Guantanamo Bay

CCR: Obama Embraces Indefinite Detention, Not Meaningfully Different From Bush

Brian Beutler | May 21, 2009, 12:41PM

President Obama's speech touched on a number of significant and controversial national security policies--but perhaps the two most important were his proposed plan for dealing with Guantanamo detainees and his outline for reforming the State Secrets privilege, which may well become an issue when some of those detainees are tried in U.S. courts.

Civil libertarians and human rights activists won't necessarily be pleased. Shayana Kadidal is the senior managing attorney of the Guantanamo project at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He says the administration's plan to maintain a system of military commissions is deeply troubling.

Read more »

Barack Obama

Obama Plans To Reform State Secrets Privilege May Not Please Critics

Brian Beutler | May 21, 2009, 11:22AM

In response to charges that the Obama White House has, to perhaps a greater extent than the Bush administration, abused its powers to get controversial cases thrown out of court, the President announced the following reform of the State Secrets privilege:

We will apply a stricter legal test to material that can be protected under the State Secrets privilege. We will not assert the privilege in court without first following a formal process, including review by a Justice Department committee and the personal approval of the Attorney General. Finally, each year we will voluntarily report to Congress when we have invoked the privilege and why, because there must be proper oversight of our actions.

Later, Obama cautioned the same critics that his policies would still leave them wanting. "There are those," he said, "who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism, and who would almost never put national security over transparency."

Which stands somewhat in contrast to one memorable line from his inaugural address, when he said "we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."