Not really. You just have to do the right thing, the thing you promised to do, the thing you know is the right thing to do, no matter how the wingnuts howl and the Very Serious People lecture and your desire for political expediency nags you. It’s not that impossible. You have to be willing to override every idea of the past eight years, that “what if” is enough to violate someone’s rights, that secrecy is always better than openness, that the benefit of the doubt is always due government in these cases. But it’s not impossible.
Let’s not begin the Obama administration by setting the bar so low we might trip over it and calling something impossible when it’s just very, very, very hard and painful. I say this all the time: Don’t tell me you can’t do that. Tell me you don’t want to, or you don’t feel like it, and at least I’ll respect your honesty and know what I’m arguing with is just laziness and not blindness, but don’t insult both of us but claiming something’s impossible when it’s not.
The nightmare scenario in cases like these, by the way, is not that those on the side of openness are wrong, and someone somewhere is proved to be a terrorist let go on a technicality. The nightmare scenario is that those on the side of openness are right, and let their fear of a mistake dictate their actions, thus keeping an innocent or unjustly accused person from freedom.
A.