In between all those balls Obama attended last night, he found time to issue an order requesting a suspension of judicial proceedings against people detained in Guantanamo Bay.
The instruction came in a motion filed with a military court in the case of five defendants accused of organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The motion called for “a continuance of the proceedings” until May 20 so that “the newly inaugurated president and his administration [can] review the military commissions process, generally, and the cases currently pending before military commissions, specifically.”
The same motion was filed in another case scheduled to resume Wednesday, involving a Canadian detainee, and will be filed in all other pending matters.
The judges and defense attorneys are under no obligation to go along with the administration’s request, but I expect that the proceedings will now come to a halt for the next 120 days. During that time, the administration will have to carefully examine the state of evidence in these cases to see if they can bring successful prosecutions in some cases, and to figure out what to do in the cases where they determine they cannot. They will also look to release as many people as possible and to seek allies willing to host them.
Obama is expected to sign an executive order soon that will lay out in detail his plan to empty the facility.
I hope that executive order will be issued today or tomorrow, but I’ll understand if they want to do a little review of the true state of affairs before issuing the order. I see this is as a good start, but I want to see more.
