indefinite detention

Liz Cheney for National Security Advisor!

…No, I’m perfectly serious. We have had to deal with two [expletive deleted] years of this administration’s clueless posturing on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: more, if you count the clueless posturing that took place before the election. And after those two-plus years we are now being told that the plan for KSM is that he… be detained indefinitely. No civilian trial. No military commission. Just keep him imprisoned until he drops dead of old age, apparently.

Gee, kids: are we finding out that national security is HARD?

Now, I don’t have a problem with indefinitely detaining the terrorist who murdered Daniel Pearl. But the White House doesn’t get off of the hook for this one. If they don’t have a clue – which they clearly don’t – and so need to crib off of the Bush years to get a GWOT* strategy up and running, then they should call in Liz Cheney for NSA. She’s got the right background; the right connections to all those grown-ups that this administration has been slandering, libeling, and generally maligning over the years; and, most importantly, putting her in the job will be a tacit admission of past error on the Democrats’ part. I don’t ever expect an open admission of past error; the Establishment Left is notably ungracious about being wrong, and I don’t have the energy to collectively beat into their heads the sense of propriety that they should have learned from their parents.

But we can certainly make them act like adults.

Moe Lane (crosspost) Continue reading Liz Cheney for National Security Advisor!

Annnnd there’s the White House turning back to indefinite detention.

Let’s see: Mark Sanford’s disgraced, Michael Jackson’s dead, that couple that everybody else in the universe obsessed over divorced or something, and the Democrats in Congress managed to pass the Twenty-First century’s answer to Smoot-Hawley – yes, this would be a nigh-perfect time to break the news that indefinite detention’s back on the agenda. The only way that it would have been better timing would have been if Tiger Woods had broken his leg again, in fact.

White House Is Drafting Executive Order to Allow Indefinite Detention of Terror Suspects

The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, is drafting an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war.

Not much else to say, except of course that this isn’t really a surprise. It’s Gitmo or extraordinary rendition; other countries need to be bribed or browbeaten into openly taking our illegal combatants, and they are certainly distinctly unwelcome on American soil. If I had to guess, we’re going to end up with extraordinary rendition – and no, that isn’t the right answer.

Not my responsibility, though: I voted for the other guy.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.