Lindsey Graham on detainee policy — to the right of the ACLU; to the left of where Obama is edging

Lindsey Graham’s office has taken exception to a post I wrote called “Obama Edges to the Right of Lindsey Graham on Detainee Policy.” That post was based on a report in the Wall Street Journal that said Sen. Graham had expressed reservations about President Obama’s idea of possibly detaining some terror suspects on U.S. soil indefinitely and without trial. Graham’s office told me that my post is “utterly, completely factually wrong.”

In support of this claim, the Senator’s representative stated that Graham is a “strong supporter of preventative detention;” that unlike “hard-core liberals” and the ACLU, Graham does not want to give detainees the same rights as U.S. citizens; that the Supreme Court has given detainees the constitutional right to habeas corpus; and that Graham therefore favors a system under which a designated national security court, with a uniform set of standards and procedures administered by a civilian judge, hears the petitions for habeas corpus authorized by the Supreme Court, and an annual interagency review is conducted to determine whether the detainee remains a security threat to the United States.

I am happy to publish the Senator’s views on this matter, but no correction to my post is warranted because the post provided an accurate report on a Wall Street Journal article. That article said that Obama “is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil — indefinitely and without trial.” It also reported that Senator Graham is skeptical about the legality of doing this. All I said was that this seems to put the Senator to the left of Obama on this issue. I’m sure that there are “hard-core liberals” that want to give the detainees rights that Sen. Graham rejects, but I was comparing his view (as reported by the WSJ) to Obama’s tentative view (as reported by the WSJ).

When I asked Graham’s representative whether the Journal’s reporting was accurate, he responded that it was.

Readers are invited to compare my post to the Wall Street Journal story on which it is based.

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