Now it if does, and one of the reasons that it does is that they haven’t thought of the problem back from the root questions—what is the American national interest at stake here, what are the costs that we’re willing to bear to see that through, what are the alternative ways of addressing this threat, what are the acceptable pools of risk?—then it’s not going to do to say, well we thought about it really hard and we were well-intentioned and we were torn and we were trying to address this with the diligence and seriousness it deserves. At some point, you’ve got to really be responsible for the decisions that you make. This is an awful situation that they’ve inherited, but it’s theirs now.

I would also say I’ve encountered in the administration a number of people who’ve read not just Stewart’s interview with the FT but his London Review of Books piece, which was a real ground-breaking piece in terms of opening up the debate in Afghanistan and expressing a lot of fears that people had, particularly fears that the debate was too constrained. That was really a very influential piece, including within the Obama administration.

GM: We’ve had eight months now to see how the Obama administration addresses these issues. Has there been anything that’s surprised you about the approach he’s taken?

SA: I have to say I’m surprised by the preventive detention stuff. I’m waiting to see what he’ll actually produce as a plan, but he accepted a category of detainees—those who are too dangerous to release, but against whom the evidence is insufficient to charge. What I expected, from a campaign that talked a tremendous amount about not being constrained by old methods of thinking, and by a group of people that considered themselves, particularly on legal questions, to be more rigorous than the Bush administration, would be an exploration of the question: If we don’t have the evidence to justify charging them, or to justify detaining them, what reason do we have for believing that these people are so dangerous that they can’t be responsibly released?

There are others who really are dangerous, but the evidence against them is pretty decent, even in cases like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Abu Zubaydah, where they’ve been tortured. None of the torture stuff is admissible or should be, but nevertheless there’s good reason to believe that they’re the terrorists that we know they are. I expected the administration to take more of an approach of saying, some of these people are just people captured on a battlefield who’ve been through a series of rigmarole steps at Guantanamo that resulted in their presentation to the public as more dangerous than they are. And when the Secretary of Defense talks about a category of fifty to a hundred detainees, which is anywhere between about a quarter and half the population at Guantanamo still, that can be neither responsibly charged nor responsibly released, it’s an indicator to me that they’re not considering the option that perhaps they’re not in fact that dangerous.

GM: That’s a topic that Obama has taken grief from some parts of his base on, but it tends to be not a really high-salience issue with the general public. So how does the press go about holding him accountable on something like that?

SA: I think our responsibility is to present the situation in its complexity. There’s an audience that’s going to be interested in that. One of the things about the Internet, since everyone can access something like Google News, is you can go searching for what stories you want to read about. And national security reporters should report this and deal with the criticisms from their readers about whether the stories in and of themselves cover the situation they’re describing accurately, contextually and adequately. But just because more people, understandably, want to read about the economy or health care and that sort of thing doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be intensely focused on holding the administration accountable, particularly if there are going to be laws passed or executive orders issues that in significant ways transform the architecture of American constitutional law.

Greg Marx is a CJR staff writer. Follow him on Twitter @gregamarx.