Gonzales: Challenges slowing Gitmo cases

[sabra]

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/breaking_news/16472791.htm

Gonzales: Challenges slowing Gitmo cases
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday blamed delays in trying terror detainees at Guantanamo Bay on legal challenges filed by their lawyers.

Those trials may start by this summer, Gonzales told Associated Press reporters and editors. He said rules for the military commission are being sent up to Capitol Hill this week.

"It's not for lack of trying," Gonzales said, when asked about the legal fate of detainees who have been held at the military facility, in some cases for five years. "We are challenged very step of the way."

"We are trying as hard as we can to bring these individuals to justice," he said.

In the wide-ranging interview that lasted an hour, the attorney general defended a number of Bush administration policies criticized by Democrats and civil libertarians as overstepping legal boundaries, including intelligence gathering and the recent firing of U.S. Attorneys.

[soothsayer]

1. How about bringing justice TO these individuals BEFORE bringing

these individuals to justice

[IWantAChange]

2. an oxymoron expression if you will - "Roberto Gonzales - justice"

[coalition_unwilling]

9. Sort of like "military intelligence" nt

[mary_unbound]

3. Too bad

I guess it's a shame we've got to waste so much time with stupid things like due process.

[Jack Rabbit]

4. I don't mind bringing these individuals to justice

It's Bush's and Gonzales' idea of justice that bothers me.

In fact, it's something for which they should be brought to justice.

[xxqqqzme]

5. Those damn attorneys paying attention

to defending detainees instead of being good little corporate lackeys.

[gratuitous]

6. Golly Alberto

Kind of makes you wonder if these kangaroo court sessions are worth all the time and effort your Department is having to put into it. And all those memos you are no doubt having to generate to make sure everything is railroaded nice and legal have a disturbing evidentiary quality to them, no? Think the ICC will honor a claim of "executive privilege"?

[Supersedeas]

7. Not for lack of trying -- it has been nearly 5 years for some

[Speaker]

8. Damn

Railroading is becoming a tough business.

[leesa]

10. Is that neck collar too tight Alberto? The man who got his law degree as a

blue light special at Wal Mart.

[struggle4progress]

11. Congress must restore basic rights (HRW in SacBee: 3 Jan 07)

Five years after President Bush opened the hastily built detention center at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, nearly 400 men, so-called unlawful enemy combatants, remain trapped there. Not a single one of these allegedly high-level terrorists have been brought to trial for their crimes and only 10 have ever been charged. This means that neither the prisoners nor the American public have gotten the accounting they deserve.

The continued detention of hundreds of men without charge has become a rallying cry of the Bush administration's critics. The administration's response has been to shroud its actions even further in secrecy and eliminate one of the most important mechanisms for keeping the government honest -- access to courts ...

Known as the "Great Writ," habeas corpus is .. a right so ancient and fundamental to Western society that it was enshrined in early English law, establishing the principle that even the king is bound by law. Thomas Jefferson called it one of the essential components of a free nation. Alexander Hamilton described it as an indispensable protection against arbitrary government ...

But legislation passed by the outgoing Congress stripped away this basic right for any non-citizen determined by the president to be an "unlawful enemy combatant." This is an enormous expansion of presidential power with terrifying implications.

http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/101773.html
www.bugmenot.com

Of 400 prisoners disallowed access to the courts, only 10 have been charged -- and lying AG blames the lawyers ...