What a difference four years makes.
In 2008, Democrats were eager to draw a contrast
with what they then portrayed as Republican excesses in the fight
against Al Qaeda. Since then, the Obama administration has in many cases
continued the national security policies of its predecessor—and the Democratic Party's 2012 platform
highlights this reversal, abandoning much of the substance and all of
the bombast of the 2008 platform. Here are a few places where the
differences are most glaring:
Indefinite Detention
2008: "To build a freer and safer world, we will lead in ways that
reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. We will not
ship away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off
countries, or detain without trial or charge prisoners who can and
should be brought to justice for their crimes, or maintain a network of
secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law. We will
respect the time-honored principle of habeas corpus, the seven
century-old right of individuals to challenge the terms of their own
detention that was recently reaffirmed by our Supreme Court."
2012: Nothing. The Obama administration has maintained the practice
of indefinitely detaining certain suspected terrorists. It has also made
use of "proxy detention,"
by which foreign countries detain US citizens under questionable
conditions, although the administration did do away with the Bush-era
"black sites."
Read on...
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