Glenn Greenwald conducted an interesting interview with Charlie Savage, the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist, about the Obama administration’s national security policies and civil liberties. Here is the part I want to discuss.
CHARLIE SAVAGE:…You know, I had this interesting conversation when I was working on this article that came out this morning with Jack Balkin at Yale Law School, and he compares this moment to when Dwight Eisenhower took over, in 1953, and after FDR and then Truman had built up the New Deal administrative state, which Republicans hated, but then Eisenhower, instead of dismantling it, just sort of adjusted it with his own policies a little bit, and kept it going. And at that point, there was no longer any sort of partisan controversy about the fact that we were going to have this massive administrative state; it just sort of became a permanent part of the governing structure of the country.
And in the same way he said in 1969 when Richard Nixon took over from LBJ, he did some adjustments to the great society welfare state that LBJ had built up, but he didn’t scrap it. And at that point, Republicans and Democrats had both presided over the welfare state and the welfare state became part of just how government worked.
That in the same way, Obama now, by continuing the broad outlines of the various surveillance and detention and counter-terrorism programs, is draining them of plausible partisan controversy, and so they are going to become entrenched and consolidated as permanent features of American government as well, going forward.
It’s an astute observation, and one I have warned about myself. Some things concern me more than others. At the top of my list is a concern about governmental electronic surveillance. I feel like we are entering a phase where we might lose any realistic legal expectation of privacy in our phone and computer correspondence. I see Obama’s policies in those areas as a real threat.
I’m also concerned about indefinite detentions. You can question my libertarian credentials, but I am more willing than Greenwald to allow a degree of wiggle-room in cleaning up Bush’s mess in regard to some of the high-value detainees we have in custody. For example, I am not in favor of releasing any of the detainees that were directly implicated in the 9/11 plot, so long as the government is willing to explain how the evidence was spoiled and to hold people accountable (by prosecuting them) for spoiling it. But I have two major reservations. First, I have not been convinced that the 9/11 detainees cannot be prosecuted in a normal court of law. Second, the plurality of detainees seem to have been improperly detained, and I don’t want the government to engage in a cover-up of that fact or to create any new classes of people who are denied basic rights. I am sympathetic to the difficulties Obama inherited, but I can’t forgive a perpetuation of the same mistakes.
Now, let me address one more part of this interview.
GLENN GREENWALD:…I know I’ve noticed a significant change in how Democrats and progressives talk about national security issues in the past several months. None of them used to defend secrecy policies of George Bush or detention powers or the denial of habeas corpus, or the right of preventive detention, and of course many, many of them now do.
I don’t know who Greenwald is referring to, but I don’t dispute the legitimacy of his observation. As for me, I would not describe anything I’ve said on these issues to be a defense, exactly. The furthest I have gone is to say that there are a small handful of detainees that we have in custody that (based on what I know about them) I do not want to see released under any circumstances. Yet, I have not conceded the government’s premise that some of them cannot be prosecuted in a court of law. I don’t believe that. But, if it were true, I still wouldn’t support releasing them. In spite of this, I am not willing to just take the government’s word for their guilt.
I cannot believe that we cannot prosecute the people that worked with the 9/11 hijackers by training them, financing them, and facilitating their travel. If we cannot prosecute them, I need to know precisely why, because it is always possible that the reason is that they are simply not-guilty in every sense of the word. If they are guilty but we can’t prove it, tell me why we can’t prove it and put the people responsible for that travesty in prison. If this highly dubious scenario is real, the people will understand the rationale for bending justice in a half dozen cases.
But the real threat isn’t from cleaning up Bush’s mess. The real threat is the broad anti-terror program of the United States and how it has the potential to undermine basic civil rights and the rule of law. And, here, any instances of the Obama administration examining the facts and coming to conclusions similar to the Bush administration are instructive. Put bluntly, I stopped believing the Bush administration very early on and they lost their credibility with me completely. When a Democratic administration looks at the same set of facts and comes to a similar conclusion, that does make me willing to step back with an open mind and reassess my assumptions. I haven’t started defending that which I previously criticized, but I have, in some instances, decided to wait and listen.
But an open mind only goes so far. I may be newly willing to listen, but so far I haven’t been convinced to think differently on these issues at all. While I am willing to allow for a grace period and to potentially reassess some of my assumptions, my basic disposition is that the Obama administration is embracing an Establishmentarian mindset that favors unconstitutional invasions of privacy and that sacrifices core human and civil rights needlessly.
In other words, there is no question that the Obama administration is an improvement of enormous magnitude, but they still must be opposed on many core issues or we will simply cede our rights to the interests of a surveillance state.
