Last Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other terrorists would be tried in a civilian court in New York City rather than before a military tribunal. Pressing Holder on this decision at yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee Oversight hearing of the U.S. Department of Justice, …
Edwin Meese III, the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation as well as the United States Attorney General between 1985 and 1988 released the following statement today on the proposed trials of terrorists in New …
Brookings Institution senior fellow Benjamin Wittes writes in today’s Washington Post: President Obama’s decision not to go to Congress for help in establishing reasonable standards for the continued detention of Guantanamo detainees is a failure of leadership in the project of putting American law on a sound basis for a …
In a stunning display of political cowardice, the Obama administration has decided not to seek specific congressional authorization for a prolonged detention statute for Guantanamo Bay detainees deemed too dangerous to set free. It’s the latest troubling flip flop by the president, an utter abdication of the lofty promises he …
The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration has decided not to seek legislation to establish a new system of preventive detention to hold terrorism suspects and will instead rely on a 2001 congressional resolution authorizing military force against al-Qaeda and the Taliban to continue to detain people indefinitely and without …
On January 22nd, President Obama vowed to close the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba by January 2010. The Washington Post reports today that the Administration is now considering moving prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to a maximum-security facility in the United States that would be jointly run by the …
If the experience of our closest allies in the war against terrorists is any indication, taking a pure law enforcement approach is dangerous, ill-advised, and might not bear much fruit. In the United Kingdom, of the 1,471 individuals arrested for alleged terrorist acts since September 11, 2001, only 340 suspects …
This Sunday on This Week, Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) echoed a point we’ve been making for months: Guantanamo Bay is a distraction. The real issue is how to best establish a system for holding accountable and incapacitating terrorists in a detention framework that is lawful, durable, and internationally acceptable. Or …
Responding to news that President Barack Obama is issuing an executive order that will immediately suspend the military commission system at Guantanamo Bay and shut down the entire camp within a year, Vincent Warren, the executive Director for the leftist Center for Constitutional Rights told the Los Angeles Times, “It …
