What do you think?Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) last week told an audience at Georgetown University that Congress should convene a “Truth Commission” to investigate allegations of Bush administration wrongdoing.[...]
Leahy’s statements were quickly embraced by many Democratic lawmakers, however, including Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), and supported by legal advocacy groups such as Human Rights First and NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, which had both earlier proposed similar ideas. Most recently, on Thursday, the bipartisan Constitution Project chimed in with a statement, signed by 18 different organizations and a range of former government officials including Thomas Pickering, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs; William Sessions, former federal judge and FBI Director; and retired Major General Antonio Taguba, all calling for President Obama to appoint a non-partisan commission to examine the legality of Bush policies related to detention, treatment and transfer of detainees.
President Obama’s Justice Department today, in a two-sentence filing, backed the Bush administration’s position on the 600 or more detainees being held at the U.S. military’s detention facility at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The department reaffirmed that the prisoners are not entitled to any constitutional rights and, most importantly, may not challenge their detention in a U.S. court.
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