Preventive Detention: "It's Obama-time!"

In 1960s South Africa, the apartheid regime resorted to 90 and 180 day detention schemes under which people were detained without charge. Any person could, at any time, be arrested and held in a prison cell without question. The regime wielded this power with impunity and used it to detain large numbers of people . . . including my uncle, Barry.

Barry was held without charge, tortured and later released only to be promptly picked-up again and held under the same conditions for another 90 or 180 day period. The situation was dire. It was effectively unjust imprisonment with no foreseeable end. Eventually Barry and my aunt, Sybilla, were left little choice but to plan an elaborate escape from South Africa. They fled to Rhodesia - hiding, so the story goes, under the back-seat of a Renault - and later to the United Kingdom; political refugees from a violent, ruthless and unjust regime.

As a child growing up in Minnesota, I heard this story from the people who lived through it and other stories from other South Africans who lived through some of the more oppressive exercises of the apartheid regime. Even as a small child, I thanked my lucky stars that I'd been born in the US, free of such abuses of power and the fear that comes with it. Today, I'm not feeling so lucky. I fear that abuses of power that began during the Bush administration are now being entrenched in policies championed by the Obama administration, including an abhorrent policy of "preventive detention," which sounds frightfully similar to the abuses of power by the South African apartheid government that I'd heard about in my childhood.

A few nights ago, President Obama spoke on national security issues and outlined a policy with respect to American-held detainees in our "War on Terrorism." I found appalling the way our President prefaced his policy with a heart-felt reflection on American values, the Constitution and the Rule of Law just before eviscerating those values, trampling on the Constitution and undermining the Rule of Law. In effect, his proposal is to convict those detainees that he can in our civilian justice system, if he doesn't have a good enough case for a conviction in that system, he'll go for a conviction in front of a military commission (one assumes the legal burden for conviction is lower somehow, though it's unclear what the advantages are of using such a system), unless the case against the detainee so poor even a conviction in THAT system is unlikely, in which case he'll simply imprison them anyhow - without any charge, without any trial, without any end in sight.

For detainees, to paraphrase another case of abuse of power, . . . "It's Obama-time!"