Posted on 09/12/2009 8:54:55 PM PDT by STARWISE
The Obama Administration is reportedly planning to enhance the ability of prisoners at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan to challenge their detention, assigning the detainees a U.S. military officer to argue for their release and granting prisoners the right to call witnesses on their own behalf.
Administration officials passed word of the changes to the New York Times and Washington Post in advance of a court deadline the U.S. government faces Monday in an appeal of a judge’s ruling which held that some prisoners at the Bagram Air Base have the right to pursue habeas corpus cases in American courts.
The changes, set to go into effect in the coming week, got a skeptical reaction from some human rights advocates, who said the new procedures echoed ones the Bush Administration set up at Guantanamo.
“These sound almost exactly like the rules the Bush Administration crafted for Guanatmamo that were struck down by the Supreme Court or at least found to be an inadequate substitute for judicial review,” said Tina Foster of the International Justice Network, who represents four prisoners at Bagram.
“They’re adopting this thing that [former Vice President] Cheney and his lot dreamt up out of whole cloth. To adopt Gitmo-like procedures seems to me like sliding in the wrong direction.”
Pentatgon and White House officials would not immediately confirm the changes Saturday night.
In April, U.S. District Court Judge John Bates ruled that non-Afghan prisoners captured outside Afghanistan but later brought to Bagram could proceed with habeas corpus cases in federal court in Washington, just as the Supreme Court has allowed Guantanamo prisoners to do.
President Barack Obama’s administration has appealed Bates’s decision, despite a statement Obama made during the campaign last year decrying the Bush Administration for putting prisoners at Guantanamo in a “legal black hole.”
The Justice Department's first brief arguing that appeal is due Monday.
On Thursday, the Pentagon’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, defended the Obama Administration’s position that prisoners at Bagram have no right to fight their detention in U.S. courts, even though Guantanamo prisoners can do so.
“The Bagram population is a much more in-and-out population. There’s more turnover in that population. Many of them are transferred to the government of Afghanistan.
So, the nature of the population is different and our detention operations there we engage in very much with the cooperation and participation with the government of Afghanistan. So, I think it’s a fundamentally different exercise,” Johnson said in response to a question from POLITICO.
“The fundamental mission of the military is to capture and detain the enemy. So as long as there are militaries they will be in the business of capturing and detaining the enemy. It’s part of what they do. Guantanamo has become an international symbol counterproductive to our national security interests and we are determined to close it. It’s fundamentally different from Bagram," Johnson added.
Foster said Johnson’s comments about “turnover” would be little solace to some Bagram prisoners who have been held for seven or eight years.
Under prior procedures at Bagram, the Defense Department said military officers reviewed the cases of prisoners there. However, Foster said her clients were not allowed to participate in those reviews and often had no idea they were taking place.
Bates's April decision left open the possibility that the courts might relinquish involvement in Bagram detentions if the Executive Branch's procedures to review detention there were more robust.
"The....process at Bagram falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantanamo," the judge wrote. He specifically noted the absence of a personal representative for Bagram prisoners--one of the features the Obama Administration is now said to be adding to the process.
~~Pray for our troops
satan is truly in control with our federal government.
This is LUNACY!!!!!!!!
Remember when “commander zero” bowed to the king of “the holy places of islam”? That’s what it’s all about.
~~Psychos
Mirandize terrorits, tell troops they can't fire back when fired upon in a war, investigate the CIA, etc.
The list goes on, and gets longer day by day.
I guess all enemies killed on the battlefield have been murdered, because they were executed without due process....????..../sarc
The military is implementing a new review system for the approximately 600 prisoners held at Bargram military base in Afghanistan, giving prisoners there a military official to represent their interests, and the right to call witnesses and present evidence in their defense “when it readily available,” an official told the Washington Post in a report published Saturday night on their website.
Cases will appear before a new review board, as part of a new process that “is about doing the right thing — only holding those we have to,” according to the same official.
The announcement-by-single-paper leak of the new policy comes at the end of a 60-day period for Congress to review the order creating the panels, which will begin to be held this week.
Most of the prisoners held at Bagram are believed – the military has to declined to give the names or exact number of prisoners held there – to be Afghans, who are considered battlefield prisoners. (9:15 p.m.)
http://www.politico.com/politico44/wbarchive/whiteboard09132009.html
Gee, I may have been a Zoomie, but I remember a Bird Colonel giving a speech at a transfer of command ceremony that bellowed "We're here to kill people and break things, until they give up!"
I would assume the less chair/coffee-cup bound services would be more forceful.
/johnny
But I'm glad I've got a nice trash can with liner right here by my computer table, cause I may just lose my breakfast... oh.. and it was scrabled eggs with sausage in them, on tortillas.
'scuse me...
The simple solution to this mess is to take no prisoners. Just shoot the bastards and move on.
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