Obama and Prolonged Detention

Obama and Prolonged Detention

The Ron Paul crowd have taken a Rachel Maddow segment that correctly pillories Obama for hypocrisy and inconsistency and attached their campaign material at the end.



And she's right: Obama made a big deal throughout the campaign--and at the start of his speech--about the Bush Administration's ad hoc approach to the problem of detaining unlawful combatants--and then announces that they are going to do the same thing! But somehow, what was unconstitutional and criminal when Bush did it in the heat of the moment, by crossing a few more "t"s and dotting a few more "i"s, will somehow become constitutional and appropriate when Obama does it.

PowerLine has the statement of one of Bush's guys before Congress on this issue, in which he agrees that Obama's "prolonged detention" is the right policy for those who are unlawful combatants, but that Obama's emphasis on due process is likely to encourage the U.S. to not take prisoners, or to make sure that third parties--who aren't as nice as we are--end up with these prisoners.

I think a lot of people are failing to recognize how fundamentally different non-state actors (such as al-Qaeda) are from traditional nation-state enemies. The closest historical example to non-state actors are pirates and the post-World War II German Werewolves. Pirates were tried (sometimes rather summarily) and hung; unlawful combatants were sometimes not even given the benefit of a trial.