Rachel Maddow: [Obama made his recent speech] announcing a radical new claim of presidential power that is not afforded by the Constitution and that has never been attempted in American history, even by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
What power is that? Preventive detention. Perhaps more subtle than pre-emptive strike military action. But just as illegal. It’s good to be king.
Maddow: This is a beautiful speech from President Obama [...] with patriotic, moving, even poetic language about the rule of law and the Constitution -- and one of the most radical proposals for defying the Constitution that we have ever heard made to the American people.[...]
How can a president speak the kind of poetry that President Obama does about the rule of law and call for the power to indefinitely, preventively imprison people because they might commit crimes in the future?
Power corrupts, they say. But I think that it is a corrupted mind that seeks power.
As Greg Craig put it: "hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law."[...]
The New Yorker's Amy Davidson compares Obama's detention proposal to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II [...] Hilzoy, of The Washington Monthly, writes: "If we don't have enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we don't have enough evidence to hold them. Period" and "the power to detain people without filing criminal charges against them is a dictatorial power." Salon's Joan Walsh quotes the Center for Constitutional Rights' Vincent Warren as saying: "They’re creating, essentially, an American Gulag." The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch says of Obama's proposal: "What he's proposing is against one of this country's core principles" and "this is why people need to keep the pressure on Obama -- even those inclined to view his presidency favorably."
Of course, this would mean holding people in violation of domestic and international law — precisely what George Bush did. It is part of the Administration’s effort to appear principled by doing an unprincipled thing. The reason that we cannot try these individuals is because they would win. The solution, according to both Bush and Obama, is not to give them a trial.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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