Prisoners' Dilemma
In a court filing on Friday, the administration announced its intention to deny Guantanamo Bay detainees full access to counsel to prepare their habeas corpus petitions and signaled that it would resume its relentless legal tactics to fight the detainees in the courts on a host of procedural issues. The administration also started to move forward with two sets of legal proceedings-- Combatant Status Review Tribunals and military commissions --to adjudicate the status of Gitmo detainees. These hearings purport to benefit the detainees, but may, in fact, end up hurting more than helping them. And in a separate but related development, the Army finally released its much-awaited investigation of the Abu Ghraib abuses. Not surprisingly, it laid the blame on a few bad apples, rather than any systemic problems in the military--and exempted the top ranks of the Army and Pentagon from any legal or moral culpability. Although these events concern different legal issue and different sets of detainees, they share a common denominator: a legal strategy to keep the rule of law out of the war on terrorism by whatever procedural, legal, or administrative means are available. [more]