Reason’s Jacob Sullum notes that Obama is not going to end Bush’s policy of indefinite detention of terrorist suspects:
In Holder’s view, then, we are engaged in a war that started years before we noticed it and may never end, at least not in any definitive way. The enemy is not simply the guy who shoots at you on the battlefield, who can be readily identified; he can be anyone, anywhere who helps anti-American terrorists. He could be a guy captured in the Philippines suspected of funneling money to Al Qaeda, or (presumably) he could be the employee of an Islamic charity in the U.S. that is accused of sending money to Hezbollah. Given Holder’s invocation of cyber and mental battlefields, the enemy could even be someone accused of fomenting terrorism through incendiary online criticism of the U.S. government. The implication is that any of these people could be held in military custody without trial until the cessation of hostilities, i.e., indefinitely.
(…)
[Obama] does seem to be preparing the ground for a military detention system that will hold the sort of suspects who could be (and have been) successfully tried in ordinary criminal courts for participating in or abetting terrorism. Such suspects need not even be tried by military tribunals; they could simply be identified as “unlawful enemy combatants” through a process that is yet to be determined but that will certainly be much less rigorous than a full-blown trial. What will be the basis for deciding which suspects get full due process and which get something far less, which receive determinate prison sentences and which are held indefinitely? If the option is available, it will always be tempting to take the easier route, which could mean that every case related to terrorism will be militarized. Then anyone accused of aiding terrorism can forget about justice as it is usually understood.
As long as Obama comes up with some mechanism to guarantee some level of due process to these detainees — after all, we at least need to have an independent system of review to confirm by independent evidence that the people being held indefinitely are indeed terrorists — then this would be, as James Joyner notes, an improvement over the Bush policy.
The alternative would be to treat terrorism as a law enforcement rather than a national security problem, but I’m honestly not sure that’s a good idea.
On the political side, though, Rusty Shackleford sums this up best:
Bush-Hitler: Holding terrorists indefinitely without charge in Gitmo.
Hope-Change: Holding terrorists indefinitely without charge somewhere else.
As with many other things, it appears that President Obama is discovering the Candidate Obama was a little naive when it came to foreign policy.
