Obama on indefinite detention: a Goldsmith blueprint?

The Obama Administration's National Security Strategy includes a statement of intent to develop a system of "prolonged detention" of "suspected violent extremists" who "cannot be prosecuted":

For detainees who cannot be prosecuted--but pose a danger to the American people--we must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards. We must have fair procedures and a through process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified. And keeping with our Constitutional system, it will be subject to checks and balances. The goal is an approach that can be sustained by future Administrations, with support from both political parties and all three branches of government (p. 36).

Three observations about this policy: 1) The report of Obama's Guantanamo Review Task Force, completed in January but just leaked to the Washington Post and published yesterday, elaborates in some detail why the Administration believes that 48 of the detainees at Guantanamo (and presumably many more at Bagram) cannot be prosecuted and cannot be released.  2)  Obama's basic intent on this front has been in place for more than a year -- he sketched out essentially the same policy in May 2009.   3) The system of "prolonged detention" he has in mind, only briefly elaborated in May 2009 and May 2010, seems to adhere to a more detailed proposed program laid out in February 2009 by Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Bush Administration's Office of Legal Counsel who withdrew the torture memos and resigned after just nine months.

Heart of Darkness

Andrew Sullivan on Bush Administration doublethink:

Looked at from a distance, the Bush administration wanted to do two things at once: to declare to the world that freedom is on the march, and huamn rights are coming to the world with American help, while simultaneously declaring to captives that the US has no interest in the law, human rights, accountability, transparency or humanity. They wanted to give hope to all the oppressed of the planet, while surgically banishing all hope from the prisoners they captured and tortured. And the only way they could pull this off is by the total secrecy they constructed and defended. So we had a public government respectful of the rule of law, and a secret government whose main goal was persuading terror suspects that there was no rule of law at all. It is hard to convey just how dangerous this was and is.

As the blogging cliche goes, read the whole thing. Also the newly released torture memos.

Dissing the Electorate II

A postscript to the prior post about Christopher Caldwell's complaint that HIllary Clinton successfully yanked the chain of New Hampshire voters: it always irks me when people disparage the electorate, which I believe is smarter than all of us. That's not to say that we're collectively always right, but that Lincoln's can't-fool-all-the-people-all-of-the-time formulation is still the deepest wisdom. It's patronizing for Caldwell to spank voters for allegedly "identifying" with Hillary. He just does not know why people voted for her or why the polls were wrong. No one really does. Caldwell also implies that because women in NH favored Clinton by margins roughly comparable to those by which men favored Obama, women's votes are more based on emotion, or 'servile' identification, than men's. If the gender gap were reversed, would he accuse women of hormonal voting?

In my 80% Democratic home town, I heard many friends and neighbors complain bitterly after the 2004 election agony about the alleged stupidity of American voters. I see Bush's '04 win as the end of a long unfortunate causal chain stretching from Monica through Gore's awful campaign through our Constitutional electoral college flaw through 9/11 and Bush's wartime bonding and finally through Kerry's dithering. It wasn't till after Katrina that the worm turned on Bush. Later than many of us would have liked - but when it turned, it turned decisively.

To be fair, Caldwell may be on to something in suggesting that politicians' histrionics -- and, I would add, sophisticated media manipulation -- may corrode voters' decision-making powers -- and even, for a long season, "fool all of the people some of the time." Saturation negative advertising, for example, apparently has worked in many cases. So does fear, as exploited by Bush after 9/11. But I suspect that the electorate adapts over time to manipulative techniques. One of the more refreshing things about this election so far is that neither negative advertising nor a huge campaign chest have gotten Romney any traction so far.

Atonement

Is there an element of atonement in Americans' response to Obama? Not atonement for centuries of slavery and racial discrimination, but for the Bush Administration's preemptive aggression, flouting of international law, disdain for allies, and widespread use of torture? Perhaps on some level a lot of Americans want to send the world a message that we're turning the page, we've sickened on the attempt to unilaterally impose our will on the world--we're changing our 'cheere,' to borrow an expressive medieval term that means the face, facial expression, the attitude, the point of view.