COMMENT Barack Obama is taking fire from left and right on national security. The left says he has broken his promises and adopted Bush administration positions on indefinite detention, trials of detainees, and disclosure of sensitive information. The right, led by former vice-president Dick Cheney, says the president has ditched those earlier policies and put the US at risk.
Often it is good to be assailed by both left and right, and this is such a case. Mr Obama is correct to say that a balance must be struck between national security and civil liberty. His critics are blind to this trade-off: the left puts civil liberty above all else; conservatives do the same for national security. Plainly, these values can be in tension, and neither can be given a veto over the other. In one way, Mr Obama’s positions are indeed closer to his predecessor’s than he led voters to expect or is willing to admit. He promised to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, for instance, and suggested that he opposed indefinite detention of terror suspects and the use of military commissions rather than civilian courts.
