I can't believe people are even debating this.

Our system of justice and the principles this country was founded upon do not allow the Government to hold people indefinitely without the filing of criminal charges.

If they did something illegal, charge them and try them. If they are acquitted, release them.

If there isn't enough admissible evidence to charge them, they get released and sent home. [More...]

There's lots of speculation that the Guantanamo detainees may be moved to Supermax at Florence, Colorado, home to the nation's supposedly most dangerous criminals. Not so fast. Right now, there's no room at the inn.

It would probably take the building of a separate facility. Or, the moving of our supposedly most dangerous criminals to prisons in other states.

As for the folks in Florence, many of whom have jobs because of the prison industry there, they have no problem with accomodating the Gitmo detainees:[More...]

Glenn Greenwald writes:

In the wake of Obama's speech yesterday, there are vast numbers of new converts who now support indefinite "preventive detention." It thus seems constructive to have as dispassionate and fact-based discussion as possible of the implications of "preventive detention" and Obama's related detention proposals (military commissions).

I hope by now my ability to disagree with and criticize President Obama is not questioned. Thus, when I say that I think there may be merit in a detention regime (the military commissions proposal seems fatally flawed to me as described) that detains known combatants in a manner that is compliant with the Constitution and the Geneva Convention, I hope my argument can be addressed seriously. I do not think Glenn's post considers the possibility that President Obama's proposal may in fact be such a Geneva Convention compliant detention regime. See also Kevin Drum. More . . .

President Obama told human rights activists today he's considering preventive detention for suspected terrorists for whom there is insufficient evidence to charge with a crime.

Translation: Just like Bush. Lock 'em up indefinitely without bringing criminal charges. A disturbing but emerging pattern: Every time Obama takes a step forward, he moves two steps back.

A little bit of progress. President Obama will announce tomorrow that one of the Guantanamo detainees will be transferred to New York for trial in U.S. District Court:

Ahmed Ghailani, suspected of taking part in al Qaeda plots to bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania among other crimes, would be the first former detainee at the detention center to face trial in the United States.

They tried and convicted Jose Padilla in federal criminal court. While he was held at a miltary brig rather than Gitmo, it's been done before and can and should be done again when criminal charges are warranted. We need to keep public pressure on the President. It seems to be having an effect.

As courts and commentators have attempted to define the boundaries of the president's authority to detain 9/11-related "terrorists" (for lack of a better term, the phrase "enemy combatants" having been jettisoned by the Obama administration), they have been vexed by the difficulty of applying "law of war" principles to a "war" that is waged by organizations or individuals rather than nations. The power to detain soldiers captured on the battlefield during a war between nations is well established, but does that power extend to civilian members of a terrorist organization like al Qaida?

Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees have argued that the president may detain indefinitely only those individuals who directly participated in hostile actions against the United States -- persons the law of war would regard as "unlawful combatants." Yesterday, a federal judge rejected that argument while taking a more limited view of the president's detention authority than the Bush and Obama administrations have urged.

[more ...]

Senate Democrats yesterday followed the lead of House Democrats who last week refused the president's request for $80 million to fund the closing of Guantanamo. According to Sen. Harry Reid:

"Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president. We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States."

Has Reid decided, without the benefit of trials, that the 240 involuntary residents of Guantanamo are all terrorists? [more ...]

The 17 Uighur detainees at Guantanamo Bay are fighting back against Newt Gingrich. Via Ryan Grim at Huffington Post:

Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs, detained for more than six years and counting at the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, are firing back at Newt Gingrich, who has accused them of terrorist ties and says that releasing them into the United States would endanger the country. The seventeen Uighurs sent their message to the Huffington Post through their translator, Rushan Abbas, who has been working with them in Guantanamo since 2002, initially contracted by the Department of Defense.

[More...]

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him . . . - Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Via TPM's David Kurtz, the Obama Administration says:

Mr. Obama’s statement on Friday said that “the use of hearsay will be limited.” . . . A memorandum describing the administration’s changes that was filed with the military judges said that such “hearsay admissibility remains much broader than in domestic courts” in the United States. One of the senior administration officials said that although federal courts bar many kinds of hearsay evidence, “the hearsay rule is not one of those things that is rooted in American values.”

On military commissions, a plethora of cliches screams out - lipstick on a pig -- meet the new boss, same as the old boss. What a disappointment Obama is on these issues.

Speaking for me only

The New York Times in an editorial today takes President Obama to task for his flip-flops on the release of torture photos and reinstatement of military tribunals.

It was particularly distressing to hear Mr. Obama echo Mr. Bush by saying that releasing the pictures would not add “to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.” This was not the fault of a few individuals. It was widespread, and systemic, the result of policies set at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

Mr. Obama was elected in part because of his promises to correct these lawless policies. He must create clear rules to deal with prisoners. And there must be a full accounting of what went so horribly wrong and how. Otherwise, Mr. Obama risks turning Mr. Bush’s mistakes into his own or, in the case of the photographs, turning Mr. Bush’s cover-up into his own. More important, he risks missing the chance to make sure the misdeeds and horrors of the Bush years are never repeated.

[More...]

Raw Story reports the torture photos the Obama Administration reversed course on releasing this week include photos released by the Australian news in 2006. Raw Story, as well as TalkLeft, published them then. (I've reprinted some several times since then.)

So if the world has already seen them, and a federal appeals court has upheld a trial court's order to produce them to the ACLU, what's Obama's justification?

Lakhdar Boumediene, imprisoned since 2001 when he was captured in Bosnia, has been released from Guantanamo and sent to France. France agreed to take the 43 year old Algerian because he has relatives there.

Boumediene has been on a hunger strike and force-fed since 2006. He's the detainee whose name appears on the landmark Supreme Court decision that held detainees can seek review of their detention through habeas petitions.

Boumediene is the second prisoner transferred to a third-party country by the Obama administration. In February, Binyam Mohamed, a native of Ethiopia who had lived in Britain, was returned to the United Kingdom.

2 down, 238 to go.