been committed.
The gap between rhetoric and reality is explicitly covered by "The War on Terror"---meaning the US is at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates in Afghanistan-Pakistan -- and the need for a War President to keep Americans safe and secure. Either there's due process or there isn't. If the USist locking people up because of what they say and not because of what they’ve done, then its a very different democracy to the one lauded by Obama.
Jack Goldsmith, a former Bush OLC lawyer, in The Cheney Fallacy at the New Republic observes:
Former Vice President Cheney says that President Obama's reversal of Bush-era terrorism policies endangers American security. The Obama administration, he charges, has "moved to take down a lot of those policies we put in place that kept the nation safe for nearly eight years from a follow-on terrorist attack like 9/11." Many people think Cheney is scare-mongering and owes President Obama his support or at least his silence. But there is a different problem with Cheney's criticisms: his premise that the Obama administration has reversed Bush-era policies is largely wrong. The truth is closer to the opposite: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric. This does not mean that the Obama changes are unimportant. Packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric, it turns out, are vitally important to the legitimacy of terrorism policies....
This interpretation increasingly looks to be an accurate account of the Obama administration's terrorism policies with Obama's embrace of Bush's policies interpreted as governing from the center.
This is the argument that Glenn Greenward is making. It is a persuasive one. It does seem as if most of the prisoners believed to be dangerous but who couldn't be prosecuted were detained from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.
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Republicans shriek, "evil terrorists in the heartland!" and Democrats roll over.