BUSH CRITICS ARE BACKPEDALING ON THE TERROR WAR NOW THAT OBAMA IS PRESIDENT:

Even some liberals are arguing that to deal realistically with terrorism, the new administration should seek Congressional authority for preventive detention of terrorism suspects deemed too dangerous to release even if they cannot be successfully prosecuted.

“You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone,” said one civil liberties lawyer, David D. Cole, a Georgetown law professor who has been a critic of the Bush administration. . . . Benjamin Wittes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued in a book published in June that Americans needed to cross a “psychological Rubicon” and accept the idea that preventive detention was a necessary tool for fighting terrorism.

“I’m afraid of people getting released in the name of human rights and doing terrible things,” Mr. Wittes said in an interview.

He said debates over Guantánamo had created a mythology that American law permitted detention only upon conviction of a crime. Locking up mentally ill people who are deemed dangerous, he noted, is an accepted American legal practice.

Expect to hear more of this kind of thing, since Democratic Presidents get far less scrutiny on civil liberties than Republicans do.