Sunday, January 03, 2010

Gitmo, Illinois

"During his campaign, Obama maligned President George W. Bush for detaining our enemies, even though they were being held according to the laws of war. Now, Obama has adopted that policy (though for a new facility) and outraged the far Left. “Prolonged imprisonment without trial is exactly the Guantánamo system that the president promised to shut down,” said Shayana Kadidal, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Preoccupied with building the new detention center, the president has failed to set up legal rules for determining who can be detained. Prisoners facing long-term captivity without trial will inevitably seek to challenge their detention in federal courts, a right that they have under the 2008 Supreme Court decision Boumediene v. Bush. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has neglected to work with Congress to establish evidentiary rules governing these proceedings, such as how to handle classified information, witness testimony, and discovery rights. With so many legal and procedural questions still unanswered, Obama remains determined to use taxpayer dollars to buy and renovate a Gitmo look-alike so that he can claim to have carried out his pledge to close the original facility. This is the price the American public pays when a president makes a hasty promise without knowing if it’s possible to keep it." read the full account, A New Guantanamo by Stephanie Hessler

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