Glenn Greenwald's observations of the Obama administration's mostly semantic change in detainee policy last Friday basically confirm what the folks from the ACLU and CAP told me. I'm a little more optimistic than Greenwald that things could work out in the long run; the new detention policy has not been outlined yet. But last week's development was not much of an improvement over or a shift from the Bush administration's policy on dealing with terrorism suspects.
Remarkably, even though Obama had asserted a detention authority last week that is mostly indistinguishable from the Bush administration, Greenwald points to this exchange between Dick Cheney and John King on CNN, in which Cheney warns that Obama is putting the country in imminent danger because of the non-changes that have been made:
President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack. ...I wish the Obama administration was going back to law enforcement mode -- the army counterintelligence manual notes that illegitimate efforts at legitimacy are self-defeating, and that terrorists lose support when they're treated like criminals. Obviously those observations apply to counterinsurgency, but I think they're also applicable in the broader sense: the way we treat terrorists right grants them the exact kind of status that they're looking for. But thus far Obama has not gone in that direction, and Cheney's comments, meant mostly to vindicate his extra-constitutional approach to fighting terrorism, do little besides give Obama the political cover he needs to keep doing things the Bush administration's way. If John King knew what he was talking about, he could have challenged Cheney's assertion rather than pretending that a negative headline from a conservative Web site is some kind of probing question.Now, I think part of the difficulty here as I look at what the Obama administration is doing, we made a decision after 9/11 that I think was crucial. We said this is a war. It’s not a law enforcement problem. . . .When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they’re doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, that they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that’s required, and that concept of military threat that is essential if you’re going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks.
