Another Weekend Another Bush Policy Adopted by Obama

The First Executive Order

The weekend dump is nothing new to politics, Obama's use of it comes with a different twist. Whereas most politician dump harmful information that might raise public ire, Obama does to dodge his own base. The last one about fast tracking the death penalty for gitmo detainee remains my favorite. The most recent example would be to detain terrorists indefinitely without a trial.

Via HA:

Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that bypassing Congress could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said…

Some of Obama’s top legal advisers, along with a handful of influential Republican and Democratic lawmakers, have pushed for the creation of a “national security court” to supervise the incarceration of detainees deemed too dangerous to release but who cannot be charged or tried.

But the three senior government officials said the White House has turned away from that option, at least for now, because legislation establishing a special court would be both difficult to pass and likely to fracture Obama’s own party…

“Legislation could kill Obama’s plans,” said one government official involved. The official said an executive order could be the best option for the president at this juncture. Under one White House draft that was being discussed earlier this month, according to administration officials, detainees would be imprisoned at a military facility on U.S. soil but their ongoing detention would be subject to annual presidential review. U.S. citizens would not be held in the system…

One administration official said future transfers to the United States for long-term detention would be rare. Al-Qaeda operatives captured on the battlefield, which the official defined as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and possibly the Horn of Africa, would be held in battlefield facilities.

The Times has reported on this as well and of course this right into Gitmo:

Such an order would be controversial — seemingly aligning the administration with a disputed legal doctrine of former President George W. Bush, whose lawyers held that the president had sweeping authority in wartime to imprison those he deemed threats to national security.

Obama officials sought to play down the significance of the discussions by an administration panel, saying that consideration of such an order was still in an early phase and subject to change. They said that lawyers had not written a specific proposal and that nothing had been submitted to the White House for review by senior officials.

Still, the possibility of the order appeared to reflect increasing frustration within the administration over the difficulties posed by the effort to meet Mr. Obama’s commitment to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by January and the dwindling options for dealing with the detainees before then.

The president had no plan nor idea about Gitmo but committed himself with that stupid photo-op on his first day of business. As expected there is already some opposition:

“Detention without charge is a regime we don’t want to see,” said Sarah E. Mendelson, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who led a study of options for closing Guantánamo. “Having an executive order rather than Congressional legislation is even worse. Then, it’s a continuation of the kind of super power within the executive branch that you saw with the Bush administration.”

Several human rights advocates met with Mr. Obama and his top advisers before his National Archives speech and warned him that indefinite detention had many of the same flaws as holding prisoners at Guantánamo.“We told him to make sure that the cure doesn’t perpetuate the disease,” said Elisa Massimino, executive director of Human Rights First.

Fine, but I am sure they will get over it in time for 2010 and 2012. One of these days he will announce that he is shutting Gitmo but not within the one year framework, will he be up front or will he dump it on the weekend again?