Read it and weep. In 2008 the Democratic Party platform denounced indefinite detention, racial profiling and warrantless surveillance while promising to “revisit the Patriot Act and overturn unconstitutional executive decisions issued during the past eight years”. In 2012 – crickets, not surprisingly.
Dems, at the White House’s urging, failed to revisit the Patriot Act when they had the chance. Indefinite detention, including proxy detentions in foreign countries, and allegations of abuse by detainees continue. The Obama administration adopted Bush’s FBI guidelines which allow profiling on the basis of race or religion. Obama took Bush’s “primacy of the executive” presidency as a precedent, not a travesty, and continued to build upon it. The next president, whichever party he is from, will likewise use Obama’s time in office as precedent to justify even more of a power-grab, as usual with a lame Congress’s complicity.
P.S. and just by the way: 2006.
Mother Jones, By Adam Serwer, September 4
What a difference four years makes.
In 2008, Democrats were eager to draw a contrast with what they then portrayed as Republican excesses in the fight against Al Qaeda. Since then, the Obama administration has in many cases continued the national security policies of its predecessor—and the Democratic Party’s 2012 platform highlights this reversal, abandoning much of the substance and all of the bombast of the 2008 platform. Here are a few places where the differences are most glaring:
Indefinite Detention
2008: “To build a freer and safer world, we will lead in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. We will not ship away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, or detain without trial or charge prisoners who can and should be brought to justice for their crimes, or maintain a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law. We will respect the time-honored principle of habeas corpus, the seven century-old right of individuals to challenge the terms of their own detention that was recently reaffirmed by our Supreme Court.”
2012: Nothing. The Obama administration has maintained the practice of indefinitely detaining certain suspected terrorists. It has also made use of “proxy detention,” by which foreign countries detain US citizens under questionable conditions, although the administration did do away with the Bush-era “black sites.”
Warrantless Surveillance/PATRIOT Act [...]
Gitmo [...]
Racial Profiling in Fighting Terrorism [...]
Torture [...]
The section of the 2012 Democratic platform titled “Staying True to our Values at Home” states, “We must always seek to uphold these values at home, not just when it is easy, but, more importantly, when it is hard.” The distance between the 2008 and 2012 platform shows just how hard it has been, and starkly illustrates the extent to which the Democratic Party has given up on its 2008 promises to roll back the national security state that emerged and expanded in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
The Nation: The Democratic Platform: The Good and the Bad, By George Zornick, September 4