[Vision2020] The more things change the more they stay the same

[Sunil Ramalingam]

Disgusting.  If we hadn't beaten people to death there this might be different.  But we have, and people have been held there before being moved to Guantanimo and elsewhere.  

Sunil

Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 10:04:24 -0800
From: vpschwaller at gmail.com
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] The more things change the more they stay the same

By  NEDRA PICKLER and MATT APUZZO 
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration, siding with the Bush
White House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no
constitutional rights.
In a two-sentence court filing, the
Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield
cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The filing shocked
human rights attorneys.
"The hope we all had in President Obama
to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we'd hoped," said
Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee
at the Bagram Airfield. "We all expected better."
The Supreme
Court last summer gave al-Qaida and Taliban suspects held at the U.S.
naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the right to challenge their
detention. With about 600 detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan
and thousands more held in Iraq, courts are grappling with whether
they, too, can sue to be released.
Three months after the Supreme
Court's ruling on Guantanamo Bay, four Afghan citizens being detained
at Bagram tried to challenge their detentions in U.S. District Court in
Washington. Court filings alleged that the U.S. military had held them
without charges, repeatedly interrogating them without any means to
contact an attorney. Their petition was filed by relatives on their
behalf since they had no way of getting access to the legal system.
The
military has determined that all the detainees at Bagram are "enemy
combatants." The Bush administration said in a response to the petition
last year that the enemy combatant status of the Bagram detainees is
reviewed every six months, taking into consideration classified
intelligence and testimony from those involved in their capture and
interrogation.
After Barack Obama took office, a federal judge in
Washington gave the new administration a month to decide whether it
wanted to stand by Bush's legal argument. Justice Department spokesman
Dean Boyd says the filing speaks for itself.
"They've now
embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law,"
said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties
Union who has represented several detainees.
The Justice
Department argues that Bagram is different from Guantanamo Bay because
it is in an overseas war zone and the prisoners there are being held as
part of a military action. The government argues that releasing enemy
combatants into the Afghan war zone, or even diverting U.S. personnel
there to consider their legal cases, could threaten security.
The
government also said if the Bagram detainees got access to the courts,
it would allow all foreigners captured by the United States in
conflicts worldwide to do the same.
It's not the first time that
the Obama administration has used a Bush administration legal argument
after promising to review it. Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder
announced a review of every court case in which the Bush administration
invoked the state secrets privilege, a separate legal tool it used to
have lawsuits thrown out rather than reveal secrets.
The same
day, however, Justice Department attorney Douglas Letter cited that
privilege in asking an appeals court to uphold dismissal of a suit
accusing a Boeing Co. subsidiary of illegally helping the CIA fly
suspected terrorists to allied foreign nations that tortured them.
Letter said that Obama officials approved his argument.

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