The Anti-torture canaries are dying

By Dave Anderson:

The Obama Administration pinched several excellent bloggers for mid-level staff positions earlier this year. I approved of those decisions as I had read Phil Carter and the Balkinization crew for years and I trusted both their judgment and their integrity, especially on the matter of realigning our policies with our Constitution concerning torture and eliminating the illegal limbo of the illegal combatant figleaf --- either they're POWS or their alleged criminals until convicted by a properly constituted court with traditional safeguards for our liberty.

We saw White House Counsel, Greg Craig resign after he lost the bureaucratic battle to make Obama meet his campaign promise to close Gitmo and stop kangaroo courts. Instead we will have convoluted courts and due process sufficient for convictions instead of credibility.

And now we have Phil Carter resigning from his role as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs. His job was to close Gitmo and to shoot the kangaroos. He said he is leaving for “family reasons” and that may be true, but that is also the most common reason given when one has lost a high salience bureaucratic turf fight.

The crew from Balkinization is still in the Administration, but I expect those canaries to start dying as well.