War Handwavium

One of Bush’s more heinous war crimes was having people black bagged and shipped off to Guantanamo to be held indefinitely without ever being charged. In 2008, the Supreme Court in Boumediene v. Bush ruled that detainees at Guantanamo still had basic rights like a right to habeous corpus, the right to due process, etc.

In response, Bush simply diverted all detainees to a different detention center, namely a base in Bagram, Afghanistan. His argument was that the Supreme Court ruling only applied to Guantanamo detainees and that detainees in other sites didn’t have any rights unless the Supreme Court specifically named each location where detainees had rights.

Whether Bush wanted an exhaustive list by city and country or whether he wanted them formatted in terms of latitude and longitude is unclear. What is clear is that interpreting the Supreme Court ruling as only applying to detainees in one particular geographic location was Bush’s attempt to gaming the system.

Fast forward to February 2009, Obama declared that he embraced Bush’s view that detainees in Afghanistan had no rights and could be detained indefinitely.

In March 2009, a Federal Court rejected this notion that the Supreme Court had to list the ten-thousand names of God before the Executive branch would be required to give detainees basic human rights.

Obama has appealed the ruling, making clear that he wants the power to inprison people indefinitely without giving them any rights to due process and the rule of law. And yet as a Senator and during his campaign, Obama stated that he was AGAINST Bush’s policies to strip people of their basic rights of due process.

Glenn Greenwald has all the gory details here:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/11/bagram/index.html