Monday, November 10, 2008

Gitmo inmates scheduled for trial

Apparently Obama is planning to have the people incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay brought to the US and given their day in court. IMO this is a good thing. It raises questions about how to handle trials involving sensitive intelligence information, but this should be something we can handle. If we can't, we need to figure out how. Just ignoring the whole question is a non-starter, it's an insult to the US Constitution which had the concept of due process written into it from the very beginning. At the very worst, we could for instance simply drop the whole "illegal combatants" concept and treat the prisoners as enemy combatants and prisoners of war. That'd take them out of the civilian court system entirely, but we've got a long-established framework for handling them from that point on without involving perversions like Gitmo.

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