we expected something more

I'd just like to take this opportunity to register my complete and total disapproval of a certain aspect of the Obama administration and the Democrats in general: their record on the nexus between national security and civil liberties.

One of the biggest and most valid complaints about the Bush administration was that their obsession with preventing another 9/11 scale terrorist attack caused them to take measures that gave the Executive unprecedented powers - who else remembers the PATRIOT Act? The warrantless wiretapping? Indefinite detention in "black sites" in countries that, while being our allies, do not give a flying fuck about human rights? These things aren't going away. Quite the opposite - President Obama has doubled down on many of these policies, even asking Congress for action codifying the Executive's right to detain individuals who have been charged with no crime (in military or civilian courts) for as long as they want, as long as they're suspected of involvement with terrorism with absolutely no oversight, Congressional or judicial. In some respects, he's gone farther than President Bush had, best exemplified by the exposure of a list of targets approved for assassination that contained U.S. citizens, most notably the American-born radical Yemeni cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki very well may be an active and enduring threat to American lives, but when our only source of information about him is what one branch of government tells us, how can we be absolutely sure? Last time I checked, a person's American citizenship can't be revoked, no matter how odious and treacherous they are. Why is the Executive branch allowed to order the military to deliberately hunt down and execute American citizens abroad? Why do the other branches simply take their word for it that they're terrorists? We know for a fact that more than a few Gitmo detainees did nothing wrong, and the people kept there were supposed to be the worst of the worst.

Where is the outrage, on the left or the right? Every day, Glenn Beck tells his audience exactly why they should live in fear of the growing power and intervention of government on domestic policy, but where is his chalkboard diagram detailing how the government can abduct you, send you to a foreign country to be detained and possibly tortured without any access to a hearing or a lawyer, or even summarily executed if they simply say "we think you are a terrorist"? Now, I don't live in fear of the Obama administration, or any administration, Republican or Democrat, hunting me down. I do believe these infringements are for the most part contained to the realm of the "war on terror"*, and most likely will remain there, but this doesn't change the fact that it allows the possibility of wider abuse. A door has been left open, and it needs to be closed even if we have no plans to walk through it. Civil liberties aren't something we can simply take for granted, they must be endlessly protected.


The President may have promised to close down Gitmo, something that I do believe would be done if it weren't for Congress stonewalling, and banned the use of brutal torture techniques, but what kind of country are we if we take "we don't drown people anymore" as good enough? Besides, Guantanamo Bay and torture (I die a little inside everytime someone uses the pseudo-Orwellian phrase "enhanced interrogation") are merely symptoms of the larger problem - a willingness to let fear of terrorism undermine our commitment to the core values that make our country great. Benjamin Franklin said it best, that "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." The United States deserves both. This is an issue that should and must transcend partisanship, and no action on it will ever be taken as long as both parties are forced to care about it by their constituents. And from now on, I plan on being as loud and obnoxious about it as possible.

*quick footnote: if this is a war, who are we at war with? Where is their territory? Where is their army? The current policy has it both ways - we're at war in the sense that the President has unparalleled powers and civil liberties must be curtailed in favor of security, but we're not at war in the sense that we're not sacrificing for the military conflict as a nation and we don't have to treat prisoners of war humanely under the Geneva Convention. They get around that by claiming that terrorists are "illegal enemy combatants" because they don't wear uniforms or abide by the Geneva Convention themselves, but none of them do. Where are the legal combatants? Wars need to be able to be won by one side or the other. Wars need to end.