Where Do the Bad Folks Go?
One of the rewards given to British Prime Minister Tony Blair for his flattering speech to U.S. lawmakers was the suspension of military judicial action against British and Australian "enemy combatants" locked up at Guantanamo Bay. This has touched off a fierce debate in the UK over the legal future of Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi, who were among the first six enemy combatants selected to face an American military tribunal. Blair's government seeks to try the two in British courts, and Bush's position is still unclear. "The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people," Bush said at a joint press conference Friday. Jonathan Turley, writing in today's Los Angeles Times, makes the case for letting other governments try their own citizens:
[T]he Bush tribunals are an affront to the rule of law: denying basic rules of evidence, allowing indefinite detention of suspects, barring access to the federal courts, permitting the introduction of statements derived from torture, barring the application of constitutional and federal laws and limiting the grounds for appeal.