White House Drafting Executive Order to Allow Indefinite Detention; Move Would Bypass Congress

Seems our Mr. Obama, or whatever his name really is, is hell bent on escalating the horrors that the Bush years introduced to us all. What a good little neoZionical putz of a slaveboy he is. He makes my skin crawl. This just in...

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White House Drafting Executive Order to Allow Indefinite Detention; Move Would Bypass Congress
By Dafna Linzer, Peter Finn, ProPublica

Such an order embraces claims by George W. Bush that certain people can be held without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Read more »

In May, President Obama made a speech in which he announced that he was considering preventive detention as a way to handle "detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people." Obama never uttered the phrase "preventive detention." But that's what he was getting at -- while adding that "we must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category."

This week, ProPublica co-published a report revealing that the preventive detention plan might actually be issued via executive order, bypassing Congress. The news was chilling. As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote this week, "Americans should recoil as one against the idea of preventive detention, imprisoning people indefinitely, for years and perhaps for life, without charge and without giving them an opportunity to demonstrate their innocence."

And yet we've embraced it, asserting that there are people who are far too dangerous to even think about releasing but who cannot be put on trial because we have no real evidence that they have committed any crime, or because we've tortured them and therefore the evidence would not be admissible ... President Obama is O.K. with this (he calls it "prolonged detention"), but he wants to make sure it is carried out -- here comes the oxymoron -- fairly and nonabusively.

In a news week dominated by right-wing sex scandals, celebrity deaths, a 150-year Madoff sentence and a Latin American military coup, Obama's preventive detention scheme was largely overlooked. It cannot be ignored going forward.

Thanks for reading,

Liliana Segura,
Editor,
Rights & Liberties Special Coverage