History's Hindsight

I'm almost always on board with Kevin Drum, but I think he's got a pretty distorted view of historical retrospection to believe this. Speaking about the military tribunals, he says:

Our children are going to look back on this the same way we look back on Japanese internment camps and McCarthy-era loyalty oaths.

There are many ways to distinguish this from those, the most important of which is that it is almost certain that all of these people will in fact be convicted, and thus go down in our history as terrorists and criminals. As such, "our children" will likely be a good deal less concerned with what rights they had obtained or lacked. I think the same would have been true if some large percentage of the interned Japanese-Americans had turned out to actually be traitors, or if McCarthy had been right about a good deal more of his outlandish claims.

In reality, what bothers us about those two events in particular is that so many innocent people were persecuted by broad strokes of injustice. That might also be true of the larger 'war on terrorism', but it doesn't seem particularly true of the military tribunals. We might not like the way they are run, but so far I've seen nothing to indicate that they are going to being used as a broad sweep against innocent people. I don't know exactly what all of those people at Guantanamo Bay did, but I'm pretty sure most of them are not innocent in the way the Japanese-Americans or the victims of McCarthyism were. I've not heard a lot of serious agitation that we have incarcerated innocent people, just that we're not giving them their due rights.

That does not mean I think the military tribunals are just or wise, but rather that CalPundit's analogy seems rather short-sighted.