Detainee Policy Gives Obama Credibility Deficit

By Steve Hynd

I don't know about the rest of you, but I strongly feel if Obama is willing to break the universal rule of law as understood by democratic nations to the extent of keeping people in jail after they've been aquitted, after all he said during his campaign and in his first few weeks in office, then there is nothing upon which his word is trustworthy.

Spencer Ackerman yesterday attended a Senate hearing at which the DOD's General Counsel, Jeh Johnson, testified.  As Ackerman highlighted, Johnson actually said that even for those detainees to whom the Obama administration deigns to give a real trial in a real court, the President has the power to continue to imprison them indefinitely even if they are acquitted at their trial.  About this assertion of "presidential post-acquittal detention power" -- an Orwellian term (and a Kafka-esque concept) that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares at all about the most basic liberties -- Ackerman wrote, with some understatement, that it "moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective."  Law professor Jonathan Turley was more blunt:  "The Obama Administration continues its retention and expansion of abusive Bush policies � now clearly Obama policies on indefinite detention." 

...this underscores what has clearly emerged as the core "principle" of Obama justice when it comes to accused Terrorists -- namely, "due process" is pure window dressing with only one goal:   to ensure that anyone the President wants to keep imprisoned will remain in prison.  They'll create various procedures to prettify the process, but the outcome is always the same -- ongoing detention for as long as the President dictates.

You have to assume that anything reasonable coming out of this administration is "pure window dressing", "procedures to prettify the process", which will simply be a cover for maintaining the status quo and increasing the power of the presidency. That applies to healthcare, the economy, the Af/Pak region, energy, global climate change, you name it. You have to, for your own safety, simply because Obama's detainee policy is such a massively criminal break with what Western democracies regard as legal and moral that literally any other crime is possible. That, for many, was exactly the problem with Bush and his administration. Given what they had done on Iraq and Gitmo, it was impossible to trust them to stay within legal boundaries on other matters. And they often didn't.