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Prevention is not always the best medicine
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Jul 09, 2009 05:48am |
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| Category | Opinion |
| Author | Ari Melber |
| News Date | Tuesday, July 7, 2009 10:40:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | President Barack Obama’s controversial detention plan for Guantanamo detainees keeps leaking.
First, anonymous administration officials said the president might authorize “preventive detention” for detainees through an executive order, shutting Congress out of the process. The White House pushed back, stating there is no such order right now. (That kind of nondenial, however, depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.) Then Robert Gibbs added that the president would not rely on legal theories claiming an “inherent authority to detain people.”
Yet either way, the president already announced his support for preventive detention in his speech at the National Archives.
It is a fundamentally radical, dangerous and potentially unconstitutional approach. Obama has faced little blowback thus far, however — a revealing sign about the state of the Democratic-progressive infrastructure.
First, to begin plainly: Preventive detention is a system to imprison people without trial or independent oversight. It has scant precedent in American history.
It is equivalent to permanent detention, in that it operates indefinitely, without judicial limits, and can effectively institute life sentences. Implemented on a mass scale, in fact, preventive detention can look like internment. When a government forcibly holds enough people indefinitely without trial, it evokes the kinds of raids, detention and abuses of power associated with authoritarian states — or darker periods in American history. |
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