Congress Makes a False Choice

This just on the heels of reports that the administration is considering “reviving the military commission system that the president criticized in the past for prosecuting terrorism suspects held at a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” On the one hand, the administration should be commended for maintaining certain elements of the war on terror infrastructure that have worked so effectively over the past eight years to keep Americans safe. Obama’s attempts to close Gitmo are now exposed as purely symbolic — he would maintain essentially the same process for adjudicating the status of most detainees, and the rest would be held without due process until they are no longer a threat to this country. Obama has also continued the rendition program, though in a manner that offers a symbolic victory to the left by ending the system of extraordinary rendition, which didn’t require even a phony warrant from a third-world dictatorship. On the other hand, the fact that Obama has achieved so little change in our war on terror policies has, perhaps, created greater political incentives for shifting the focus to the alleged misconduct of the previous administration. If you don’t actually plan on giving due process to terrorists, better to have the base focused on the last administration’s interrogation techniques. If you can’t actually close Gitmo, better to have the base focused on the alleged abuse of prisoners by U.S. troops. Still, it’s not at all clear that the Obama administration has actually rejected the false choice between our security and our ideals. And even if they believe their own propaganda, they still have a long way to go to convince Congress and the American public that our ideals (which apparently now include providing released terrorists with welfare) can never be compromised for the sake of security, and that the rights of terrorists supersede our right to detain them and extract vital information.