Hating liberty, loving safety

Watching Eric Holder fumble his way through a barrage of hostile questions from a Texas Republican on handling ‘terrorists’ showed how much the Obama Administration has sacrificed in failing to take the high ground on the civil liberties debate. The questioner assailed him on whether ‘terrorists’ or ‘members of groups declared to be terrorists’ would be allowed to enter the U.S.—presumbly in shackles from Guantánamo—and pilloried Holder for daring to resist his blanket statements about the sacredness of protecting that special class of bipeds known as ‘Americans’ from these weird creatures from outer space.

Holder stayed on the defensive throughout because he and his boss accept the logic of this debate on Rush Limbaugh’s terms. If safety from foreign bad guys is the only consideration that matters, then of course it looks weak or criminal to undo the Bush-era approach or even to worry about fairness. Who cares about the suspects? Throw ‘em all out or lock ‘em all up, just KEEP US SAFE. This is the liturgy of all dictatorships, and it’s been a popular one since the dawn of biped time.

Too bad Holder didn’t decide to defend the rule of law and remind his questioner that until a court declares that a person is a ‘terrorist’ or has committed some illegal act, we cannot proceed to punish him. Too bad Obama doesn’t feel strong enough—despite his sky-high popularity rating—to throw the Guantánamo disaster back in the Bushites’ faces and declare that since they seized these individuals and tortured them instead of putting them on trial, anything that goes wrong now is the fault of W and his enablers.

And too bad that no one has the balls to say that in a country of laws sometimes criminals go free and commit more crimes and that that’s the price of a system that protects the accused individual even if sometimes dangers are increased. The reactionaries would have a huge cow, but they will anyway. On the other hand, I’m willing to bet that a substantial portion of the public weaned on Law & Order, Miranda rights and criminal procedure would come around and eventually agree.

Montaigne writes in ‘On Experience’ of his dismay at a group of local peasants who found a man half-dead along the road and ran away instead of coming to his aid. When challenged, they argued that had they stuck around, the local police would have accused them of the crime, put them in prison, and no one would have done anything about it. Montaigne knew they were right and lamented not their inhumane but logical behavior, but rather the failings of a perverse and cruel legal system.

Now Obama continues on the slippery slope of pandering to the safety-at-all-costs crowd and further undermining our civil protections. His action is a shameful abandonment of the basic principles he should have learned at Harvard Law School. The amoral Clintons couldn’t have triangulated it any better, and Obama will reap the same reward they did—hatred from the rejuvenated right and eventual indifference from his erstwhile fans.