Obama praises Guantanamo decision

• Last Updated: June 15. 2008 3:36PM UAE / June 15. 2008 11:36AM GMT

WASHINGTON // The US Democratic candidate Barack Obama capitalised on the public’s weariness with George W Bush’s presidency, praising the Supreme Court’s decision to allow detainees at Guantanamo Bay to challenge their imprisonment in federal courts.

Mr Obama’s head-to-head battle with Republican rival John McCain began in earnest this week, following Hillary Clinton’s departure from the Democratic candidate race.

Mr Obama has repeatedly sought to discredit his opponent by tying him to the Bush administration's unpopular policies, focusing on fiscal issues, the war in Iraq and on yesterday, Guantanamo. Both candidates have vowed to shut down the prison at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, condemned by allies and rights groups as a legal black hole.

Taking audience questions in Pennsylvania, Mr Obama praised Thursday’s Supreme Court decision to allow detainees at Guantanamo Bay to challenge their imprisonment in US federal courts. Enforcing such rights, he said, is “the essence of who we are.” Even when the Nazis’ atrocities became known in the 1940s, he said, “we still gave them a day in court” at the Nuremberg trials. “That taught the entire world about who we are,” he said.

The Supreme Court’s ruling was a repudiation of Mr Bush’s ambitious and hugely controversial schemes to hold terror suspects from different countries outside the protections of US law.

Mr McCain sharply criticised the Supreme Court decision, saying it would hamper the war on terrorism. The Bush administration has a sweeping definition of who should be held behind bars, which critics say encompassed large numbers of young men hostile to the United States and required the large-scale prison at Guantanamo.

But even if the roughly 270 inmates were moved to a high-security prison on the US mainland, the next commander-in-chief will be confronted with a legal morass left over from Mr Bush’s attempts to treat terror suspects separately from the US legal system.

“Quite honestly the next president, whoever he is, is going to face a series of difficult decisions. The options are all unattractive,” said Sarah Mendelson of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The main issue the next president is faced with is a broader issue beyond Guantanamo, which is who should be detained and why?” To avoid the legal and diplomatic fallout created by Guantanamo, the next president will probably have to narrow the definition of who should be detained and focus on key figures in terror networks, Ms Mendelson said. The next president will also have to weigh the future of US-run prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as CIA detentions and interrogations carried out at secret sites abroad.

As for the detainees held at Guantanamo, the next administration would have to decide who could be put on trial — despite evidence tainted by possible torture or abuse — and whether the accused should be tried in US courts or within the special “war on terror” tribunals created by president Bush.

Mr McCain supports the special tribunals, while Mr Obama’s advisers say he would get rid of them and try the detainees in regular federal courts or in military courts.

And for detainees allegedly too dangerous to release to their home countries, but who cannot be tried in court for lack of concrete evidence, a new administration would face a delicate choice.

The president could allow such inmates to be freed, upholding American legal principles but running the risk the suspects later take up arms against US targets.

The alternative would be a return to holding detainees indefinitely without charge, a practice employed at Guantanamo that would require a new law and which could once again draw international condemnation.

Neither Mr McCain nor Mr Obama has taken a position on introducing open-ended detention — known as preventive or administrative detention — but human rights groups and legal experts are already debating the idea.

An adviser to Mr Obama said the Illinois senator would first make full use of the court system before backing any such measure.

“My sense is that his inclination will be to exhaust the existing options in our legal system which he thinks has dealt with terrorism cases quite well in the past before creating something new, untested and potentially damaging to our reputation,” said the adviser, who asked not be named.

Mr McCain’s campaign was unavailable for comment.

Right-leaning experts are pushing for preventive detention, arguing that modern-day militants who wear no uniforms and act independently of any state fall outside traditional legal definitions and need to be locked up before they do harm.

But rights advocates say it would be a slippery slope that backfired on Great Britain in its fight against the Irish Republican Army and could serve as a recruiting tool for militants.

“Such a ‘solution’ would be worse than the Guantanamo problem,” Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote in the June issue of Foreign Affairs.

“Indeed, it would effectively move Guantanamo onshore and make its detention regime a regular part of the US government’s arsenal,” he concluded.

*AP and AFP