I guess Glenn Greenwald is a “conspiracy nut” too

Apropos my blog on the U.S. Army and the Army National Guard running ads seeking Internment/Resettlement (I/R) Specialists, it seems that columnist Glenn Greenwald isn’t beyond opining that these Specialists might not be employed on foreign soil only:

“…preventive detention” allows indefinite imprisonment not based on proven crimes or past violations of law, but of those deemed generally “dangerous” by the Government for various reasons (such as, as Obama put it yesterday, they “expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden” or “otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans”). That’s what “preventive” means: imprisoning people because the Government claims they are likely to engage in violent acts in the future because they are alleged to be “combatants.”

After all, once you accept the rationale on which this proposal is based — namely, that the U.S. Government must, in order to keep us safe, preventively detain “dangerous” people even when they can’t prove they violated any laws — there’s no coherent reason whatsoever to limit that power to people already at Guantanamo, as opposed to indefinitely imprisoning with no trials all allegedly “dangerous” combatants, whether located in Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, Western countries and even the U.S. [emphasis mine]

[Thanks to Chris Ciancio]

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8:29 pm on August 5, 2009