BeNJAMIN WITTES is an eternal optimist. In 2006, he wrote a smart little book, "Confirmation Wars," which argued that U.S. Supreme Court nominees should not have to endure lengthy appearances before the Senate Judiciary Committee just so that preening senators can wax loquacious for hour after hour of live television coverage. Don't hold your breath.
Now the Brookings Institution fellow and former editorial writer for the Washington Post is back with "Law and the Long War," a rich and thoughtful volume that calls on Congress to extract the U.S. government from the deepening legal morass created by what he views as the Bush administration's ill-managed "war on terror." Don't hold your breath for this, either.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the executive branch's aggressive efforts to disable possible Al Qaeda terrorists have moved forward with only limited legislative contributions from Congress. Now the administration's detention of hundreds of alleged Al Qaeda operatives at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, many of whom have been imprisoned there for more than six years, is generating a landslide of courtroom litigation in which the government is playing a losing hand.
A jerry-built system of "Combatant Status Review Tribunals" and attendant military administrative proceedings was set up by the Pentagon to process the prisoners. But Wittes emphasizes that Congress "never grounded the detentions in law -- meaning that the entire edifice . . . stands on a bed of sand." The shakiness of this structure has become especially apparent in recent weeks: First the high court, in a case titled Boumediene vs. Bush, ruled that the Guantanamo detainees have the right to petition for their individual release through habeas corpus actions in federal court. Then a federal appeals court found that Huzaifa Parhat, one of 17 Guantanamo detainees who are Uighur Muslims from western China, did not merit any detention as an "unlawful enemy combatant" whatsoever.
These court rulings amplify what Wittes terms "a certain sloppiness in the military's categorization of and standards for the detainees," the "vast majority" of whom "were not captured by American forces" but were handed over by Afghan or Pakistani forces. As a result, he writes, many of the specific allegations against particular individuals are "vague, weakly sourced, entirely unsourced, or even stated as possibilities or likelihoods, rather than as certainties." And some detainees' denials of involvement with Al Qaeda seem "alarmingly credible, particularly when coupled with especially thin government allegations." (Of the roughly 270 remaining Guantanamo detainees, several dozen may be able to win release through habeas corpus petitions. But those for whom the U.S. government can show evidence of Al Qaeda loyalties will no doubt remain prisoners for years to come.)
