There's never enough power to go around

 If our leaders were infallible and incorruptible, I could write fewer columns.
Take President Obama’s recent statement that he’d like a “preventive detention” policy for holding terrorists we know are guilty, but can’t convict in court.
If I knew that Obama and his successors would never use such a power to detain anyone who wasn’t a genuine terrorist, that might be a good idea; even Bush’s enemy combatant policy would be reasonable if I knew our government would never imprison any “enemy combatants” who were actually innocent.
Of course, those policies would still violate the Constitution, but if we had infallible leaders, the Founding Fathers probably wouldn’t have tied government’s hands by requiring “probable cause” before we spy on people or forbid indefinite detention without trial.
The Founders knew better.
As they put it in “Cato’s Letter,” “power, without control, appertains to God alone; and no man ought to be trusted with what no man is equal to.”
Even in regular court trials, with all their procedural safeguards, innocent people end up in jail for years. Locking people up without proving their guilt in court has unsurprisingly turned out worse: In her book, “The Dark Side,” Jane Mayer said that CIA analysts concluded in 2002 that more than 200 Guantanamo Bay prisoners out of 600 had no connection to terrorism.
Some Americans wanted Bush to ignore the law and the Constitution to “keep them safe,” and for some people, that’s still the top priority: Obama shouldn’t close Gitmo because everyone left is a dangerous terrorist (even though we know that’s not true), the “worst of the worst!” If we lock Islamic terrorists in American jails, they could use their mutant super-powers to break out! If we try them in American courts, some of the might be found not guilty! Forget justice — better safe than sorry!
Like I said, that might make sense if the government could infallibly identify the guilty, but our leaders are not infallible.
Neither are they incorruptible.
Countless governments around the world think the smart response to criticism is imprisoning the critics until they shut up (or forever); if we ignore the safeguards in the Bill of Rights, how long before someone decides that’s a good solution for America, too? After 9/11, countless right-wingers shrieked “treason” at anyone who dared criticize Bush; I suspect a few of them would have been happy to see the “traitors” locked up. If the “treason” never has to be proven in court, why not?
Bush kicked off a massive expansion of presidential power, but it’s not ending with him: Obama has retained, and in some cases pushed to expand, many of the same unconstitutional powers (the states’ secrets privilege, for example).
That doesn’t surprise me — presidents rarely want to shrink the power they command — but it doesn’t please me. And the longer expanded presidential powers continue, the more they’ll seem like the norm. In 2109, people could be looking back and marveling that we ever thought we had the right to a fair trial.
I’d much sooner see them look back at Gitmo the same way we look back on the Japanese internment of World War II, as a violation of everything this country is supposed to stand for.
Presidents don’t enter office swearing an oath to keep us safe. They take office swearing they “will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
We should hold them to it.