[Fwd: [Marxism] Obama Backs Bush On Bagram Detainees]

[Charles Cornell]

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Subject: 	[Marxism] Obama Backs Bush On Bagram Detainees
Date: 	Sat, 21 Feb 2009 09:59:01 -0500
From: 	Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com>
Reply-To: 	Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
<marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu>
To: 	aorta <aorta at home.nl>



(This is the lead article on Huffington Post today. Let's hope the
gloves are coming off.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/20/obama-backs-bush-on-bagra_n_168766.html
Obama Backs Bush On Bagram Detainees
NEDRA PICKLER and MATT APUZZO | February 20, 2009 07:48 PM EST | AP

WASHINGTON — 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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