U.S. officials may move hundreds of prisoners from a base in Cuba to facilities within the United States after Supreme Court rulings that granted military detainees access to U.S. courts, the Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday.
| Maybe Barbra Streisand can put them up? |
Pentagon and Justice Department officials said they were considering moving all the prisoners from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a conservative judicial district within the United States, according to the newspaper.
| I'd do just the opposite. Marin County should do it. Let the 9th Circuit deal with them. |
Consolidating the proceedings in one court would avoid transporting prisoners and government lawyers to federal courts across the country, the report said. Monday’s Supreme Court rulings rebuffed President George W. Bush’s assertion of sweeping powers to indefinitely hold "enemy combatants" after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Administration officials told the newspaper they were unprepared for the ruling. "They really didn’t have a specific plan for what to do, case by case, if we lost," a senior Defense Department official was quoted as saying in the report. "The Justice Department didn’t have a plan. State didn’t have a plan. It’s astounding to me that these cases have been pending for so long and nobody came up with a contingency plan." U.S. officials said the Bush administration could ask Congress to designate a federal court to try the cases, the report said. A third option would be to allow prisoners to demand legal justification for their imprisonment at a makeshift court at Guantanamo, a possibility the Supreme Court left open. |