Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
My colleague Spencer Ackerman seems to think I was being entirely too eager to praise the Obama administration for extending some minimal ability to challenge their detention to those held at Bagram prison in Afghanistan. Writing at the Washington Independent, he says:
The Obama administration is putting a new plan in place at Afghanistan's Bagram air field detention facility to bring indefinite detentions there -- a practice viewed as a replication of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility's more noxious functions -- to an end. What does it include? Assigning U.S. military officials, who aren't lawyers, to represent detainees' interests in administrative hearings, according to The Washington Post. And what does that sound like?"They're setting up what amounts to a CSRT," said David Remes, the legal director of the non-profit Appeal for Justice law firm who represents 19 Guantanamo detainees. A CSRT is the acronym for a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, the old mechanism at Guantanamo to adjudicate not a detainee's guilt or innocence, but whether he constituted a threat to U.S. national security. Detainees were at the mercy of hearsay evidence and had the burden of proving that they weren't a threat and the government's case against them was erroneous. The Bush administration contended that CSRTs provided all the process rights to which Guantanamo detainees were entitled. But in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Boumediene case that detainees were entitled to habeas corpus protections.
And so, Remes said, several years and several thousand miles later, here we are again. U.S District Judge John Bates, a Bush administration appointee, ruled this spring that non-Afghan detainees brought to Bagram have habeas rights, but Afghan detainees at the facility don't. Remes foresees a protracted fight. "We'll spend another four years going up to the Supreme Court on the question of Bagram [detainees'] habeas rights," he said. "It's another stall. And one I would have expected from the Bush administration but not the Obama administration."
An interesting point and he may be right.. I think it's pretty unlikely that the Supreme Court will grant full habeas rights to detainees held overseas in the middle of a war zone, no matter how long that fight is kept up in court. I still say this is progress, though as I said originally I would like to see them use conventional courts martial and assign JAG attorneys to each detainee.
But I'm also glad that there are people like Remes out there who are not willing to accept it as good enough and are pushing for more.
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Comments
What with all the disillisionment I am feeling with Obama (I didn't expect to keep all, or even more than a few promises, but still) I am begginning to wonder if Mccain could really have been much worse. What do you think?
Posted by: valhar2000 | September 22, 2009 12:08 PM
First link is broken, Ed.
Posted by: Ranson | September 22, 2009 12:13 PM
I don't understand that "in the middle of a war zone" argument. If the detainees are actually captured in the middle of the war zone, OK. But if they're transported there from somewhere else, that somehow puts them out of reach of legal protections?
The mind boggles at the scenarios that loophole opens. It seems we're almost always involved in wars or skirmishes somewhere. And if they all end, and the David Remes of the world start clamoring for release, well, we can just find another Panama or Grenada to tussle with and move our prisoners there for the duration. Besides, what exactly are the boundaries on the GWoT™?
Posted by: ERinSTL | September 22, 2009 12:23 PM
What with all the disillisionment I am feeling with Obama (I didn't expect to keep all, or even more than a few promises, but still) I am begginning to wonder if Mccain could really have been much worse. What do you think?
McCain's domestic policies, especially those with the economy were so bad as to be outright dangerous. Add to that the fact that Palin was VP combined with McCain's age, and I think the outcome of a McCain-Palin administration would have been catastrophic for our country, more so than even the Bush administration has been.
Posted by: dogmeatib | September 22, 2009 3:43 PM
Well, Obama is already extending the power of the executive branch that Bush helped establish, he has not yet done anything to curb the excesses of the banking and financial firms that caused the recession (they have been bailed out, but they have not been regulated in any way to prevent further abuse) and, though he supports a stimulus bill that is thought by many to be necessary, that bill is already on its way to being turned into more corporate welfare.
Palin would not likely have pushed for health-care reform, I'll grant you that; and she might have done more than a symbolic gesture towrd the establishment of Christianity in government too.
Yeah, I guess Mccain would have been worse.
Posted by: Valhar2000 | September 23, 2009 3:57 AM
I really don't see any evidence that McCain would be curtailing the power of the Executive had he been elected. Obama hasn't done much regarding the financial market, really only talking about the need for regulation, etc., but given the other battles he's waging, I can really only "harrumph" that one rather than see it as betrayal of anything. McCain stated quite firmly that he didn't believe anything was wrong with the financial markets, he had as his campaign financial advisor the jackass that wrote the legislation that deregulated the market in the first place. His idea for dealing with the recession was to "take an ax" to government spending, Depression anyone?
I agree that Obama's stance on executive power is quite disturbing, but to suggest that electing McCain would have reversed that trend (in some magical mystical way not suggested by any of his statements or actions) is just silly. Add to that, as I stated earlier, his downright destructive economic policies and his psychotic VP candidate ... hell, I wouldn't have moved to Canada, I'd have moved to Mars, or one of the moons of Jupiter...
Posted by: dogmeatib | September 23, 2009 9:52 AM