This Sunday Barack Obama repeated his promise to close Guantanamo. Since the media is still coddling their favorite son, CBS’s Steve Kroft did not bother to ask how. As Heritage Senior Legal Fellow Charles Stimson tells the Christian Science Monitor, it is the how that is the hard part: “It is easy to criticize. It is much harder to lead when you are accountable for the security of the country,” says Charles “Cully” Stimson, who served as deputy assistant Defense secretary for detainee affairs in the Bush administration. Mr. Stimson …
According to The Washington Post, the Obama administration is planning to “launch a review of the classified files of the approximately 250 detainees at Guantanamo Bay immediately after taking office, as part of an intensive effort to close the U.S. prison in Cuba.” Obama hopes to close GITMO quickly but, like so many of his other promises, reality will pose a problem. WaPo continues: “But the advisers, as well as outside national security and legal experts, said the new administration will face a thicket of legal, diplomatic, political and logistical …
During Salim Hamdan’s U.S. military commission trial last week, defense lawyers pressed FBI agent’s on whether or not Hamdan (who has been accused of being Osama bin Laden’s driver) was ever read a Miranda warning (the Miranda v. Arizona U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1966, which held that potential criminal suspects in custody must be informed of rights to an attorney and against self-incrimination). Hamdan’s lawyer told Reuters he intended to raise “significant new evidence” regarding Hamdan’s treatment in interrogations that could reopen the issue of whether evidence can be …
In the 2006 case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, four members of the Supreme Court joined a concurring opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer that said: Nothing prevents the President from returning to Congress to seek the authority [for trial by military commission] he believes necessary. … The Constitution places its faith in those democratic means. Dissenting in yesterday’s 5-4 Boumediene v. Bush decision, which found the subsequent Military Commissions Act of 2007 unconstitutional, Justice Antonin Scalia retorts: “Turns out they were just kidding.” The entirety of Scalia’s dissent is a must read …
