The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar does a great service today, explaining, with a good deal of precision, how President Barack Obama's recent decision to appeal a U.S. District Court's ruling on a trio of detainees at Bagram Air Force Base was a case of a court handing the White House a giftwrapped, politically safe, un-frack-upable opportunity that Obama still managed to get entirely wrong, for no good reason.
The Obama administration could have just let this one go.
U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates' April 2 ruling that three detainees -- two from Yemen, one from Tunisia, all held by the U.S. military at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan without charge for more than six years -- have a right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts was crafted narrowly on purpose. The Obama administration did not have to appeal it and open itself up to the charge that it was making the same arguments that the Bush administration did -- that prisoners in the war on terror can be held indefinitely with no constitutional rights whatsoever.
Yet on Friday, the Obama Justice Department did just that, filing documents with the federal court indicating that it plans to appeal the judge's ruling, because allowing these three men to challenge their detention would "impose serious practical burdens on, and potential harm to, the Government and its efforts to prosecute the war in Afghanistan."
And, just in case the point proves elusive, Eviatar then fires with both barrels:
In other words, it would be really inconvenient right now for the U.S. military to have to defend holding prisoners for years without charge or trial, and it has more important things to do, like fight a war on terror.
Doesn't that sound eerily familiar? Isn't that the same argument the Bush administration used when it said that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay didn't have habeas rights? And wasn't it President Obama who said that he rejects "a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus?" So where did that guy go?
Eviatar notes that an overarching review of detainee policy is being conducted, for a completion in July, after which the administration reserves the right to review their decisions on Bagram. "So maybe Obama is being cautious rather than unprincipled," Eviatar suggests. All the same, allowing this April 2 ruling to go forward would have been a rare instance in which hyper-timid incrementalism would have been welcome.
MORE:
Obama Bungles Bagram [Washington Independent]
Obama and habeas corpus -- then and now [Glenn Greenwald]
Obama Follows Bush Policy on Detainee Access to Courts [Washington Post]
Defending Bush, Obama admin. appeals decision allowing detainees to challenge imprisonment [Think Progress]