McGurn’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed on Obama’s Notre Dame speech makes an interesting point, namely that Obama “wins” on abortion by simply going on stage and saying “Let’s talk about it.” Any debate about abortion necessarily undermines the pro-life’s best hand — the firmly ideological belief that the sanctity of life is all-important and non-negotiable; we cannot even begin to discuss any compromises.
Now to torture. In this case, the Left holds the more firmly ideological position: torture is unequivocally wrong because as Americans we value freedom and justice. In rhetoric, Obama supports the Left, but in practice, Obama’s military tribunals and other measures look more and more like Bush’s policies (only with better legal grounding. Great article from the Financial Times here). Obama’s pragmatism undermines his ideological position — that freedom and justice are sacrosanct and non-negotiable — and puts him on defense. Why else would the President’s speech outlining his torture positions have to “compete” with an incredibly unpopular ex-Vice President’s speech?
Today, President Obama attempted a forceful reply to critics on both the left and the right for his policies on detention and torture. In a speech at the National Archives, in a room redolent with the iconography of liberty and rights, Obama attacked the Bush administration’s “ad hoc” legal approach to the detention and treatment of terrorism suspects. However redolent Obama’s speech was with the fragrance of American founding values, the president emphasized one overall – the consistency inherent in the idea of the “rule of law”.
In BR’s January/February issue, David Cole grappled with the same question – and reached a remarkably similar conclusion. Detention without trial, Cole argued, was not only legal, but necessary. Many detainees could not be brought to trial in the U.S. under international law. What they could be afforded, he claimed, was some modicum of due process – proceedings to clarify whether they had actually been members of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, for example. “Enhanced interrogation techniques,” moreover, would be firmly out of the question. Above all, Cole wrote, “Guantánamo is a black mark because of this resistance to law and refusal to recognize the basic human dignity of the detainees. If we are to fix the problem, we need not abandon military detention, but we must subject it to the rule of law.”
Still, Cole endorses a legally shaky principle of detention without trial as a “preventative” measure, meant to prevent strongly suspected terrorists from reengaging in violence. According to a recent New York Times article, one in seven former detainees returns to terrorism after release.
International humanitarian law affords Cole – and Obama – more flexibility with the Guantánamo detainees than they would have for domestic terror suspects. But human rights groups have been critical of ideas like these, which appear to represent an intermediary step between the “ad hoc” policies of the Bush years and a doctrinaire approach to detention that would essentially follow an established legal order — whether domestic or international. Leaks from a meeting between representatives from several leading human rights organizations and Obama indicate that they now see little difference between his policies and those of George W. Bush.
Lurking behind these debates are several definitional problems.
I already posted this over at The Stanford Review’s blog, where I’ve been guest blogging as a token moderate/left-leaner.
You can check out more of my thoughts at the Review, but here are some questions:
How was this recording allowed? Rice’s people are usually pretty strict about such things.
If this video makes ends up getting a lot of attention–I think it could go either way as there is no single damning sentence or Fox News-worthy clip–will Rice ever do another dorm talk at Stanford?
Turning to substance, does 9/11, or preventing another 9/11, really change everything, as Rice asserts? Should public panic and demands for safety make it ok to undermine the moral and legal bases of our government?
Was the “enhanced interrogation” legal? Rice seems to think so, but much of the furor over memos released argues that it was not.
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