Reports today that the U.S. military is calling for an overhaul of the Bagram prison in Afghanistan follow weeks of little-reported protests by prisoners there, who since July 1 have refused to leave their cells or participate in video-phone calls with family members, all to protest their More…
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 More…
Here’s another point I should have made in my piece earlier today: Just because President Obama’s Justice Department has been asserting a remarkably broad, Bush-like view of his detention authority pursuant to the laws of war in the Guantanamo detainees’ habeas corpus cases, that doesn’t mean the president More…
Since my piece on the intensifying battle over “preventive detention” was published, Ken Gude from the Center for American Progress wrote to point out an important distinction that deserves more emphasis.
As I note in my story, Gude and Kate Martin, Director of the Center for National Security More…
Ever since President Obama said in his speech at the National Archives that he believes there’s a category of people at Guantanamo who can’t be tried in criminal court or by military commission but are too dangerous to release, legal and More…
So just who are those “civil liberties groups” that have encouraged the Obama administration to issue an executive order creating a system of prolonged preventive detention?
As Spencer wrote today, someone in the administration told ProPublica’s Dafna Linzner and The Washington Post’s Peter Finn that yes, civil liberties groups More…
Serves me right for not reading my White House briefing transcript until this morning, but here’s Robert Gibbs yesterday talking about what looked on Friday to be a forthcoming executive order authorizing preventive detentions:
I think the President addressed the notion and the very tough issue that the administration
I’m still trying to figure out how the Obama administration could believe that civil liberties groups gave it cover to issue an executive order authorizing “prolonged detention” of suspected terrorists, as Dafna Linzer and Peter Finn reported on Friday. Ginny Sloan, president of the Constitution Project — which More…
Huge news from Dafna Linzer and Peter Finn. The Obama administration fears that congressional prerogative is going to get in the way of closing Guantanamo Bay by January. So its answer is to cut Congress out of the decision-making and set up a system of “prolonged detention” for an More…
On Thursday, the Supreme Court will meet to decide, among other things, whether to take up the case of Kiyemba v. Obama, in which the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., ruled that federal courts do not have the power to order any Guantanamo detainees released into More…
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