Sunday, September 23, 2012

How Obama Came to Be the Biggest Defender of Indefinite Detention

Perhaps it's all for the best that the Obama administration oversaw the scrubbing of civil liberties vows that graced the 2008 Democratic Party platform from the 2012 edition. It's one thing to promise to end practices implemented by your nefarious political opponents; it's quite another to commit to ending abuses you yourself have practiced without restraint. Under the circumstances, credibility suffers. And, on the long list of civil liberties violations that the current occupant of the White House has learned to love, indefinite detention—the practice of holding suspects without charges or trial, and with no certain end to their imprisonment—features prominently.
Allegedly horrified by the Bush administration's growing collection of due-process-deprived prisoners, the Democratic platform of 2008 promised:
We will not ship away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, or detain without trial or charge prisoners who can and should be brought to justice for their crimes, or maintain a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law. We will respect the time-honored principle of habeas corpus, the seven century-old right of individuals to challenge the terms of their own detention that was recently reaffirmed by our Supreme Court.
Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2012/09/21/were-all-in-detention-now

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