Ooops, Um, Well, What the President Meant Was, Uh ... [Andy McCarthy]
The New York Times reports the following (italics are mine) from its interview with Pres. Obama aboard Air Force One — the same interview during which he floated engagement with the Taliban as the way to go in Afghanistan:
>>>During the interview, Mr. Obama also left open the option for American operatives to capture terrorism suspects abroad even without the cooperation of a country where they were found. "There could be situations — and I emphasize 'could be' because we haven't made a determination yet — where, let's say that we have a well-known Al Qaeda operative that doesn't surface very often, appears in a third country with whom we don't have an extradition relationship or would not be willing to prosecute, but we think is a very dangerous person," he said.
"I think we still have to think about how do we deal with that kind of scenario," he added. The president went on to say that "we don't torture" and that "we ultimately provide anybody that we're detaining an opportunity through habeas corpus to answer to charges."<<<
Aides later said Mr. Obama did not mean to suggest that everybody held by American forces would be granted habeas corpus or the right to challenge their detention. In a court filing last month, the Obama administration agreed with the Bush administration position that 600 prisoners in a cavernous prison on the American air base at Bagram in Afghanistan have no right to seek their release in court.
Instead, aides said Mr. Obama's comment referred only to a Supreme Court decision last year finding that prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention.
ME: It appears that either Obama thinks all war captives are entitled to challenge their detention in federal court or he is not up to speed on what his Justice Department has been doing lately. But — assuming the Times is reporting this accurately — his remarks addressed people we will capture in the future ("I think we still have to think about how do we deal with that kind of scenario"), which means he was most certainly not talking about the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay — most of whom have been in our custody for years.
The Supreme Court's Boumediene decision leaves open many important questions, but the most important is whether the new constitutional right it invented, court review of detention for enemy prisoners, applies uniquely to Gitmo or extends everywhere on earth where the U.S. government acts. Maybe Obama misspoke, but what he said was alarming, to say the least.
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