Obama Reshapes the War on Terror With First Day Moves

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


guantanamo-prisoners-250x200.jpg President Barack Obama began his first full day in office with a blockbuster move, ordering that military commissions currently ongoing at Guantanamo Bay be halted for 120 days. It is a dramatic first step toward reshaping the war on terror, and one that is being hailed by human rights groups that have spent recent years fighting the Bush Administration’s detention and interrogation policies. “This is a giant step forward,” Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU, told me. “Had [Obama] not acted today, there was a chance of irretrievable harm occurring at Guantanamo and we would have lost the game before the Obama team hit the field.”

Romero and multiple lawyers for Guantanamo detainees said in interviews Wednesday that though they applaud the 120-day moratorium on the military commissions, they are skeptical of the one-year deadline for closing Gitmo that the Obama administration is reportedly considering. “Closing Guantanamo Bay is not difficult” says Wells Dixon, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “It can be done in three months.”

“We want to see what comes out,” says Romero, noting that his organization seeks “a real plan that is more substantial than just a year, more than generalities.”

That plan will likely be shaped by mid-level Justice Department appointees, whose ranks the Obama team is populating with officials who have been outspoken in their opposition to the Bush administration’s detainee policies.

The man who will take John Yoo’s old job place at the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel is Marty Lederman. Like Yoo, he will have the opportunity to craft the legal opinions governing rendition, torture, and a number of other thorny issues. The Georgetown law professor and frequent blogger has been a fierce critic of Bush’s torture policy. Romero says of the pick, “There is a lot of clean-up to do in the Office of Legal Counsel and fortunately the appointments that President Obama has made include individuals with enormous experience and the right values.”

Human rights groups are also thrilled by the appointment Neal Katyal. Also a Georgetown law professor, Katyal argued–and won–multiple detainee cases before the Supreme Court. He represented Salim Hamdan, Osama Bin Laden’s one-time driver, whose successful 2006 case dealt a serious blow to Bush’s military commissions. The Supreme Court held that the commissions violated both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions, and it forced the Bush administration, loathe to share power or ask permission, to approach Congress for authorization of a system to try detainees at Guantanamo. Katyal will be principal deputy solicitor general (a job once held by Chief Justice John Roberts) under Elena Kagan, former dean of Harvard Law School, and will play a key role in determining how to handle war on terror detainees.

As these changes begin, attorneys representing Guantanamo detainees are watching Obama’s first moves closely. “We are sitting and waiting,” says Brent Mickum, who has represented Abu Zubaydah, among other Guantanamo detainees. “What I’d like to see done is for the Obama Administration to open up the system. Make the full torture memos public. That doesn’t cost the Obama Administration anything. They would be held in high regard not only in this country but around the world.” He notes that the Bush Administration argued that Guantanamo cases take so long to prosecute because much of the supporting evidence is classified. “They don’t want any of it to leak out,” Mickum says. Declassifying portions of it “would allow the prosecutions to proceed much more rapidly and people would see the extent to which there is no evidence in most cases. And it would facilitate placing people [in foreign countries].”

Mickum has another request for the Obama team. The US government should say “we’ve made some mistakes,” he suggests. “It’s clear we picked up some innocent people. And we apologize for that.”

Overall, opponents of the Bush administration’s detainee policies are encouraged by what they call Obama’s “first steps.” They point out, as Dixon notes, that “the devil is in the details”–and they are waiting for his next big move. “Guantanamo, it’s history.” says Romero. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Photo from Flickr user Manila Ryce used under a Creative Commons license.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate