Pentagon debuts new process for Bagram prisoners
Politico ^ | 9-12-09 | Josh Gerstein
politico.com
The Obama Administration is reportedly planning to enhance the ability of prisoners at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan to challenge their detention, assigning the detainees a U.S. military officer to argue for their release and granting prisoners the right to call witnesses on their own behalf.
Administration officials passed word of the changes to the New York Times and Washington Post in advance of a court deadline the U.S. government faces Monday in an appeal of a judge’s ruling which held that some prisoners at the Bagram Air Base have the right to pursue habeas corpus cases in American courts.
The changes, set to go into effect in the coming week, got a skeptical reaction from some human rights advocates, who said the new procedures echoed ones the Bush Administration set up at Guantanamo.
“These sound almost exactly like the rules the Bush Administration crafted for Guanatmamo that were struck down by the Supreme Court or at least found to be an inadequate substitute for judicial review,” said Tina Foster of the International Justice Network, who represents four prisoners at Bagram.
“They’re adopting this thing that [former Vice President] Cheney and his lot dreamt up out of whole cloth. To adopt Gitmo-like procedures seems to me like sliding in the wrong direction.”
Pentatgon and White House officials would not immediately confirm the changes Saturday night.
In April, U.S. District Court Judge John Bates ruled that non-Afghan prisoners captured outside Afghanistan but later brought to Bagram could proceed with habeas corpus cases in federal court in Washington, just as the Supreme Court has allowed Guantanamo prisoners to do.
President Barack Obama’s administration has appealed Bates’s decision, despite a statement Obama made during the campaign last year decrying the Bush Administration for putting prisoners at Guantanamo in a “legal black hole.”
The Justice Department's first brief arguing that appeal is due Monday.
On Thursday, the Pentagon’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, defended the Obama Administration’s position that prisoners at Bagram have no right to fight their detention in U.S. courts, even though Guantanamo prisoners can do so.
“The Bagram population is a much more in-and-out population. There’s more turnover in that population. Many of them are transferred to the government of Afghanistan.
So, the nature of the population is different and our detention operations there we engage in very much with the cooperation and participation with the government of Afghanistan. So, I think it’s a fundamentally different exercise,” Johnson said in response to a question from POLITICO.
“The fundamental mission of the military is to capture and detain the enemy. So as long as there are militaries they will be in the business of capturing and detaining the enemy. It’s part of what they do. Guantanamo has become an international symbol counterproductive to our national security interests and we are determined to close it. It’s fundamentally different from Bagram," Johnson added.
Foster said Johnson’s comments about “turnover” would be little solace to some Bagram prisoners who have been held for seven or eight years.
Under prior procedures at Bagram, the Defense Department said military officers reviewed the cases of prisoners there. However, Foster said her clients were not allowed to participate in those reviews and often had no idea they were taking place.
Bates's April decision left open the possibility that the courts might relinquish involvement in Bagram detentions if the Executive Branch's procedures to review detention there were more robust.
"The....process at Bagram falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantanamo," the judge wrote. He specifically noted the absence of a personal representative for Bagram prisoners--one of the features the Obama Administration is now said to be adding to the process. |
