Adam Serwer has a great piece about preventive detentions as the cover story to this month’s American Prospect. He takes the issue of Obama embracing a false choice head-on:

Frakt isn’t buying the administration’s assertion about the necessity of preventive detention — the practice of imprisoning suspected terrorists even in cases where the government cannot prove they have committed crimes. "When you look at the minimal amount of evidence required to convict someone of something like material support for terrorism, and they don’t even have that much, how is it that we know that these people are so dangerous?" he asks. Frakt’s concerns likely have a great deal to do with the way the government has treated his client — and not only because it tried to get his coerced confession admitted as evidence.

The piece is actually only superficially about Obama. Substantively, it documents the fissures within the civil-liberties community on detention and terrorism. This, for instance, is an arch observation:

A Human Rights First study showed that since the 1990s, 91 percent of terrorist suspects tried in civilian courts have been convicted, and the remaining 9 percent were later imprisoned on lesser charges. This is a conviction rate more suited to Vladimir Putin’s Russia than to the United States — something civil-liberties groups would likely be protesting if they weren’t so busy trying to get terrorist suspects their day in court in the first place.