Obama backs Bush's Bagram prisoner policy
US president Barack Obama’s Justice Department shocked human rights activists today as it backed the former Bush administration, saying detainees in Afghanistan had no constitutional rights.
In a two-sentence court filing, department lawyers said the Obama administration agreed that detainees at Bagram Air Base could not use US courts to challenge their detention.
The filing left human rights lawyers stunned.
“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 lawyer representing a detainee at the air base. “We all expected better.”
Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented several detainees, said: “They’ve now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law.”
Last year, the US Supreme Court gave al-Qaida and Taliban suspects held at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the right to challenge their detention.
With about 600 detainees at Bagram 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 US District Court in Washington.
Court filings claimed the US military had held them without charges, repeatedly interrogating them without any means to contact a lawyer. Their petition was filed for them by relatives 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 was reviewed every six months, taking into consideration classified intelligence and testimony from those involved in their capture and interrogation.
After Mr Obama took office, a federal judge in Washington gave the new administration a month to decide whether it wanted to stand by Mr Bush’s legal argument.
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said the filing spoke for itself.
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 continuing military action.
The government says releasing enemy combatants into the Afghan war zone, or even diverting US personnel there to consider their legal cases, could threaten security. The government also said that if the Bagram detainees had access to the courts, it would allow all foreigners captured by the US in worldwide conflicts to do the same.
