Is Barack Obama George Bush light?

This seems disturbingly real on the issue of terrorism. 

First, Obama has refused to release the photographs of abused detainees. He claims it will infuriate the Muslim world. That is true. It probably will.

It also should infuriate the American people. To claim that it will put American soldiers in harms way is a bit ridiculous. They are already targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. While it is true that the photos may become a recruitment tool for our enemies, ensuring that such atrocities never happen again is even more important.

If the pictures are as inflaming as Obama makes them to be, then he should change his position on prosecuting those responsible for torture. To withhold these photos from public view because of their disturbing nature, but not create a forum to assign blame, and thus, national healing, on this painful subject is disturbing in itself.

In addition, Obama’s decision to try detainees in military tribunals is a clear break with his campaign promise, despite his protestations of the opposite. Still, I am not as disturbed by this as long as there are tribunals and the endless incarceration without charge or trial ends.

Finally, Obama’s decision to create a legal justification for preventive detention is not merely disturbing but frightening. Any door opened in this venue is a door that will never be closed. The government, as governments have always done, will try to push it open further over time. What is done for terrorists, can also be done for domestic criminals. It would not be hard to draw the line from terrorist to gang members. After that, then what?

A political system that holds prisoners in preventive detention is morally bankrupt. Dictators and totalitarian societies do this all the time. They create a law that encompasses anything they want it to, and then imprison anyone they want to. At least under Bush, the illegal act of preventive detention was not codified. For Obama to want to place this under a legal umbrella makes Bush look like a second-string human rights abuser.

Probably everyone of these Gitmo detainees need to stay incarcerated and incarcerated for years to come. Yet, if we don’t have the evidence to try them, even in the limited rights of a military tribunal, then how do we have evidence they should be held? Is it all based on assumption? Or because the detainee threatens America verbally?

If someone is a member of a terrorist organization that has attacked the United States and that organization continues to promote further attacks, then that should be enough justification for a law that will prosecute these individuals. It is against the law to make threats against the President of the United States. If the evidence against these terrorist detainees is so slim that it cannot be proved that they are making threats against the United States, then there is no justification to hold them.

Hopefully, Congress will decide that preventive detention is not the answer. A new law may be needed to handle these terrorists, but it needs to be a law to prosecute them, not a law to begin the dismantling of the American judicial system.