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