Top-notch critique of today’s “let’s slap a coat of paint on and maybe it’ll sell” announcement and backpedaling regarding military commissions:

Let’s concede that if the U.S. is going to continue to try accused terrorists in newly-created military commissions — rather than under our normal, long-standing system of justice — then it is better to have more safeguards than fewer. That’s just true by definition. Let’s further concede that many of the past criticisms voiced about Bush’s military commissions, including some of Obama’s criticisms, focused on the specific rules of those commissions, some of which (though far from all) are addressed by Obama’s modifications, including the most important change that coerced statements are no longer admissible. Nonetheless, the overwhelming bulk of the objections to what the Bush administration did was to the very idea of military commission themselves. The controversy — one of the most intense of the Bush era — was grounded in the argument that there was absolutely no reason, other than to pervert justice and enable easy and due-process-free convictions, to create a separate tribunal rather than use our extant judicial processes.

[snip]

…if the state is willing to accord due process only when it is guaranteed that it can win, but then creates a new system of diminished due process whenever it believes it cannot win, the guarantee of due process, for rather obvious reasons, becomes completely illusory (”we’ll give due process as long as we’re sure we can win, and if we can’t, we’ll give you something less”). Source

Painting broadly now, but consider this:

Iraq, a country under martial occupation, while an economic and societal basket case, while riven by ongoing and constant political, partisan and sectarian chaos, allowed Saddam Hussein trial in a newly nascent and still unsteady judicial system under a fledgling, subservient government barely operational and in crisis, mostly in public proceedings and venue.

Can the U.S., a country of relative plenty, a country of social and civil calm, under no immediate widespread lethal or destructive threat and suffering no ongoing programs of internal violence, do no less than channel a few handfuls of alleged criminals through its own longstanding, primarily respected and proven, long evolved, publicly accountable judicial branch — as established by its founding document — for trial?

And under circumstances of justice and of incarceration which do not deliberately institute and replicate individually a curriculum of some of the most brutal and repugnant tactics of repressive power and abuse of authority often ascribed to regimes incontrovertibly engaged in and sutained by thuggery, barbarity and fear.

Wanting to portray ourselves as a collective portrait of liberty and to be held up as a standard of freedom requires much, much more than just talking the talk.