[THS] Obama Wins the Right to Detain People with no Habeas Review

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25517.htm


Obama Wins the Right to Detain People with no Habeas Review

By Glenn Greenwald

May 23, 2010 "Salon" -- Few issues highlight Barack Obama's extreme hypocrisy the
way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush’s most extreme
policies was abducting people from all over the world -- far away from any battlefield
-- and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even
the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court.  Back in the day, this
was called "Bush's legal black hole."  In 2006, Congress codified that policy by
enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in
Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the
Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at
Guantanamo.  Since then, detainees have won 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought
pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify
their detention.

Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision
was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram -- including even those detained outside of
Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned.  Amazingly, the Bush
DOJ -- in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their
detention -- contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo,
then that person (under Boumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they
instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind.  In other
words, the detainee's Constitutional rights depends on where the Government
decides to drop them off to be encaged.  One of the first acts undertaken by the
Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The
New York Times put it, Obama lawyers "told a federal judge that military detainees in
Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a
key argument of former President Bush’s legal team."

But last April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the
case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that Boumediene applies to
detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram.  I reviewed
that ruling here, in which Judge Bates explained that the Bagram detainees are
"virtually identical to the detainees in Boumediene," and that the Constitutional issue
was exactly the same:  namely, "the concern that the President could move detainees
physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely."

But the Obama administration was undeterred by this loss.  They quickly appealed
Judge Bates' ruling.  As the NYT put it about that appeal:  "The decision signaled
that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to
imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight."  Today,
a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the Bush/Obama
position, holding that even detainees abducted outside of Afghanistan and then
shipped to Bagram have no right to contest the legitimacy of their detention in a U.S.
federal court, because Boumediene does not apply to prisons located within war
zones (such as Afghanistan).

So congratulations to the United States and Barack Obama for winning the power to
abduct people anywhere in the world and then imprison them for as long as they
want with no judicial review of any kind.  When the Boumediene decision was issued
in the middle of the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain called it "one of the
worst decisions in the history of this country."  But Obama hailed it as "a rejection of
the Bush Administration's attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo," and
he praised the Court for "rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and
respecting habeas corpus."  Even worse, when Obama went to the Senate floor in
September, 2006, to speak against the habeas-denying provisions of the Military
Commissions Act, this is what he melodramatically intoned:



    As a parent, I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family
members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo
without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to
prove their innocence. . . .

    By giving suspects a chance -- even one chance -- to challenge the terms of their
detention in court, to have a judge confirm that the Government has detained the
right person for the right suspicions, we could solve this problem without harming
our efforts in the war on terror one bit. . . .

    Most of us have been willing to make some sacrifices because we know that, in the
end, it helps to make us safer.  But restricting somebody's right to challenge their
imprisonment indefinitely is not going to make us safer. In fact, recent evidence
shows it is probably making us less safe.

Can you smell the hypocrisy?  How could anyone miss its pungent, suffocating odor?
Apparently, what Obama called "a legal black hole at Guantanamo" is a heinous
injustice, but "a legal black hole at Bagram" is the Embodiment of Hope.  And
evidently, Obama would only feel "terror" if his child were abducted and taken to
Guantanamo and imprisoned "without even getting one chance to ask why and prove
their innocence."  But if the very same child were instead taken to Bagram and
treated exactly the same way, that would be called Justice -- or, to use his jargon,
Pragmatism.  And what kind of person hails a Supreme Court decision as "protecting
our core values" -- as Obama said of Boumediene -- only to then turn around and
make a complete mockery of that ruling by insisting that the Cherished, Sacred
Rights it recognized are purely a function of where the President orders a detainee-
carrying military plane to land?

Independently, what happened to Obama's eloquent insistence that "restricting
somebody's right to challenge their imprisonment indefinitely is not going to make us
safer; in fact, recent evidence shows it is probably making us less safe"?  How does
our policy of invading Afghanistan and then putting people at Bagram with no
charges of any kind dispose people in that country, and the broader Muslim world, to
the United States?  If a country invaded the U.S. and set up prisons where Americans
from around the world where detained indefinitely and denied all rights to have their
detention reviewed, how would it dispose you to the country which was doing that?

One other point:  this decision is likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court, which
serves to further highlight how important the Kagan-for-Stevens replacement could
be.  If the Court were to accept the appeal, Kagan would be required to recuse
herself (since it was her Solicitor General's office that argued the administration's
position here), which means that a 4-4 ruling would be likely, thus leaving this
appellate decision undisturbed.  More broadly, though, if Kagan were as sympathetic
to Obama's executive power claims as her colleagues in the Obama administration
are, then her confirmation could easily convert decisions on these types of questions
from a 5-4 victory (which is what Boumediene was, with Stevens in the majority) into
a 5-4 defeat.  Maybe we should try to find out what her views are before putting her
on that Court for the next 40 years?

This is what Barack Obama has done to the habeas clause of the Constitution:  if you
are in Thailand (as one of the petitioners in this case was) and the U.S. abducts you
and flies you to Guantanamo, then you have the right to have a federal court
determine if there is sufficient evidence to hold you.  If, however, President Obama
orders that you be taken to from Thailand to Bagram rather than to Guantanamo,
then you will have no rights of any kind, and he can order you detained there
indefinitely without any right to a habeas review.  That type of change is so very
inspiring -- almost an exact replica of his vow to close Guantanamo . . . all in order to
move its core attributes (including indefinite detention) a few thousand miles North to
Thompson, Illinois.

Real estate agents have long emphasized "location, location, location" as the all-
determining market factor.  Before we elected this Constitutional Scholar as
Commander-in-Chief, who knew that this platitude also shaped our entire
Constitution?



UPDATE:  Law Professor Steve Vladeck has more on the ruling, including "the
perverse incentive that today's decision supports," as predicted by Justice Scalia in
his Boumediene dissent:  namely, that a President attempting to deny Constitutional
rights to detainees can simply transfer them to a "war zone" instead of to
Guantanamo and then claim that courts cannot interfere in the detention.  Barack
Obama quickly adopted that tactic for rendering the rights in Boumediene moot --
the same rights which, less than two years ago, he was praising the Supreme Court
for safeguarding and lambasting the Bush administration for denying.  Vladeck also
explains why the appellate court's caveat -- that overt government manipulation to
evade habeas rights (i.e., shipping them to a war zone with the specific intent of
avoiding Boumediene) might alter the calculus -- is rather meaningless.



UPDATE II:  Guest-hosting for Rachel Maddow last night, Chris Hayes talked with
Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights about the Bagram ruling and
Obama's hypocrisy on these issues, and it was quite good, including a video clip of
the 2006 Obama speech I excerpted above:

And in The New York Times, Charlie Savage has a typically thorough examination of
the impact of the ruling.  As he writes:  "The decision was a broad victory for the
Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite
periods without judicial oversight."  But GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham (author of the
habeas-denying provision in the Military Commissions Act) "called the ruling a 'big
win' and praised the administration for appealing the lower court’s ruling," and that's
what really matters.