Obama’s Love of Indefinite Detention
Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective. Asked by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) the politically difficult but entirely fair question about whether terrorism detainees acquitted in courts could be released in the United States, Johnson said that “as a matter of legal authority,” the administration’s powers to detain someone under the law of war don’t expire for a detainee after he’s acquitted in court. “If you have authority under the law of war to detain someone” under the Supreme Court’s Hamdi ruling, “that is true irrespective of what happens on the prosecution side.”
Just no. Either these people are criminals, in which case they need to be tried or released, or they are prisoners of war, in which case they need to be treated as such. It is not acceptable to continue the Bush policy of indefinite detention. I realize that Bush and the cowards like him who approved of torture have poisoned the well, and I realize that this is a difficult political problem, but that does not excuse this kind of betrayl of American values.
It wasn’t right when Bush did it, and it is not right when Obama does it. The reason to be proud of America is not because you happened to be born on a particular piece of dirt that mapmakers call “America”. The reason to be proud is the set of ideals that America represents in theory if not in practice. But those ideas are worth defending, and the closer to those ideas are practice becomes, the better we are as a nation and the better we can make the world.
Johnson was asked if that meant that trials were sort of beside the point and he said no.
But why not? If the trials have nothing to do with whether or not the person continues to be detained, what is their point?
I can think of one: You only have trials of those for who you’re confident you can get a conviction so as to have a forum in which to say “See? We were right all along. These people are bad.”
There is a term for that: show trials.
I would think that if they are POW’s then if they are found guilty they should be released and immediately flown back to the country they were captured in. I would see no reason to release them into the general population in the US.
The March toward a System of Indefinite Detention continues….
On June 28th 2009 I posted on a breaking story, that Administration Officials announced in a press conference:
“The White House is considering whether to issue an executive order to indefinitely imprison a small number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, co…
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