Civil Liberties Take Another Hit

Phillip Carter is a lawyer, a former Army Captain, a veteran of the Iraq War and a very harsh critic of the Bush administration's detention and interrogation policies. He was a vigorous supporter of Barack Obama's campaign, and in 2008, became the Obama campaign's National Veterans Director. In April of this year, he was appointed the top Pentagon official for detainee affairs, but yesterday, he suddenly "quit without explanation just days after Obama confirmed in an interview with Fox News in Beijing that his administration would miss its Jan. 22 Guantánamo closure deadline."

Carter said he was resigning due to "personal issues," and -- like Greg Craig before him -- remained loyal to Obama by refraining, at least thus far, from publicly criticizing any administration policies. I have no idea what actually motivated Carter's abrupt resignation, but here's what I do know: so many of the detention and other "War on Terror" policies Obama has explicitly adopted were the very same ones which Carter (as well as Obama) repeatedly railed against during the Bush years, in Carter's case primarily in blogs he maintained both at The Washington Post and at Slate.

[...]

Carter harshly condemned the Bush administration's decision to use a military commission to try Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, accused of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania. Carter suggested that trying detainees for "war crimes" for pre-2001 acts violates the Constitution's ban on ex post facto punishments (since the U.S. was not at war at that time).

[...]

While the Obama administration commendably sent Ghailani to New York to be tried in a civilian court, it just announced two weeks ago that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, whose case originated as a criminal investigation with the FBI, would now be turned over to a military commission for prosecution in connection with the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole -- raising all of the serious objections Carter voiced to the Ghailani case.

[...]

Carter had also voiced serious concerns over the Bush DOJ's use of the "state secrets" privilege as a means of evading vital constitutional and other legal questions -- only to watch the Obama DOJ do the same thing.

[...]

Carter advocated real consequences for DOJ torture-approving lawyers such as John Yoo (specifically, his firing from Berkeley), only to watch the Obama administration take multiple steps to protects such officials from any legal consequences. He applauded the Bush Pentagon's cancellation of a key appointment of Gen. Jay Hood to Pakistan on the ground that Hood had presided over Guantanamo and was thus "tained by torture," only to watch Obama appoint the highly tainted Gen. McChyrstal as his commander in Afghanistan.

[...]

[F] ollowing Greg Craig, this is now the second high-profile resignation of a relatively devoted civil libertarian in a short period of time. Combine that with the still-missing-and-unconfirmed Dawn Johnsen, and all of this leaves those who are indifferent or hostile to civil liberties values -- people like John Brennan and Rahm Emanuel -- with even fewer counter-weights than before.

  Glenn Greenwald

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.