War Handwavium

Obama is the first president to suggest that he ought to be able to preventively detain anyone, for any reason, for as long as he wants, without any evidence of an actual crime, just in case that person might commit a crime in the future.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/05/22/preventive_detention/index.html

Some people with a sense of civil liberty saw this coming.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/12/09/guantanamo/

This isn’t saying we want to hold POW’s until the end of the war. POW’s are captured on a battlefield. POW’s do not include civiliians and are limited to armed combatants. And the “War On Terror” is a propaganda campaign with no end in sight. We’re still waging a “War on Drugs” decades after it started. Politicians will be waging a “War On Terror” for decades into the future.

This is Obama saying he wants to detain anyone, foreign or American, whether they committed a crime or not, whether there is evidence or not, on the grounds that maybe, perhaps, possibly, they might commit a crime in the future.

Obama is proposing America’s first Pre-Crime unit.

The reason, and I mean the only reason, anyone is proposing this is because every single detainee in Guantanamo has been tortured, and torture makes evidence inadmissable, which means none of these detainees can be convicted in any legal court of law. Not to mention that torture creates a demand that the torturers be prosecuted for torturing. Had Bush and Company not been so hot to trot to cut a man’s testicles and repeatedly bring men close to death via drowning, we wouldn’t have this problem now.

But now it’s Obama’s problem. And the right thing to do is to return to the rule of law, not invent laws that say there is no law. Obama wants to maintain his popularity, and Cheney and other psychopaths will howl murder if a single detainee is released from Guantanamo. And because Darth Cheney has tainted the evidence against every detainee, we cannot secure any convictions unless we submit to Darth Cheney’s notion of Rule of Law: It’s legal if I say so.

If this becomes “law”, America is doomed.