White House Dismissed Legal Advice On Detainees

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Source: Washington Post

Senior lawyers inside and outside the Bush administration repeatedly warned the White House that it was risking judicial scrutiny of its detention policies in Guantanamo Bay if it did not pursue a more pragmatic legal strategy that considered the likely reaction of the Supreme Court. But such advice, issued periodically over the past six years, was ignored or discounted, according to current and former administration officials familiar with the debates.

In August 2006, for example, the top lawyer at the State Department told senior officials at the White House that unless they won a congressional mandate that broadly supported their system of detaining terrorism suspects, their goal of keeping the detainees locked up was in jeopardy. "I can virtually guarantee you, without a legislative basis, federal courts are not going to be willing to uphold the indefinite detention of unlawful combatants," John B. Bellinger III warned in an e-mail.

The e-mail, disclosed by former White House officials familiar with the intense internal debates over detainee policy, was one of several red flags for the White House in its fierce battle to keep the detention facility in Cuba free of judicial oversight.

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"Through misjudgment and overreaching, the White House ended up with the very result it sought to avoid -- heavy judicial involvement and erosion of deference to the president's view of wartime necessities," said Matthew Waxman, who worked on detainee affairs at the State Department and the Pentagon before leaving last fall to teach law at Columbia University.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/20/AR2008062002939.html?hpid=topnews

[Tutonic]

1. Hey PUMA, NO Quarter and Hillaryis 44 rejects

Let me interpret this for you--if you elect John McBush you're going to get two new Supreme Court judges that have been trained as clones of Scalia, Alito and Roberts. (Nobody could be as bad as Clarence Thomas). And then you will not have a balanced impartial court that is willing to overturn bad policy/laws practiced by your Preznut. You decide--the constitution or Stop Obama.