Hooo boy this is gonna get me hide-rated, I'll betcha.
I'm listening to Rachel Maddow right now, and I'm finding what she's saying, in one sense, frighteningly naive.
Follow me below the fold....
In the course of operations against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and other operations throughout the world, we captured or detained many innocent people. We also probably picked up a few serious bad-asses.
What do you do with these people? The Bush administration's answer was, "Torture 'em all, we find a reason to attack Iraq here a couple thousand miles to the east..."
So we tortured the innocent people, which was wrong, and an embarassment or even international incident when we finally let them go. And we tortured the bad-asses, too, equally wrong, but which didn't do us a damn bit of good in terms of usable intelligence, but completely corrupted our ability to handle these people within any reasonable interpretation of our legal traditions.
What then to do? Please note for the sake of argument: I am talking only about folks we can reliably determine are legitimate bad-asses, where it is legitimately against our national interest to let them free, and yet... our hands are now tied in terms of any legal means for finding grounds to lock them up for a long long time. Let's also assume that the people we're talking about are not U.S citizens and were not captured in the U.S.
(If I were Obama, I would be ripshit with the idiots in the previous administration who set him up with this clusterfuck.)
What can be done? We can't let these people go, and we can no longer give them a proper trial. Please note, this is only a small subset of all the people in our custody -- most of whom should never have been captured, let alone tortured, and need to be released, with our apologies, forthwith.
This is what was bothering me about Rachel this evening; I'm quite sure Obama was referring to this fairly small class of people - ones we can't let go, and can't fairly try any more. He's going to have to make something up on the fly.