A couple of weeks ago I pointed out that the distinctions between Barack Obama and Dick Cheney on many national security policies are fairly minimal. This is especially true on an issue in which Cheney seems to be drawing a great deal of attention: the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 plotters.
Dylan Matthews talked to defense attorney Aziz Huq, who was part of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri's defense team (al-Marri confessed to material support for terrorism charges earlier this year). This is what he said:
Huq, currently a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, says that, despite pledges from the Obama Administration that it would end objectionable Bush policies in fighting terror, changes from the Bush administration's approach are hard to spot. “The way Guantanamo-related cases are being prosecuted is very similar to the way they were being prosecuted a year ago,” Huq claims.
Deporting former Guantanamo prisoners to their birth countries, where they could be tortured is an example. The Obama administration, Huq alleges has taken “a very expansive view” of anti-torture laws. He notes a case concerning “an Uzbek guy”—Bekhzod Yusupov—“who’s lived with a bunch of other Uzbek guys, where the evidence against him is stuff from a shared computer, hearsay evidence, really really, weak stuff.” The Department of Homeland Security is relying on this material, Huq says, and could wind up deporting the suspect to a country where dissidents are literally boiled alive.
Federal intelligence agencies are also continuing “transfers made from U.S. custody to the third country for a purpose of detention and interrogation,” a tactic that became common during the Bush administration, Huq says, blaming the Obama administration's Detention Policy Task Force, which has been charged with releasing or relocating detainees.
The differences between the Bush-Obama policies on detention and trial are at the margins. That's not lefty shrieking -- that's just how it is. While there should probably be a distinction between Cheney and Bush on national security, the fact remains that the policies of the current administration are so similar to that of its predecessors as to make Cheney's criticisms incoherent. This isn't about policy -- this argument is personal and partisan, but it's fundamentally not about what the Obama administration is doing different on national security with regards to terror detainees, because it's not doing much that's different.
On the other side, the rather deafening silence of liberals who once decried the lawlessness of the Bush administration is equally frustrating.
-- A. Serwer
