OBAMA’S CONSTITUTION….I don’t expect to hear anything about this stuff soon from the Obama team, but I hope they don’t put off for too long making some explicit statements about:
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Domestic surveillance/warrantless wiretapping
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Guantanamo
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Torture policy/adherence to Geneva conventions
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Signing statements
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Military tribunals
Let’s call this the “shredding the constitution” file. Or, more hopefully, the “putting the constitution back together” file. The first two items in particular are going to be especially tough for Obama. He’s almost certainly going to be told in no uncertain terms by men wearing dark suits and penetrating stares that the wiretapping program has produced reams of actionable intelligence and that cutting it back will endanger American security. And those sentiments won’t stay private. They’ll be leaked to plenty of friendly reporters if Obama orders the program modified anyway. We can expect some major political firestorms over this.
Guantanamo, if anything, will be even harder. I’m not talking here about Guantanamo the place. The prison itself can be pretty easily moved elsewhere. I’m talking about Guantanamo the problem: namely, what do you do with the remaining detainees there? Battlefield conditions being what they are, it’s almost a certainty that the evidence against many of the prisoners — including some of the genuinely dangerous ones — is far too weak to withstand any kind of dispassionate tribunal. But if that means some of them get released, where do they get released to? Kansas City? It’s not as if there’s another country in the world that will take them, after all.
But we can’t keep surveilling American citizens forever and we can’t continue to keep prisoners locked up based merely on rumors and hearsay (or confessions extracted by torture). I don’t expect Obama to clean this stuff up on his first day in office, but here’s hoping that the constitutional law professor doesn’t wait too long. It would be nice to have our country back again.
