We have to confront a painful question about our President. Many of us were convinced that he would be very different from his predecessor in matters of civil liberties. He is not. The distance between our expectations and reality is a failure that must be explained. So what happened?

While you have assembled lots of good categories that may explain why Obama is behaving this way, reasons aren't really important. 1. They don't change anything. These terrible decisions will continue as they have been for many months now. 2. Even if Obama told you why he was defending horrible Bush policies, would anyone trust what he told you now? I wouldn't!

If one of your reasons is valid that many Americans were conned by Obama, how could he explain himself now to you or anyone else? If it was someone else's fault, he either agreed with them at the time or appointed the wrong people to certain positions. If he isn't in charge than he's also a failure as a leader. All you end up doing is picking your own poison.

It's much better as Glenn is doing to just examine these decisions for what they are and represent without trying to find excuses and reasons for them. Reasons are a dime a dozen.

Try them in a federal, Article III court, and if they are acquitted, release them... to a village in Afghanistan. Then bomb the village, killing a bunch of civilians and the acquitted terrorist (who really did do "It" anyway) to boot!

Problem solved! No show trials, no circumvention of justice, no corruption of Western values.

This goes on every day and no one bats an eyelash, so why not just make it explicit. We kill terrorists in Yemen with a missile strike while they're driving a car with their family and no one cares. We kick that same person's ass while they're in custody and we're ready to storm the Bastille.

It even happens to "civilian" criminals. People like Jeffrey Dahmer get convicted, but don't get the death penalty. Then they're put into the general prison population or are "accidentally" left in the open in prison, and are murdered by a lifer with nothing to lose. You get the result you want in a perfectly legal way without the pesky procedural hurdles.

I am being facetious, but maybe I'm not sure if I am. People want to impeach Obama or try bush for violations of habeas corpus, falsifying a legal rationale for torture, indefinite detention, etc., but they only complain about mountains of civilian deaths and terrorist assassinations that take place every day via arial assault, Predator drones, cruise missiles, and commando takedowns. No one says anybody should go to jail for that; that is just war, which is perfectly OK!?

It sometimes seems like complaining about poor seat padding on an electric chair.

that because we had a "noble" cause it wasn't torture? That is so ridiculous on its face, how on earth could she have uttered that. Even in some alternate reality where it could be true, I'm sure many would disagree with calling America's two wars in the middle east "noble."

You can also work in "a Catch-22 situation" where one is doomed no matter whether one is guilty or innocent.

Do you know what happened to the Dawn Johnson nomination?

Still pending -- maybe a Democratic super-majority in the Senate and a huge margin in the House will eliminate the excuses.

Is Obama as committed to post-acquittal Presidential detention as he is committed to abolishing DADT in the armed forces, or the public option in health care?

Does the word "law" really mean anything in the United States anymore? I think that, in a nutshell, is what is really at stake here. Is there any reason I shouldn't be calling the President the Dictator if this is allowed to happen? I can't really think of one.

Thanks for this Glenn.

Do you know what happened to the Dawn Johnson nomination?

Re Obama's due process: I hope everyone is calling the White House to complain about this travesty.

It seems as though Alicia Shepard's argument about the use of the word "torture" is morphing and evolving. Every time she appears on an NPR affiliate to discuss it, she adds new layers to the defense.

She's now written two pieces on the NPR website, where she had to clarify the policy the second go-round.

She's been on the radio, what? four times now? The Talk of the Nation segment barely counts because that was just a tag-team pushback between herself and Neil Conan, who admitted he was towing the company line before the discussion ever got started. Then, as I predicted in the thread before it started, came the plant caller who was so passionate about NPR's neutrality she just HAD to call in to tell Shepard and Conan how much she really appreciates NPR and their fine parsing of terms.

Now she's scared to have the coveted "Dialogue" with you that she wished would replace the "diatribe". I really wish I could go to her "class" at Georgetown and ask a few questions from the peanut gallery. Unfortunately, Shepard has replaced Cheney as the most shadowy creature from the Swamp.

Whereas Bush actually thought that all the detainees were "bad people", I think that Obama's primary motivation here is political. He thinks that due process for the detainees will lead to a political disaster: the inevitable release of a "known terrorist". So he's blocking all avenues toward that result.

In a real sense, the public is to blame for this result, since there is so much widespread apathy and misinformation alive on this issue.

"presidential post-acquittal detention power"

I'm sure there exist more dispiriting words than these, but I'm not sure what they are. I'm left to feel as though Obama's 4 years are to be endured in the same way Bush's last 4 years were to be endured. With the GOP in such disarray, and without any indication that they will recover their sanity anytime soon, for the first time in my long voting history, I'm contemplating the prospect of not voting at all. So, Obama's Hope and Change™ campaign plank really was an empty soup can he intended to kick down the road.

Alexandra Jaffe can call the destruction of evidence of Binyam Mohamed's torture black mark on the Obama administration’s promised transparency, but I'd be more inclined to see it as a blatant attempt to obstruct justice and would think it's a criminal act on its own.

"the role of a news organization is to lay out the debate" - Alicia Shepard

IOW, We'll talk about talking about it. It's a tested, tried, and true way to effectively sanitize something. See, it's all in the abstract.