Could Obama Possibly Adopt the Evil, Despicable, Unethical, Unconstitutional Policies of the Bush Administration?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Obama’s intelligence transition team is unlikely to make major changes in Bush administration intelligence policies. How will that be received?

Let’s see what the “mainstream” liberals think about those Bush policies. We can get their unfiltered opinion by going to a respectable web site run by some law professors, The Volokh Conspiracy. Keep in mind that most of these comments are made by lawyers or law students; not by inmates from an asylum on an overnight pass.

Robert Farrell: (on the Bush administration’s detention policy regarding enemy combatants)

If you are comfortable with the idea that the government can point a finger at you, call you a terrorist, and haul you off in the middle of the night to prison, without ever having to prove or even to disclose the charges against you, you may want to ask yourself why you like living in a democracy at all.

Are you wondering why – in Bush’s America - Robert Farrell is still running around free?

In the same blog post, PLR writes:

Gitmo has been a long-term dumping ground for noncombatants like Boumediene, al Odah, the Uighurs and others, who are left in a legal vacuum for years on end. If they had been true battlefield captures, they would have been released from custody relatively quickly -- the military isn't interested in babysitting noncombatants.

The Left can’t seem to get their heads around the fact that the war we are in is not like the Napoleonic wars or even like the Great wars of the 20th Century, with men in uniform shooting at each other from well defined lines. Perhaps it’s their unfamiliarity with warfare, their obsessive desire to see everything within a framework that fits their world view. They have an idea of war and, like a procrustean bed; they will make all future wars fit that matrix. The idea that non-combatants by day can turn into combatants at night seems totally alien to them.

Here’s a thought experiment: what were the 9/11 hijackers; combatants or non-combatants? When did they become combatants? Defend your answer.


Randy R. – in what passes for sarcasm on the Left -

You're right! We should give up every liberty in order to maintain security, just like in that V for Vendetta movie. I also think the Bill of Rights is a quaint relic from the 18th century, and we should get rid of it. Including the Second Amendment.

Randy should give it a rest. Hysteria was a woman's trait.

Robert Farrell chimes in (again) with fears of a military coup:

An arbitrary system of detentions is not a safe thing because it is in the hands of the military; if you had to give a one-sentence summary of the most common way a democracy dies it would have to be "And then the military came in temporarily to restore order."

Actually, Robert, "arbitrary" (as in capricious) systems of detention are not a good thing in civilian or the military hands. Democracies are fairly rare in the history of the world. Most died at the hands of popular rabble rousers.

This from roan is fairly typical of the “reasoned” arguments conducted by the left:

…do people really believe that toxic, potently bad faith personalities like those of Dick Cheney and David Addington can ever be reasoned with at face value to an honest conclusion without taking stock of, and confronting, their bad faith and dishonorable conduct? Some people's arguments must be bypassed as the toxic and specious cover stories that they are - if one wants to make meaningful progress in ending repellent practices or excessive secrecy. Perhaps Greenwald is simply more motivated toward those ends, and less interested than Kerr in an academically-sterilized debate that seems more appropriate for a time after the worst of the ongoing atrocities have ceased

That, is hard to refute ...