- Lindsey Graham says the White House now seems open to a new law to lay out the standards for open-ended imprisonment.
Photo: AP
It would be hard to overestimate the danger of John Yoo's "teachings". Acceptance of his platform requires rejection of 'The Great Writ' of habeas corpus, the basis for 800 years of law. Yet the Obama administration appears poised to do just that; see White House mulling indefinite detention.
"If they are in fact considering preventive detention legislation today, I think it would be a mistake both substantively and politically... legislating preventive detention for the future would turn the Guantanamo anomaly into a permanent legal norm. It would give every future president an authority that hasn't existed since the Alien and Sedition Acts - the authority to detain people without trial not because they were captured on a military battlefield but because [they] are considered a threat to national security. There is no way to write that law to prevent a less scrupulous president from abusing such authority in a moment of national crisis." -Â Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch
