The administration seems to be prosecuting an
overseas contingency operation as if it was an episode of Law & Order or some other
fictional legal TV series:
Hundreds of prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan will for the first time have the right to challenge their indefinite detention and call witnesses in their defense under a new review system being put in place this week, according to administration officials.
The new system will be applied to the more than 600 Afghans held at the Bagram military base, and will mark the first substantive change in the overseas detention policies that President Obama inherited from the Bush administration.
International human rights organizations have long criticized conditions at the Bagram facility, where detainees have been held -- many of them for years -- without access to lawyers or even the right to know the reason for their imprisonment. Afghans have cited Bagram, where virtually all prisoners in U.S. custody are held, as a major source of resentment toward coalition forces, a senior administration official said.
[Source: Washington Post]
