Long-Term Detention

The Washington Post reports

The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts. The outcome of the review, which also involves the State Department, would also affect those expected to be captured in the course of future counterterrorism operations.

One of the proposals is

the transfer of large numbers of Afghan, Saudi and Yemeni detainees from the military's Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center into new U.S.-built prisons in their home countries. The prisons would be operated by those countries.

As part of this proposal, the US will

build a 200-bed prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for lack of evidence, according to defense officials.

This has long been one of the most disgraceful parts of the administration's approach to the so-called war on terror. The government has no evidence to charge these people with crimes, so really they have no idea if they are terrorists or not. But they get imprisoned anyway. Not only do they get imprisoned, they are denied access to lawyers, never charged with a crime, and given no means of getting out of prison. Essentially, the government picks up people and locks them away, perhaps for life, without ever having to justify the detention.

That this is blatantly unconstitutional is immediately obvious. (Among other things, the Constitution provides the right to habeas corpus, i.e. the right of a prisoner to be brought before a judge to challenge the lawfulness of the imprisonment, and a right to due process.) This was shown in the Hamdi case, where the government's indefinite detention of a terror suspect was declared unconstitutional. Hence, the idea of transferring the prisoners to foreign nations where things like the Constitution, rule of law, and American way will not get in the way of things.

This is despicable, and not a little scary. Just think, we get four more years of this.