The bloggers over at Obsidian Wings keeps saying how I feel, except that they say it better, citing more durable sources, more interestingly, with more snark, and a wider audience. For a while there, when I wasn't blogging, it was partly because they kept pretty much saying what I wanted to say.

So I'll just link to the two most recent posts, regarding Darth Vader Dick Cheney and Obama's speeches on whether or not America is a Banana Republic tortures people lawless nation uses "enhanced interrogation", in which they quote this article examining Cheney's sanctimonius, callow, self-serving, nation-corrupting, callow, illegal bullshit and call out Obama on his incredible, 180-degree, misguided and cowardly decision to justify arbitrary imprisonment by re-naming it "preventative detention."

Yeah, that's right, I'll call Obama's crap, too. You can't have both the ability to arbitrarily imprison people and claim that your country observes the right of habeus corpus. Or, as hilzoy puts it:

The power to detain people without filing criminal charges against them
is a dictatorial power. It is inherently arbitrary. What is it that
they are supposed to have done? If it is not a crime, why on earth not
make it one? If it is a crime, and we have evidence that this person
committed it, but that evidence was extracted under torture, then
perhaps we need to remind ourselves of the fact that torture is
unreliable. If we just don't have enough evidence, that's a problem, but it's also a problem with detaining them in the first place.

Here's hoping I'm wrong, or this is a bone he's (inexplicably) thowing to the morons who are pro-torture, only to take it back later on.