Technically, it's Change

But I think violating Habeas Corpus is pretty much the same no matter where you do it. Apparently, the Obama Administration does not agree.

During the campaign, Obama (and pretty much every other Democrat, Independent, and even some Republicans) regularly criticized Bush's policies in Guantanamo Bay. However, as the Washington Independent reports, the new policies being enacted at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan (one of the major detention centers in the nation) sound like "GTMO", Part II.

“They’re setting up what amounts to a CSRT,” said David Remes, the legal director of the non-profit Appeal for Justice law firm who represents 19 Guantanamo detainees. A CSRT is the acronym for a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, the old mechanism at Guantanamo to adjudicate not a detainee’s guilt or innocence, but whether he constituted a threat to U.S. national security. Detainees were at the mercy of hearsay evidence and had the burden of proving that they weren’t a threat and the government’s case against them was erroneous. The Bush administration contended that CSRTs provided all the process rights to which Guantanamo detainees were entitled."

The Washington Post actually heralds this as a victory for the rights of prisoners, since the new policies mean that indefinite detentions can be challenged. But the truth is hidden a few paragraphs down the page:

"Under the new rules, each detainee will be assigned a U.S. military official, not a lawyer, to represent his interests and examine evidence against him. In proceedings before a board composed of military officers, detainees will have the right to call witnesses and present evidence when it is "reasonably available," the official said."

If you're going to have a "trial" where the prosecution and the judges work for the same organization (in this case, the U.S. military), I don't think that really counts as a fair trial. Not to mention the fact that you would be assigned another member of the military to act as your defense council. Surely, this is a huge step forward for the prisoners at Bagram. Now, instead of being held indefinitely without a trial, they will be given a sham trial that will "justify" holding them indefinitely.

Just to be clear: I'm not saying that we should make it easier for terrorists to be released from prisons (least of all in Afghanistan). If we want to hold them indefinitely for being enemy combatants who are a security risk, then so be it. But let's stop pretending like we are giving them a fair shake.

Eight Years Later

It is that moment that my generation will always remember.

On September 11, 2001, I was just entering my first full week of high school. I was in second period World History class with Ms. Croley when the announcement was made. I was sitting in the third seat of the second row on the left-hand side of classroom #100 at St. Pius X. She turned off the projector and told us to say a prayer. It was a few hours later (in Ms. Cebula's fifth period Physical Science class) that I saw the video for the first time. I'm not sure how much later it was before I believed it was real.

Eight years later, we still haven't caught Osama. We still haven't rebuilt much of anything on that block in lower Manhattan. But, we also haven't been attacked again. I don't know if that's a victory or not, but at least its not a loss. The important thing is to remember those who died, thank those who have kept us safe since then, and (most importantly) to resist the temptation to trade our rights in name of security, despite the fear that might encourage us to do so.

Andrew Sullivan offers four things we have learned from the war that began on 9/11:

"The first is that total security is impossible in a free society.

I understand deeply the hankering for it in the ashes of the World Trade Center. But we should all acknowledge that a free society will never be able to have 100 percent level of success against those who are prepared to kill themselves in acts of terror. The Cheney promise is a mirage - and getting there could mean losing far more than we gain.

The second is that defeating this menace is not amenable to conventional military power; and that intervention in Muslim countries needs to be calibrated very, very carefully to avoid generating more terror than we manage to suppress.

The third is that nation-building and counter-insurgency in countries which are barely nations and failed states is a century-long enterprise. Occupations that long are imperial ventures. Imperial ventures can become self-sustaining. They are harder to end than government programs, because they are, in part, a government program. Unless they can be shown to drastically reduce the terror threat to the West, they can be ghastly errors. The war in Iraq remains such a ghastly error. The war in Afghanistan, alas, now another. A great power with the debt levels of the US right now is not Britain in the early 19th century; it's Britain in the early 20th century. Empire has to be paid for. And we have long since run out of money.

Fourth. We should not grant the enemy more allure than he deserves. Al Qaeda is now weaker than it once was - rejected by the people in Iraq and Jordan, decimated by the military and CIA under Bush and Obama. They did not have access to weapons of mass destruction, or they would have used them a long time ago. Smarter, more targeted detection, surveillance, skilled interrogation (not sadistic brutality), more skilled and culturally-attuned human intelligence: these are the skills we need."