Preemptive Indefinite Detentions

Well the terrorists have won I guess.

and edit: I liked Greenwald's point about how this turns our conception of due process on its head:

What Obama is saying is this: we'll give real trials only to those detainees we know in advance we will convict. For those we don't think we can convict in a real court, we'll get convictions in the military commissions I'm creating. For those we can't convict even in my military commissions, we'll just imprison them anyway with no charges ("preventively detain" them).
 
Welcome to Post 9/11 Orwellian America.
 
Kind of strange....pre-emptive suspension of habeus corpus? Only makes sense during a bona fide crisis, and ongoing conspiracies targeting the nation as a whole, or Federal property. That is, in a case where there is no reason to suspect that a foiled operation is part of a larger conspiracy, habeus corpus should be in effect.

@Jolly Roger, you like profiling, huh?
 
About as much as I like preemptive indefinite detentions. But if we are going to do it, might as well prevent the next Oklahoma City.
 
I endorse Comrade Obama's Article 58!
 
I can understand what Obama is doing, to prevent certain people from being released.. but I still think summary military execution for goig against the U.S. military in X manner would give him less political and international strife than either by preemptive detentions or releasing them.
 
Said it before and will say it agian.

It's almost like Obama has gotten some information that shows these poor people locked up are dangerous! Who would have thought it???

I didnt vote for him!
 
Said it before and will say it agian.

It's almost like Obama has gotten some information that shows these poor people locked up are dangerous! Who would have thought it???

I didnt vote for him!


Haha. The thing is, these changes seemingly would extend beyond the current batch of detainees. The key issue is potentially broad suspension of habeus corpus, which is a key component of the Western legal system. It's not just the context of 9/11.
 
(posted elsewhere originally) Time to add to the discussion since debate isn't getting sparked much here. I think this should do the trick...

What is the point of creating this system? What is it going to be used for that the current system (after some adjustments) can't handle? Who is going to be targeted?

The problem for me is that these questions don't have obvious answers, and the nature of the conflict and ease of applicability towards US citizens is disconcerting.

The language used in the speech doesn't really seem to be directed at traditional POWs, but rather al Qaeda operatives. In that case:

Why can't the appropriate intelligence agencies keep an eye on him and do due diligence before arresting him through current legal structures? If he's a non-citizen in Syria why isn't it preferable to track, surveil, and infiltrate him and his group to root out other extremists and cells?

This just seems like under-resourced intelligence agencies playing loose because they are either too lazy or stretched thin to keep doing the quality job they did for 50 some years (assuming you agree). Regardless, this is just a further step down the road from proper legal protections towards fascism (in this case, a largely extralegal - in the traditional sense - system of state force that proceeds from a justification of the state as the ultimate good to be preserved, rather than ethical ideals that it should stand for). I'm not saying this will make the US fascist, but it's the direction at least.

It doesn't matter if it never gets used against US citizens, it's not the right direction for the country to go. Especially not for a war of convenience that is now, I think blatantly, being used by the political and military establishment as a cover for perpetual expansion of power and legitimacy.

I'm going to repeat yet another argument (from elsewhere) that I have yet to hear a proper response for:

This wasn't necessary to survive during the Cold War when we had thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at us, why is it necessary today?

I think every expansion of executive power or retreat of ideals should be treated with this question. Al Qaeda is not an existential threat for the US, so why is the US sacrificing fundamental values to fight it?
 
DNK said:
This wasn't necessary to survive during the Cold War when we had thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at us, why is it necessary today?

You had thousands of nuclear missiles pointing back at targets you could actually hit? You wouldn't even know what to hit if New York happened to be hit by a nuclear attack would you? You could blindly hit Islamic targets and achieve next to nothing but a guarantee that a nuclear attack would again hit your shores. Your looking at chalk and cheese, and the cheese poses a far greater threat than the infinitely larger and more powerful chalk ever did.

DNK said:
I think every expansion of executive power or retreat of ideals should be treated with this question. Al Qaeda is not an existential threat for the US, so why is the US sacrificing fundamental values to fight it?

... honestly AQ is winning. It's bled your will to fight, legitimatized its presence in large parts of the Islamic world and has humiliated a hegomon. You can't absolutely win ever. It can't lose - most of its goals are well on the way to fruition. You can claim that it doesn't post a threat to the United States itself, I'll grant it probably doesn't, but it poses a threat to the legitimacy of your government, which is ironically predicated increasingly on its ability to defend its body politic, something it has failed at, so utterly manifestly, I'm starting to wonder if its working for the other side - the litany of failures both strategic, and tactical are so long you could bury all your Presidents from Clinton onto Obama in it. It doesn't need to destroy you in the conventional sense of the word, that has never been its stated goal, indeed its stated goal has been to humble and ultimately bankrupt you in a series of fruitless wars, in order to push its agenda in the Islamic world which runs at odds with your apparent avowed belief in propping up dictators and their accompanying accouterments of oppression. Your whole political elite and indeed most of your population hasn't even bothered to read the reasons that AQ has decided to do what it decided to do. Declarations of wars of are intended to be a list of grievances and AQs are quite specific (not as specific as Formaldehyde might think) but it nevertheless provides a means of disentangling and removing the fundamental justifications that AQ relies upon for its continuing legitimacy.

You can continue to treat AQ like a nation state to be crushed like a bug or you can drop the false analogies to the Cold War and Facism and every other threat you have ever faced and recognize that AQ is such a poor comparison you shouldn't even bother. You can sacrifice all your liberties - you will lose; you can keep them and still lose. Your civil rights are not and have never really been the issue the only people who think that are ironically Americans... but keep thinking they are your only paving your way to losing.
 
I'm going to repeat yet another argument (from elsewhere) that I have yet to hear a proper response for:

This wasn't necessary to survive during the Cold War when we had thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at us, why is it necessary today?


Probably because the Russians didnt want to the world to end just as the US didnt.

Al-Qaeda and terrorists on the other hand don't care if they die, just how many people (military or civilian) that go with them.
 
Labtec600 said:
Al-Qaeda and terrorists on the other hand don't care if they die, just how many people (military or civilian) that go with them.

Incorrect.
 
You had thousands of nuclear missiles pointing back at targets you could actually hit? You wouldn't even know what to hit if New York happened to be hit by a nuclear attack would you? You could blindly hit Islamic targets and achieve next to nothing but a guarantee that a nuclear attack would again hit your shores.
AQ isn't USSR, no. There was MAD, yes. My point was that the risk scenario with the USSR was >>>>> that with AQ. So, as I just said, display how this new threat requires these changes first, don't just tell me it's new and we don't have MAD so the old rules don't apply. The status quo is such, and was created in a time of far greater risk, so tell me what is new and why it must change with such a smaller risk. Do that and I'll agree. Your post didn't do that, it was a rant. A rant isn't convincing me of anything, and it's basically all I hear from proponents generally. I want proponents to give competent arguments that detail what it is about AQ that requires these changes other than knee-jerking nukes in NYC for the millionth time. I would appreciate it much since I hate only having one side of an issue.

Of course, I don't know if your rant was from a proponent or opponent since you didn't even address the issue once ;)

Where are the nukes coming from anyway? The Taliban? How does this new Obama policy actually connect with the nuke issue? Are we just going to start detaining people en masse and hope our dragnet catches the one that would have got the nuke 5 years later? Does not compute. You'd think the way to cracking a nuclear plot would be good investigative work, infiltrating cells, tracking dangerous individuals, watching potential suppliers. Where does indiscriminate imprisonment fit in?

I would respond to the rest of your post but considering how you shoved a lot of words down my throat I didn't intend or even imply and that are barely applicable, I don't think it would be appropriate. Find the guy you were talking to and ask him what he thinks...
 
Kind of strange....pre-emptive suspension of habeus corpus? Only makes sense during a bona fide crisis, and ongoing conspiracies targeting the nation as a whole, or Federal property. That is, in a case where there is no reason to suspect that a foiled operation is part of a larger conspiracy, habeus corpus should be in effect.

@Jolly Roger, you like profiling, huh?
Didn't Lincoln suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War and Reconstruction?
 
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