Rachel Maddow Attacks Obama

This is interesting. Maddow rejects Obama's plans for Guantanamo detainees. I don't accept her argument, but here it is:



I think she frames the issue incorrectly as if it were a criminal law issue and Obama is proposing to "prevent crimes in the future". No, I think Obama is dealing with an existing war and is trying to come up with a solution to how you handle detained combatants.

During WWII, I don't think the US felt obliged to hold criminal trials every time they took some Nazis or Japanese prisoner. Nope. They simply put them in detainment facilities for the duration of the war. The US wasn't holding them for "crimes". It was holding them because they were combatants that you can't turn lose until they and their organization agree to end the war.

The fact is the US has already released some Guantanamo detainees that they viewed as "low risk" who promptly went back to war against the US. This proves you can't release detainees unless you are sure they and their "war" is over.

So here's a case where I think there is a loony left wing fringe that is attacking Obama for the wrong reason.

Instead, I would attack Obama for not releasing detainees who were innocent but swept up as "terrorists" without adequate proof. I don't think the "proof" needs to meet the criminal system's "beyond a reasonable doubt". I think it would be perfectly adequate if the bar were simply set at "preponderance of evidence" that is used in civil cases. (Remember the OJ trial. He was found "not guilty" in the criminal case because the jury did not think the evidence is beyond a reasonable doubt. He was convicted int he civil trial that the families of Ron Goldman and Nichole Brown brought against him because that jury found the weight of evidence of guilt sufficient. See Wikipedia on "burden of proof".) I have no problem with any country holding Al Qaeda militants until the war is over. Tragically this is not a traditional nation state war which means that ending the war is going to be very hard and likely a very fuzzy event. That means detention may be very, very long. But that is just a fact of war. Nothing criminal about that. Nothing unlawful about that. In short, Rachel Maddows is wrong.