Flickr/localsurfer (Creative Commons).The Obama administration has officially decided that it will continue to detain around 50 terrorist suspects without trial. And if the administration is taking this position with respect to people who have already been held for as long as eight years, “they will almost certainly take the same position with respect to people picked up in the future,” says Jameel Jaffer, the director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.
Pretty much everyone agrees with the idea that real terrorists should be in jail. The problem is that the government sometimes makes mistakes about who is a terrorist, or who committed terrorist acts. It’s made them before, and it will make them again. The Obama administration is just as capable as the Bush administration was of mistakenly imprisoning an Afghani goatherder or two dope-smoking tourists.
Thanks to the Supreme Court, these folks can now challenge their detention by filing a habeas corpus petition in federal court. But as Glenn Greenwald explains, “mere habeas corpus review does not come close to a real trial, which the Bill of Rights guarantees to all “persons” (not only ‘Americans’) before the State can keep them locked in a cage.” Shouldn’t the government have to have evidence before it can imprison someone forever? So the problem the Obama administration now faces is, as Jaffer says, “wanting to close Guantanamo without ending the policies”—namely indefinite detention without trial—”that Gitmo represents.” That’s a “purely cosmetic change,” Jaffer says. And as Spencer Ackerman demonstrates in his excellent one-act play, “Indefinite Detention Of The Soul,” there’s simply no reason for Democratic senators to support moving Gitmo if the change is purely cosmetic.
