WHAT THE UR HAS GRASPED...:

Despite Rhetoric, Obama Still Following Cheney's Lead in Dictatorial Justice: It seems like the former vice-president is the one piggybacking on the new president's detainee policy spotlight, but a top foreign-policy analyst argues that, when it comes to tribunals, it's the other way around: the Obama administration is maintaining the practice of inventing justice as America sees fit. (Thomas P.M. Barnett, 5/21/09, Esquire)

[D]espite more answers than ever before on the most controversial issue of the day, the president might as well have been talking to himself when he said "there are no neat or easy answers here." In fact, when it comes to the thorniest nuance of the detainee issue — not their release, but their trial in Bush administration-invented military commissions — he didn't offer many good answers at all.

President Obama's decision to stick with a modified version these tribunals — "an appropriate venue for trying detainees," as he called them today — seriously undermines his campaign pledge to turn the page on Bush-Cheney's deeply flawed approach to terrorism. No matter how many times he enumerates the "swift changes" by his administration to ditch its predecessor's out-of-thin-air concepts — "war on terror," "enhanced interrogation methods," "unlawful enemy combatants" — Obama continues to promote Bush-Cheney's isolating notion that detainees should be tried in a special, U.S.-executive-branch-controlled system of alternative justice that lies outside of two proven pillars of traditional justice: the military's ever-effective courts martial and our civilian court system, which is held in place by the same safeguards of the Constitution that Obama invoked so many times this morning.

Beyond the rhetoric, then, Obama has told the world that America's definitions of terror remain its own. He says it's not a reversal? It is. The president has reminded the world of a Cheney-ism: We know terrorism when we see it, and when we see it, we'll let you know.

...is that standard is completely acceptable to Americans. After all, what's the danger? That we'll be a bit rough on evildoers who don't quite fit some transnationalist's technical definition of a terrorist?

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 21, 2009 2:11 PM