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When President Barack Obama spoke yesterday on the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, perhaps his most worrisome comment was the implication that prisoners believed to be dangerous but who couldn't be prosecuted -- that is, the government couldn't prove they were dangerous in a court of law -- would be detained indefinitely. While today's press briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs didn't do much to elucidate the question, he did make this comment:
MR. GIBBS: How's it different than -- I don't think it's -- let me just say for the umpteenth time, I am not a constitutional lawyer. But if somebody is picked up on a battlefield you can detain that person for the length of the conflict. I think that's fairly well-established.Gibbs comment suggests that these detainees who can't be prosecuted but the administration is afraid to release might only be held until the end of our conflict in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, it's not clear that we know the length of our conflict in Afghanistan, which is where, along with Pakistan, many of the detainees were captured. It's rather ironic to see the two most difficult moral and security challenges that administration faces now -- how to resolve conflict in Afghanistan-Pakistan and how to deal with the prisoners we captured there -- tied together. We don't know when either will end.
-- Tim Fernholz
