I will probably further piss off one of the rants on the Rec. List, but I do submit that I have something thoughtful and constructive to say about Obama's speech. I applaud yesterday's speech for putting torture prosecutions back on the table. But I kept listening to it over and over because it was so poetic that I felt like he could have said he eats children and I wouldn't have flinched.
What he did say, and what I wish was making Kossacks flinch, is that, for certain people, we will need to have indefinite preventive detention. Let me say that again: indefinite preventive detention not based on past or proven crimes, but based on our government's determination that you are dangerous.
As someone who is being indefinitely punished via a mystery "No-Fly List" and a 5+-year bar investigation--based on a determination by the government that I am somehow dangerous to fellow passengers or clients, I shiver at the notion that the United States should be able to preventively detain "people who would do us harm" even when the government can't prove they violated any law(s)--all in order to keep us safe.
Glenn Greenwald has a much better and lengthier discourse on this at http://www.salon.com/....
While Obama's speech left so many of us feeling great--especially his emphatic condemnation of the legal black hole that is Guantanamo Bay--he also advocated the creation of a new system of indefinite preventive detention.
I don't have the magic answer. But I am certain that indefinite preventive detention is not it.
UPDATE: Because so many commenters are pushing for me to give an answer, here's what I'd do, which I've been advocating on Daily Kos for years: TRY THEM IN FEDERAL CIVILIAN COURTS, WHICH HAVE SUCCESSFULLY TRIED MANY TERRORISTS, INCLUDING THOSE WHO HAD TAINTED EVIDENCE SUPPRESSED.
