preventive detention

As long as I’m praising Marc “I Won The Morning” Ambinder, check out this rather significant data point he mines from a Washington Post story on the final dispensation of Guantanamo detainees:
Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be tried in federal court or military [...]

It’s hard to know whether this is good news or bad, but theoretically, at least, it could have been worse.
The Obama administration said on Wednesday that it will not seek new legislation from Congress authorizing the indefinite detention of about 50 terrorism suspects being held without charges at Guantanamo Bay. While that still upsets many [...]

A U.S. Marine reservist and general has created a detailed report recommending that up to 400 of the 600 prisoners at the U.S.-run prison at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan have done nothing wrong and should be released, NPR reports.
Lawyers have been making that argument for years now, but the United States has insisted [...]

Writing about the role Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan played in the Bush counterterror surveillance program, Marcy Wheeler, blogging for Glenn Greenwald at Salon today, argues that as NSA adviser, rather than CIA director (a position Brennan was nominated for, but Glenn helped torpedo the nomination by highlighting his previous role in the Bush [...]

It’s been one year since then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey proposed that Congress pass legislation declaring a new, expanded war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban — thereby granting the president the authority to detain indefinitely members of those groups anywhere in the world.

In my just-published piece on the Obama administration and Congress’s plans for military commissions, I quote a former military-commission prosecutor, U.S. Army Reserve Lt. Col Darrel Vandeveld who’s an unlikely commission opponent. A former true-believe in the widespread guilt of the Guantanamo detainees, Vandeveld ultimately resigned from the commissions last September after suffering a crisis [...]

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 has to stick with that definition in [...]

What I should have written yesterday about Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies is that she supports using an executive order on preventive detentions if and only if it’s a method of forestalling an overbroad legislative proposal to impose them. Even so, that position probably won’t impress Gabor Rona, the international legal [...]

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 Studies, have both written in support of the [...]

A letter to the White House asks the president not to expand a controversial Bush-era policy.