Publication Date:
Source:
Author:
Professor Barbara Olshansky is quoted in The Christian Science Monitor in a story about the legality of the detention of prisoners held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The Christian Science Monitor writes:
At the height of its operation, the terror detention camp at Guantánamo was viewed as a legal black hole, a place where Al Qaeda suspects could be held and questioned beyond the glare of judicial scrutiny.
President Obama has made the closing of the detention facility a priority. But as Guantánamo is being drawn down, large-scale construction is under way at a US military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan.
Some critics are already calling it "Obama's Guantánamo." And it looks to become the next big flash point in a long legal tug of war over the direction of America's antiterror policies.
...
Unlike the Guantánamo detainee cases, lawyers in the Bagram case have never been permitted to meet or communicate with their clients. Bagram detainees are not entitled to the combat status review tribunals and other safeguards set up at Guantánamo.
"We can't keep people without due process," says Barbara Olshansky, a key player in the Rasul case who is now helping to litigate the Bagram case. "This case is important because it goes to the issue of does the writ [of habeas corpus] extend to where the US military is completely entrenched and controlling detention."
...
"What we are really asking Judge Bates to do is define where the writ ends," says Ms. Olshansky, who is also a professor and director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School.
...
"To stretch [US constitutional protections] to Bagram under these circumstances would lead to the anomalous result that any alien enemy engaged in warfare abroad and detained by the United States anywhere in the world can petition US civilian courts for review of the military's decision to detain them," says the government's brief filed in September.
...
... Olshansky, Ms. Foster, and the other lawyers in the case have not been permitted to see it.