Five months on, it's hard to tell where former
President George W.Bush leaves off and current
President Barack Obama begins.
(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
The administration of President Barack Obama is said to be seriously considering continuing a controversial practice of the Bush administration: indefinite detention of terrorism suspects without trial. The news reinforces the implications of a legal memo filed by the administration in March in the district court for the District of Columbia, which asserted the president's power to hold detainees without charges.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
The Obama administration is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil -- indefinitely and without trial -- as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The proposal being floated with members of Congress is another indication of President Barack Obama's struggles to establish his counter-terrorism policies, balancing security concerns against attempts to alter Bush-administration practices he has harshly criticized.
This follows on the March filing (PDF) by the Justice Department, which said:
The President has the authority to detain persons that the President determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and persons who harbored those responsible for those attacks. The President also has the authority to detain persons who were part of, or substantially supported, Taliban or al-Qaida forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act, or has directly supported hostilities, in aid of such enemy armed forces.
The implication is that President Obama has embraced policies he once rejected, and now plans to accuse people of plotting terrorism attacks and imprison them for as long as it wishes without going through the niceties of proving its case and giving the accused a chance to defend themselves. The policy makes no allowance for the possibility that government officials might be mistaken -- or malicious -- in their suspicions. It assumes that simply asserting that a suspect has nefarious ties is sufficient grounds for imprisonment -- an assumption that begs the question: Why should we bother with a judicial process at all if mere accusation is enough for conviction?
Last November, when President George W. Bush's administration was holding detainees without charges, the New York Times editorialized:
There is no authority, in the Constitution or in any law passed by Congress, for a president to seize and detain indefinitely individuals in the United States without charges. If the government wants to imprison such suspects, it should bring regular criminal charges against them in the civilian system.
The Times was right then, and that objection to indefinite detention is equally compelling now.
email J.D.: civilliberties (at) tuccille.com
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Comments
When the muslims surrender and bin Laden surrenders, when insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq surrender and wage war no more, then these people can be repatriated. Until then, we can't free them. They still consider themselves soldiers, albeit in a holy war, so we dare not turn them loose until the war is over.
I see nothing wrong with that. They were not forced to wage war, the elected to do so and not even as members of an identifiable national military. Therefore detention of any kind is far more generous than what internatiional allows, which is execution.
So, no. Keep them. Just be damn sure they are or have been combatants or aided and supported combatants against us. I don't believe we placed every German prisoner on trial to determine if he should not be kept until the war was over. We shouldn' start now.
We could however exercise our discretion under international law and execute these guys if it is determined we can't keep them locked off the battle field.
Straightarrow,
The key point in your comment is when you say, "Just be damn sure they are or have been combatants or aided and supported combatants against us."
Right now, all we have is the government's word that these are bad guys. Maybe the government is mistaken, maybe these guys were innocents rounded up and "sold" to the U.S. by their enemies in Afghanistan (the U.S. has paid bounties), or maybe they looked at the wrong CIA agent or soldier cross-eyed. That's the whole point behind the call for fair trials: So we know that the guys we're imprisoning are guilty of something.
I do not agree that they get trials. However, I would support a trial of the facts the capturers used in the capture and/or detention. If the facts of the capture cannot be defended beyond a reasonable doubt, the detainee is set free, we can kill him on the next battlefield he appears on. And the person responsible for the detention is investigated.
statement such as "We need to do this for safety." won't cut it. The invoking of fear is not a reason for detention. The person placing the detention had better have concrete evidence of the detainee's worthiness of the treatment.
No trial, this isn't a criminal matter. It is war. And we didn't start it. We can't afford to lose it, because our passing from existence is the goal of our enemy.
Fear of terrorists (blown way out of proportion, as more Americans die of exposure to peanuts than terrorism) clouds judgement...
The us vs them construct is a tool used to divert attention from the real "terrorists"...the personnel of our own government.
And, due to a thoroughly corrupt judicial system, trials in America often mirror the show trials of the old Soviet Union.
We were warned-by James Madison and others-about the hazards of rule by crises/emergency. Not only are these warning ignored, we seem unable to learn from direct experience...
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