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| Maori prisoners in the Waikato Wars. Illustrated London News, February 1864, from New Zealand History Online. |
You read it here first. Or you could have, anyway, if you wanted to. When President Obama issued his signing statement with the signature of the noxious National Defense Authorization Act, last New Year's Eve, I was online almost instantly to let you know that it didn't look so bad after all—that I was pretty sure that he at least really really disliked putting people under indefinite military detention.
Now, from Talking Points Memo via Vyan at Kos, we've got the administration's [jump]
guidelines on how the law is to be interpreted, and it looks just about impossible to put anybody under indefinite detention at all unless they're already there:
Under broadly written categorical waivers carved out by the Obama administration, the military custody requirement will be waived if the suspect’s home country objected to military custody; if the individual is a lawful permanent resident arrested in the country or for conduct conducted in the country; when a suspect is originally charged with something other than a terrorism offense; when a person is originally arrested by state or local law enforcement; when a transfer to military custody “could interfere with efforts to secure an individual’s cooperation or confession”; or when transferring an individual might interfere with joint trials with other defendants.
President Obama also said that the Attorney General, working with other national security officials, has the ability to issue additional waivers for “categories of conduct, or for categories of individuals, or on an individual case-by-case basis, when doing so is in the interest of national security.”As TPM quotes Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, the routine has "read this law virtually out of existence."
A big reason for that political Observer's Paradox I was talking about a month ago—the way our observations of the news have a kind of curious quantum effect on what the news is—is, to put it simply, the Internet as it has developed over the past ten years or so, and the fact that it delivers the news somewhat faster than it actually progresses.
And this is especially complicated by Obama's habit of rolling out the news with extreme deliberation, a professorial attempt to get the audience to focus, perhaps, with the sequence of carefully staged leak-like events followed by the actual announcement followed by the explanation followed by the laying out of the details followed by the effective date of whatever it is, which can be several years after those first signals.
In the meantime the rest of us are focused on the position of the idea: is it left, is it right, how far, to what degree? The emoprogs, the legalists, and the folks like me who like to call themselves "left" will have begun to howl on the basis of the earliest approximations of what Obama has in mind—that whatever plan it may be gives up everything to the right already, and now he's sending it out for further compromises—while the right screams socialism, fascism, Islamism, Mau-Mau terror, and everything else their fear-crazed imaginations can come up with.
And when the thing finally materializes we can't see where—or whether—we've managed to push it; it's moved somehow outside the region we were quarreling in, and whatever judgment we want to make has the character of open-mouthed surprise. The credit card company can't raise our interest rate on the basis of a late payment? The insurance company can't demand a copay for a preventing care visit? Uh... okay. In fact awesome, but... what about those drones? And the drones are in some different phase where Obama doesn't want to talk about them at all.
I've been trying to read online a little bit less and old-fashioned periodicals a little bit more. I'm unlikely to be scooping anything any more, as I did (in my non-humble opinion) with that New Year's Eve announcement. Hopefully, in return I'll be getting a little more judicious, and before I try to change the story I'll let the story change me.
