Re: Obama's Constitution

trudogg wrote:
I don't expect to hear anything about this stuff soon from the Obama
team, but I hope they don't put off for too long making some explicit
statements about:

* Domestic surveillance/warrantless wiretapping
* Guantanamo
* Torture policy/adherence to Geneva conventions
* Signing statements
* Military tribunals

Let's call this the "shredding the constitution" file. Or, more
hopefully, the "putting the constitution back together" file. The
first two items in particular are going to be especially tough for
Obama. He's almost certainly going to be told in no uncertain terms by
men wearing dark suits and penetrating stares that the wiretapping
program has produced reams of actionable intelligence and that cutting
it back will endanger American security. And those sentiments won't
stay private. They'll be leaked to plenty of friendly reporters if
Obama orders the program modified anyway. We can expect some major
political firestorms over this.

One cure for that might be to go into the files and blow the lid off their
wiretapping conversations between our soldiers overseas and their loved ones
at home. Apparently there's been a whole lot of that.


Guantanamo, if anything, will be even harder. I'm not talking here
about Guantanamo the place. The prison itself can be pretty easily
moved elsewhere. I'm talking about Guantanamo the problem: namely,
what do you do with the remaining detainees there? Battlefield
conditions being what they are, it's almost a certainty that the
evidence against many of the prisoners - including some of the
genuinely dangerous ones - is far too weak to withstand any kind of
dispassionate tribunal. But if that means some of them get released,
where do they get released to? Kansas City? It's not as if there's
another country in the world that will take them, after all.

There may be several. Once the lack of concrete evidence is exposed most
of them essentially become political refugees.


But we can't keep surveilling American citizens forever and we can't
continue to keep prisoners locked up based merely on rumors and
hearsay (or confessions extracted by torture). I don't expect Obama to
clean this stuff up on his first day in office, but here's hoping that
the constitutional law professor doesn't wait too long. It would be
nice to have our country back again.

Kevin Drum



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