Who Are We? -- by Bob Herbert -- NY Times

[balantz]

Published on Tuesday, June 23, 2009 by The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/opinion/23herbert.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&ref=opinion&adxnnlx=1245787356-2JmZP7uD7EJ31JHgyHKTgQ

Who Are We?

by Bob Herbert



Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House.

One of the most disappointing aspects of the early months of the Obama administration has been its unwillingness to end many of the mind-numbing abuses linked to the so-called war on terror and to establish a legal and moral framework designed to prevent those abuses from ever occurring again.

The president deserves credit for unequivocally banning torture and some of the other brutal interrogation techniques that spread like a plague in the Bush administration’s lawless response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But other policies that offend the conscience continue.

Americans should recoil as one against the idea of preventive detention, imprisoning people indefinitely, for years and perhaps for life, without charge and without giving them an opportunity to demonstrate their innocence.

And yet we’ve embraced it, asserting that there are people who are far too dangerous to even think about releasing but who cannot be put on trial because we have no real evidence that they have committed any crime, or because we’ve tortured them and therefore the evidence would not be admissible, or whatever. President Obama is O.K. with this (he calls it “prolonged detention”), but he wants to make sure it is carried out — here comes the oxymoron — fairly and nonabusively.

Proof of guilt? In 21st-century America, there is no longer any need for such annoyances.

Human rights? Ha-ha. That’s a good one.

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In other words, the victims, no matter how strong their case might be, no matter how badly they might have been abused, could never have their day in court. Jane Mayer, writing in the June 22 New Yorker, said of the rendition program, in which suspects were swept up by Americans and spirited off to foreign countries for imprisonment and interrogation: “As many as seven detainees were misidentified and abducted by mistake.”

The Bush and Obama view of the state-secrets privilege effectively bars any real examination of such egregious mistakes.

It was thought by many that a President Obama would put a stop to the madness, put an end to the Bush administration’s nightmarish approach to national security. But Mr. Obama has shown no inclination to bring even the worst offenders of the Bush years to account, and seems perfectly willing to move ahead in lockstep with the excessive secrecy and some of the most egregious activities of the Bush era.

The new president’s excessively cautious approach to the national security and civil liberties outrages of the Bush administration are unacceptable, and the organizations and individuals committed to fairness, justice and the rule of law — the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many others — should intensify their efforts to get the new administration to do the right thing.

More than 500 of the detainees incarcerated at one time or another at Guantánamo Bay have been released, and, except for a handful, no charges were filed against them. The idea that everyone held at Guantánamo was a terrorist — the worst of the worst — was always absurd.

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[FiveGoodMen]

1. And who did we elect?

[bemildred]

2. The best guy available.

That doesn't mean we can't do better next time. But the Congress is the key, the President is just an employee. We need to keep pushing Congress to the left.

[KakistocracyHater]

3. he has all of Bush's power & authority, he doesn't quite need

Congress as much as people feel. He should use it, for the good of the many.