The Washington Establishment’s Plans for Obama’s Executive Orders

“The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.”

– Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Glenn Greenwald

Barack Obama will have spent his first several days in office issuing a series of executive orders which, some quibbling and important caveats and reservations aside, meet or actually exceed even the most optimistic expectations of civil libertarians for what he could or would do quickly — everything from ordering the closing of Guantanamo to suspending military commissions to compelling CIA interrogators to adhere to the Army Field Manual to banning CIA “black sites” and, perhaps most encouragingly (in my view):  severely restricting his own power and the power of former Presidents to withhold documents and other information on the basis of secrecy, which was the prime corrosive agent, the main enabler, of the Bush era.  As a result, establishment and right-wing figures who have been assuring everyone (most of all themselves) that Obama, in these areas, would scorn “the Left” (meaning:  those who believe in Constitutional safeguards) and would continue most of Bush’s “counter-Terrorism” policies are growing increasingly nervous about this flurry of unexpected Bush-repudiating activity.

The Washington Post‘s Fred Hiatt has an Editorial today purporting to praise what he claims is Obama’s “appropriate prudence in taking things slowly — at least for now.”  Hiatt further praises Obama for his intention to scrap the current military commissions system, because, as Hiatt puts it, “a deeply flawed and unjust legal process such as the one in place at Guantanamo is untenable.”  Yet this is what Hiatt says about what should replace the Guantanamo military commissions system:

Mr. Obama should order trials in federal court when possible. For those for whom traditional prosecutions would not be feasible, he should ensure robust due process, whether in courts-martial or aversion of existing military commissions. If there are dangerous detainees who cannot be tried— a possibility that Mr. Obama has acknowledged — the president should consider creation of a specialized court, akin to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in which such detainees would be guaranteed periodic review of their detentions by a federal judge empowered to order their release.

This paragraph, which more or less embodies the conventional wisdom about what should be done with Guantanamo detainees once that camp is closed, is about as ironic a claim as can be imagined.  Just think about what Hiatt, masquerading (as always) as the defender of democracy and Western justice, is actually saying:

In the name of due process, we should give Guantanamo detainees a trial in our normal civilian courts, using our normal rules of justice —but only if we’re certain ahead of time that we can win and convict them.  For those we’re not certain we can convict using our normal standards of due process (because the evidence against them is “tainted”), we should re-write the rules of justice and create a whole new tribunal (similar to the Guantanamo military commissions that Hiatt pretends to decry, which advocates, in Orwellian fashion, typically call “national security courts”) in order to make it easier for us to win against them and keep them incarcerated.  And then, for those who we can’t convict even in the new, “looser” tribunals, we’ll just create a wholly separate, new, presumably secret tribunal that has the power to keep people detained indefinitely without having to prove that they violated any laws at all.

Rather obviously, if you afford due process safeguards only to those people you’re sure you can convict anyway, but then deny them at will to whomever you think can’t be convicted under the normal rules, that isn’t “due process.”  That’s a transparent sham, a mockery of justice.  You can’t have different due process standards and entirely different courts that you pick and choose from based on how many rights you think you can afford to extend and still be assured of a conviction (e.g.: “we’ll probably lose in a real court against this detainee because the prime evidence we have against him is a coerced confession, so let’s stick this one in a national security court where we can use the coerced confession and don’t have to extend other rights and safeguards that will get in our way, and thus be assured of winning”).

More obviously still, the U.S. will not, as Hiatt puts it, “end the discredited practices for handling foreign detainees that have blemished the United States’ reputation worldwide” if we simultaneously, as Hiatt advocates, create a new court that is empowered to keep accused Terrorists in cages indefinitely without having to give them a trial at all (i.e., a “preventive detention” scheme).  If all we end up doing is re-creating the travesties of Guantanamo inside the U.S., we will not have taken a step forward.  One could plausibly argue that replicating Guantanamo inside the U.S. will be to do the opposite.

This is why the understandable enthusiasm (which I definitely share) over Obama’s pleasantly unexpected commitment in the first few hours of his presidency to take politically difficult steps in the civil liberties and accountability realms should be tempered somewhat.  There is going to be very concerted pressure exerted on him by establishment guardians such as Hiatt (and the Brookings Institution, Jack Goldsmith and friends), to say nothing of hard-line factions within the intelligence community and its various allies, for Obama to take subsequent steps that would eviscerate much of this progress, that render these initial rollbacks largely empty, symbolic gestures.  Whether these steps, impressive as they are, will be symbolic measures designed to placate certain factions, or whether they represent a genuine commitment on Obama’s part, remains to be seen.  Much of it will depend on how much political pressure is exerted and from what sides.

Obama deserves real praise for devoting the first few days of his presidency to these vital steps — and doing so without there being much of a political benefit and with some real political risk.  That’s genuinely encouraging.  But ongoing vigilance is necessary, to counter-balance the Fred Hiatts, Brookings Institutions and other national security state fanatics, to ensure that these initial steps aren’t undermined.