Salon.com - Obama proposed a new system of Indefinite Preventive Detention yesterday in his National Security speech that is stunning in its illegality.
Obama is proposing we keep people locked up not for the crimes they have committed and we prove they committed in a court of law, but on the chance that they might commit crimes in the future. There will be no trial, for no crime exists to be charged. There is only the nebulous threat of “future acts” to justify depriving people of their liberty potentially indefinitely.
Is this justice?
Imagine you are picked up off the street for daring to write something provocative in your blog. Perhaps you vaguely threaten to relocate to Afghanistan and work with a humanitarian aid organization there. Unkown to you the humanitarian aid organization might possibly be associated with the Afghan resistence. Perhaps the head of the aid organization is the third cousin twice removed of a suspected warlord causing our march for empire trouble on the border. Based on that alone you could be kept in a cell forever. After all, letting you out of that cell might mean you really would do what you threatened and we can’t have that.
Don’t think it couldn’t happen.
Read here the story of a red crescent worker arrested for perhaps having the phone number of a possibly terror related individual, Take a Walk in Lakhdar Boumediene’s Shoes. Our government kidnapped Boumediene, tortured him, kept him in a cell for seven years and seven months, had him sign an agreement not to sue and then deported him last week.
Many men have been swept up off the streets these past eight years not for what they did or said or who they knew and associated with, but based on anonymous and often false accusations from third parties who in return collected bounties equal to several year’s wages. Many thousands still languish in our cells around the world with no hope of a hearing or legitimate trial and now Obama is proposing a system that will allow uncharged detainees to be held without trial FOREVER and he wants to make this system “legal.” Maybe the DOJ will start producing memos to back Obama up.
Indefinite detention with no trial is unconstitutional and morally abhorrent. Bush would never have been allowed to get away with it and indeed the American Civil Liberties Union and Center for Constitutional Rights have fought de facto indefinite detention for years now.
So the question now is will Obama worship, unthinking partisanship, and irrational fear rule the day and allow this grotesque new proposal to come (officially and quasi-legally) into existence?
You who think Obama cannot do wrong (hope! change!) despite the growing number of civilian corpses and refugees in Af/Pak due to his policies need to start paying more attention to what he is really doing and saying.
On this issue Obama is proving that the new boss may in fact be worse than the old boss.
If you don’t believe Obama really plans to lock people up potentially forever for “future crimes,” Rachel Maddow lays it all out coherently and eloquently in the Youtube clip above which includes footage of Obama proposing and justifying this new system of indefinite preventive detention.
The ACLU doesn’t miss a trick and their Executive Director, Anthony D. Romero, has already responded:
“We welcome President Obama’s stated commitment to the Constitution, the rule of law and the unequivocal rejection of torture. But unlike the president, we believe that continuing with the failed military commissions and creating a new system of indefinite detention without charge is inconsistent with the values that he expressed so eloquently at the National Archives today.”
From the NY Times article on Obama’s speech: “It is very troubling that he (Obama) is intent on codifying in legislation the Bush policies of indefinite detention without charge,” Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said after the speech. “That simply flies in the face of established American legal principle.”
Other sources - Obama Is Said to Consider Preventive Detention Plan (NY Times), Obama Endorses Indefinite Detention Without Trial for Some (Washington Post), CCR: Obama Embraces Indefinite Detention, Not Meaningfully Different From Bush (TPM), Obama in Bush Clothing (Washington Post), Terror suspects face indefinite detention after Guantánamo (Financial Times), Facts and myths about Obama’s preventive detention proposal (Glenn Greenwald of Salon), Is Obama creating “an American Gulag?” (Joan Walsh of Salon).
Full text of Obama’s speech on National Security (21 May 2009, NY Times)
FOR ODETTEROULETTE and those who wish to do something, here is the number to the White House comment line:
Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
FAX: 202-456-2461
TTY/TDD
Comments: 202-456-6213
Visitors Office: 202-456-2121
You can email him an ear eye full at this contact site.
There are protests planned for the 28th of May and OSer Jill McLaughlin has the informations and links in her blog, Breaking News: U.S. Citizens Hate Torture, Acting to Stop It.
Transcript of the YouTube clip (I typed this out by ear and it is rough - so no bitching) Maddow sums up the horror in the last paragraph:
Maddow: We will begin tonight with a tale of two speeches, both from the same man, both from President Obama. One speech that could have been billed as a ballad to the contsitution, a proclamation of American values, a repudiation of the lawless behavior of the last presidention administration. And another speech annoucing a radical new claim of presidential power that is not afforded by the constitution and has never been attempted in American history even by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Remarkably President Obama today made both of those speeches simultaneously.
Standing inside the national Archives in front of the actual original constitution, Predident Obama delivered a blistering critique of theBush administration in which he called their actions and their legacy literally a mess.
Clips from Obama’s speech yesterday: Our government made a series of hasty decisions. … Poorly planned haphazard approach. …too often we set those principles aside as luxories we could not afford. Our government made decisions based on fear, rather than foresight. The decisions that were made over the past eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable.
Maddow: “…An ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable.” Ouch! Then moments later he announced his own, his own ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism.
President Obama today proposed something new. Something called prolonged detention. Doesn’t sound that bad, right? Prolonged detention.
Did you ever see the movie Minority Report? It was based on a Philip K Dick short story. Came out in 2002 and starred Tom Cruise. Remember? He played a police officer in something called the Department of Pre-Crime. Pre-Crime is where peole are arrested and incarceratated to prevent crime they have not yet committed.
(Clip from Minority Report where Tom Cruise character arrests a man for a murder that is to be committed in the future. Man cries, but I haven’t done anything.)
Maddow: You didn’t do anything, but you’re gonna. Future murder. Creepy, right? Putting somebody in jail not for what they have done, but for what you’re very sure they are going to do.
Clip from Obama’s speech: There may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes. In some cases because evidence may be tainted but who none-the-less pose a threat to the security of the United States.
Maddow: We’re not prosecuting them for past crimes, but we need to keep them in prison because of our expectation of their future crimes.
Clip from Obama’s speech: Al Queda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States and those that we capture like other prisoners of war must be prevented from attacking us again.
Maddow: Prevented. We will incarcerate people preventively. Preventive incarceration. Indefinite detention without trial. That’s what this is. That is what Obama proposed today if you strip away the euphamisms.
One civil liberties advocate told the New York Times today quote, “We’ve known this was on the horizon for many years, but we were able to hold it off with George Bush. The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama Administrtion over these powers is really stunning.”
And it is stunning. Particularly to hear President Obama claim the power to keep people in prison indefinately with no charges against them, no conviction, no sentence, just imprisonment. It’s particularly stunning to hear him make that claim in the middle of a speech that was all about the rule of law.
Clip from Obama’s speech: We must do so with an abiding confidence in the rule of law. …our government was defending positions that undermine the rule of law. …to ensure they are in line with the rule of law.
Maddow: How can a president speak the kind of poetry that P resident Obama does about the rule of law and call for the power to indefinitely preventively imprison people because they might committ crimes in the future. How can those two things co-exist in the same man, even in the same speech?
Well that brings us to the self-consciously awkward embarrassing part of this speech today. After condeming the Bush administration for what he called their ad hoc legal strategy for trying to make things seem legal that patently weren’t, this is what President Obama proposed.
Clip of Obama Speech: That’s why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law. We must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. …We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified. …our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining Guantanamo detainees that cannot be transferred. Our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.
Maddow: You’ll construct a legal regime to make indefinite detention legal. You will… what does he say? Develop an appropriate legal regime so you can construct a whole new system outside the courts even outside the military comissions so you can indefinitely imprison people without charges. And you will build that system from scratch. What’s that somebody said about ad hoc legal strategies?
Just for context here in the United Kingdom where there isn’t even a bill of rights, there has been a major debate about whether people can be held in preventive detention. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair wanted three months to be the outer limit for how long anyone could be held. There was a big political fight about it. Parliament ended up limiting that power to 28 days. 28 days is still the longest period of preventive detention that’s allowed under law in any comparable democracy anywhere in the world
How long would President Obama’s proposed indefinite detention last? He’s not saying yet, but here is how he’s defining the threat he says makes indefinite detention necessary.
Clip of Obama’s speech: Right now, in distant training camps and in crowded cities, there are people plotting to take American lives. That will be the case a year from now, five years from now, and — in all probability — 10 years from now.
Maddow: Ten years from now? So you could get arrested today and locked up without a trial without being convicted without being sentenced for say ten years until the threat of your future criminal behavior passes? Prolonged detention he’s calling it.
This was a beautiful speech from President Obama today with patriotic even moving language about the rule of law and the constitution and one of the most radical proposals for defying the constitution we have ever heard made to the American people.
