I.
Barack Obama has signed executive orders (i) closing Guantanamo (within a year), ending the deeply flawed military commission system, and reinstating habeas corpus to so-called enemy combatants; and (ii) ending torture by reinstating the Army Field Manual as the sole unified standard for interrogation of prisoners. This is good, though as Glenn Greenwald argues, one of the most crucial issues now facing the Obama administration regarding our legacy of torture is whether “tainted” evidence — i.e., evidence obtained by means of torture — will be allowed in trials of detainees deemed “too dangerous to release.”
As Greenwald puts it, interpreting Obama’s claim that we need to create “a process that adheres to rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo American legal system, by doing it in a way that doesn’t result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up”:
There are detainees who the U.S. may not be able to convict in a court of law. Why not? Because the evidence that we believe establishes their guilt was obtained by torture, and it is therefore likely inadmissible in our courts (torture-obtained evidence is inadmissible in all courts in the civilized world; one might say it’s a defining attribute of being civilized). But Obama wants to detain them anyway — even though we can’t convict them of anything in our courts of law. So before he can close Guantanamo, he wants a new, special court to be created — presumably by an act of Congress — where evidence obtained by torture (confessions and the like) can be used to justify someone’s detention and where, presumably, other safeguards are abolished. That’s what he means when he refers to “creating a process.”
Amazingly, when discussing the same topic, Obama vowed that “we will send a message to the world that we are serious about our values.” How? By creating a new court just for accused Islamic radicals that allows us to use confessions and other evidence that we obtained through torture? That sounds like exactly the same “message about our values” that we’ve been sending.
One should say, as Greenwald does, that it’s not entirely certain that this is necessarily what Obama means by not releasing “people who are intent on blowing us up,” but rather that Obama hasn’t yet clarified what he intends to do with those who cannot be convicted in a court of law — because their confessions were elicited by means of torture — but whom he nonetheless (without trial) presumes to know definitely absolutely want to blow us up.
II.
In other news, the AP reports on Obama’s first ordered Predator drone strike inside Pakistan:
Suspected U.S. missiles killed 18 people on the Pakistan side of the Afghan border Friday, security officials said, the first attacks on the al-Qaida stronghold since President Barack Obama took office. At least five foreign militants were among those killed in the strikes by unmanned aircraft in two parts of the frontier region, an intelligence official said without naming them. There was no information on the identities of the others.
Pakistan’s leaders had expressed hope Obama might halt the strikes, but few observers expected he would end a tactic that U.S. officials say has killed several top al-Qaida operatives and is denying the terrorist network a long-held safe haven.
The United States has staged more than 30 missile strikes inside Pakistan since August last year — a barrage seen as a sign of frustration in Washington over Islamabad’s efforts to curb militants that the U.S. blames for violence in Afghanistan and fears could be planning attacks on the West.
The Times of London adds:
Security officials said the strikes, which saw up to five missiles slam into houses in separate villages, killed seven “foreigners” — a term that usually means al-Qaeda — but locals also said that three children lost their lives.
I post this story to ask, simply: do we think this is okay, bombing inside the territory of a country with which we are not at war? If so, why? Was George W. Bush justified in initiating this practice? Obama seems to have decided that he was.