Human Rights Watch vs. Preventive Detention

Add Human Rights Watch’s Joanne Mariner to the list of civil libertarians who dissent from the Obama administration’s emerging proposals for preventive detention. This is from a newly released statement from the organization:

“Pursuing a policy of indefinite detention without charge would send the Obama administration down the same misguided path as its predecessor,” said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch. “It would be a major break from longstanding principles of American justice.”

Human Rights Watch emphasized that US law provides ample grounds to prosecute and imprison anyone who has taken even a small step toward committing an act of terrorism. Preventive detention, which allows imprisonment on suspicion that someone will take dangerous action in the future, is unjust and inconsistent with US law and traditions.

Mariner adds in the statement that to shut down Guantanamo while preserving a mechanism for preventive detention will be to close the facility “in name only.” And adding to my clarification of my Friday post about Brookings’ Benjamin Wittes, an advocate of a constrained system of preventive detention, see Adam Serwer’s TAPPED post today and Wittes’ op-ed in The Washington Post with Jack Goldsmith.