that unpopular bill of rights thingy

Uh, what? The arguments aren't very good?

How about we have somebody making them, like say, the President who ran on a campaign that opposed such abuses?

Like those of that dreaded previous administration. Same as the new.

The problem is not that civil liberties freaks like me have "weak arguments" within the public sphere. The problem is that the natural party for endorsing them and most likely to have raised a great furor during the last decade is...in power. And not complaining about the powers they get to abuse now. As Greenwald notes, civil liberties are the last thing we should leave up to public opinions. Constitutional constraints on government power are essential not merely so that reviled groups like criminals or terrorists "get away" or escape with milder punishments (say: not tortured as a start...), but mostly so that majorities of the public are not subject to abuses of power for either petty reasons or because they are perceived as part of a reviled group themselves. Once it becomes clear that a power exists for a government, it will use it. It will not limit itself to our well-intended targets. All will suffer.

The proper question for people who support these expansive views of authoritarian states to prosecute terrorism is not to ask things like "what do I have to hide", with the assumption being "nothing" but instead to ask what they would do should they become targeted and accused, wrongly, by the state of a crime they submit should be condemned and treated with the strongest and harshest possible methods, with chains of evidence and due process abandoned as their normal recourse for justice. In other words, imagine they are part of the accused and reviled minority, but completely and obviously innocent. What escape routes would they want for themselves in that circumstance? Because granting a government such broad powers all but guarantees that some of its targets will be innocents such as themselves. Governments are composed of human beings. They are capable of errors, of petty jealousies and personal agendas that they will carry with them to perform public duties. These errors must be, if at all possible, correctable. These biases should be, wherever possible, removed. At the moment, we have methods to do neither in the prosecution of this war. Ultimately that means the main casualty is most likely our own freedoms.

The next most essential question to ask people is what, precisely, has changed in our approach on this problem of international terrorism. We don't torture people anymore. Okay, well that more or less stopped in 2006. We can still rendition people if we want. But we don't, we end up killing them in drone strikes or military actions or letting these other countries that we might send someone off to (Pakistan for example) capture people instead. We still try to try suspected or captured terrorists in civilian courts (a premise that Bush-Cheney backers are quick to forget and try to paper over at every opportunity). We still have a prison system with a concept of indefinite detentions with very minimal legal avenues for challenging such things (something now codified by SCOTUS for sexual offenders, if you want to leave them to rot in jail, sentence them for life without parole, don't puss out and let them out in 10 years and then tell us "but he's still too dangerous to let out", we need to leave him in). We still put thousands of people on watch lists for travel and activity, again, with an obtuse and labyrinthine escape route for people who might be wrongly accused or associated with terrorism (and one assumes that if there really are hundreds of thousands of potential terrorists plotting and scheming, we might see more activity than a few fizzling bombs).

But set against that we are somehow told that the arguments for these civil liberties are too hard to make, or are flawed. They don't need to be flawed. They're the fucking laws that the government is required to obey, regardless of public opinions to the contrary. When it flaunts these requirements, someone should be accountable for doing so. We might forgive such judgments when they have demonstratively positive ends (say, stopping a terrorist attack that saves thousands of lives). But we should still have to assure that this is indeed what we achieved by doing so. We don't do this now. Many of our security methods are still justified not under an assessment of what they do in the real world, and what methods we already had available, but by "public opinion" or by an appeal to their supposed necessity and absence with the fond recourse of justification being "tough on terror" as a political cover for asserting a need for more powers than are necessary.

Quite simply it is impossible for people to appeal to public opinions and attempt to prevail upon them the error of their ways if there are not leaders and public figures who recognize the need for doing so and the disturbing lack of accountable and transparent changes and clean breaks from previous policy, with all its according dangers that went recognized with great frequency and vigorous intensity. A President who runs on reversing such policies, who then does not, and who is supported by a constituency that may naturally oppose some of these intrusive measures (in favor of others, but I digress), is likely to suppress such dissension when it stirs from his own ranks rather than where it serves his political interests by attacking his opponent. Indeed, GOP attacks and claims of weakness and naive prosecution of the global war on terror as some sort of meager criminal problem (something I dearly wish were so in many ways), feed such political goals as well, presenting a difference where there is none, and continuing to dampen the likelihood of reliable criticism. When instead such criticism is hit back with the presumption that "well the public likes this hard-line, police state approach and thinks it works", we who hold such liberties dear should not sit down and surrender the fight as though our arguments hold no water against such weight.

The problem isn't that the weapons of reason in our arguments are somehow newly and horribly flawed by the election and sea change therein. The problem is that there are fewer people willing to recognize the necessity of their deployment. I suppose the primary explanation for why that is, is that most people perceive that a sea change has occurred and silenced themselves. No great shift has occurred on this front. The lines of entrenchment are preserved, only with fewer now flocking toward and willing to man the trenches on one side of the engagement with the thought that the lack of activity means the war here is over.