Send Gitmo detainees to Bagram?

Washington Times Editorial:

Score one for the Bush legacy. The Justice Department has embraced an important aspect of the Bush administration's detainee policy. In response to an inquiry by a federal judge regarding habeas corpus rights of detainees held in Afghanistan, Acting Assistant Attorney General Michael F. Hertz stated pithily, "The government adheres to its previously articulated position."

This prudent continuity in policy is pleasing, but opens up a contradiction for the Obama administration.

The central question was whether federal courts have jurisdiction to hear cases involving non-citizen prisoners captured in the course of military operations while being held outside the United States. The Bush administration's position, now adopted by President Obama, was no. Yet this was also the Bush team's position on Guantanamo, which it argued was constitutionally outside the United States, a status established during the Clinton years. The Supreme Court eventually, and with some legal gymnastics, ruled otherwise, which led to the initiation of the military tribunal system. But the Obama administration will extend even more rights to the Guantanamo detainees than even the Supreme Court thought necessary. How this squares with the position that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights whatsoever is hard to understand. The Bush policies at least had the advantage of consistency.

This reinforces the conclusion that Mr. Obama's stance on Guantanamo was less principled than political.

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In the event the Gitmo detainees were shipped to Bagram in Afghanistan would be whether the political question would go with them. Would Bagram then become the focus of a leftist hate campaign. My guess is that it would, but it would be harder for the Supreme court to much things up over there. I have always felt the complaints against Gitmo were made in ba faith by liberals. What we are starting to see with the Obama administration is the culmination of that bad faith.