My man Benzon pointed this review of Phillip Bobbitt by Niall Ferguson several months ago. I just read it. Now is the time to connect the dots between what McCain might be thinking and what Bobbitt has said. While I still think in terms of Barnett, I know he has updated the Pentagon's New Map which is several years old now. Barnett wants to be a change agent in an Obama administration but I can't square his tolerance of Putin.
It is becoming clearer to me that McCain has stood up clearly against GTMO for symbolic but also good reasons. I still blame Congress for not being proactive in making a reasonably modified legality work for Bush, whose intent has been right. Well, here's the paras:
So how should you fight terror? Like the British soldier-philosopher Rupert Smith, Bobbitt argues that the Bush administration blundered in Iraq by waging the wrong kind of war. As a victory over a suspected rogue nation-state, Operation Iraqi Freedom was a triumph. But the “war amongst the people” that then had to be waged to convert Iraq into an ally in the war on terror was a fiasco. Bush had wanted an old-style victory-with-parades. In these new wars there can be no such resolution (hence Bobbitt’s earlier coinage, “the long war,” which a more sober Bush briefly adopted).
To make matters worse, the Bush administration has seemed to glory in its contempt for the rule of law, even as it has posed as the exporter of freedom. A member of the Democratic Party (and nephew of Lyndon Johnson), Bobbitt is damning about the deficiencies of the Patriot Act, the “prison colony” at Guantánamo Bay, the use of torture and the willful evasion of existing law that has accompanied it. Yet many of his fellow Democrats (not to mention many libertarians on the right) will be stopped short by what Bobbitt says next.
Bush’s instinct was not wrong. In this war, we do need pre-emptive detention of suspected terrorists; we do need a significant increase of surveillance, particularly of electronic communications; we do need, in some circumstances, to use coercive techniques (short of torture) to elicit information from terrorists. The administration’s fatal mistake was its failure to understand that these things could be achieved by appropriate modifications of the law. By doing what indeed was needed, but doing it outside the law, the administration undermined the legitimacy of American policy at home as well as abroad. Bobbitt is emphatic: all branches of government must act in conformity with the Constitution and the law.
With lawyerly precision, Bobbitt explores the classic conundrum of the “ticking bomb”: a detainee very likely has knowledge of a concealed explosive device that, if detonated, will kill thousands. In such a case, because the ends really do justify the means, the right thing may indeed be to torture him. But doing so, Bobbitt argues, can never be legal. The torturer would have to stand trial for his action, though with the strong presumption that he would be acquitted if he had succeeded in averting a disaster. Under less extreme circumstances, Bobbitt suggests, it should be possible for government agents to use coercive methods short of torture (sleep deprivation, truth drugs), but only with the prior approval of a jury.
In that last paragraph, Bobbitt uses what I am now calling the 'Man on Fire' scenario after the Denzel Washington movie - that we may have our own type of 'legal suicide' agents who would be sacrificed to our legal system in order that they may pay the price of freedom to safeguard consent. I think it goes one step further than my 'Monsters on a Leash' which is essentially the Bush doctrine of not ruling out anything, but trust us, we're Americans. I think anyone who genuinely had issues with GTMO and waterboarding as elements of the Bush Administration that went too far, must be put at ease by McCain's hardlines.
With regard to what I had been saying about International ID and The Last ID and Posner's CT Circuit which seemed to perplex too many of my readers, I'll simply say this: Everything that Alberto Gonzales got in trouble over with regards to updating the definition of enemy combattants under the Geneva Convention - which ultimately resulted in civil rights being given to Hamdan who is not a citizen is what I'm talking about. We ought to seriously reconsider who is whom. Again, if we are not exporting liberty, then we have no Constitutional authority to treat foreigners as protected by the US Constitution. If we are we need several very well defined shades of grey, issuing from our Congress and State Department. Now. McCain's elimination of torture and torture-like practices does not fundamentally alter the standing of domestic terrorists and enemies in the long war. We need to stop treating jihadi enemies of the West and of the state as mere criminals and their entry into the US as criminal tresspass. They're spies, at least. Bobbitt understands something profound, I think, about this grey area.
Anyway, I want to know that McCain has considered Bobbitt. We are evolving neoconservative geopolitics here.
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