An excerpt from The New Yorker end February 2009 issue:

…Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, who has taken the lead role in Marri’s legal defense, says that the Bush Administration’s decision to leave him in sustained isolation was akin to stranding him on a desert island. “It’s a Robinson Crusoe-like situation,” he told me. In 2005, Hafetz challenged the constitutionality of Marri’s imprisonment. A lower court affirmed the government’s right to detain him indefinitely. After several appeals, the case is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court in April. Hafetz calls the Marri case a pivotal test of “the most far-reaching use of detention powers” ever asserted by an American President.

The Court’s calendar requires the Obama Administration to file a reply to the challenge by March 23rd. Unless some kind of diversionary action is taken—such as sending Marri home to Qatar, or working out a plea agreement—the Court’s schedule will likely force the Obama Administration to offer quick answers to a host of complicated questions about its approach to fighting terrorism.

John Bellinger III, who served as the counsel to the State Department under President Bush, says of officials in the Obama Administration, “They will have to either put up or shut up. Do they maintain the Bush Administration position, and keep holding Marri as an enemy combatant? They have to come up with a legal theory.”

(Among) the issues to be decided, Hafetz says, (are) “the question(s) of who is a soldier, and who is a civilian. Is the fight against terrorism war, or is it not war? How far does the battlefield extend? In the past, they treated Peoria as a battlefield. Can an American be arrested in his own home and jailed indefinitely, on the say-so of the President?” Hafetz wants the Supreme Court to rule that indefinite executive detention is illegal, and he hopes that Obama will withdraw Bush’s executive order labelling Marri an enemy combatant, and issue a new one classifying him as a civilian. This shift would allow Marri either to be charged with crimes or to be released.

The Obama Administration’s strategy in the Marri case will almost certainly establish legal principles that will have ramifications for future cases, as well as for the two hundred and forty or so similarly designated “unlawful enemy combatants” held in the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. During the Bush years, the designation encompassed not just members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban but also anyone who associated with them, supported them, or supported organizations associated with them, even if unwittingly. In 2004, a Bush Administration lawyer told a judge that, in theory, an enemy combatant could even be “a little old lady in Switzerland” whose charitable donations had been channelled, without her awareness, to Al Qaeda front groups.

If the Marri case reaches the Supreme Court, it will test the limits of such theories. The case is therefore being closely watched by civil libertarians on both the left and the right. The Center for Constitutional Rights, a liberal advocacy organization, and the Cato and Rutherford Institutes, which lean to the right, are among the many legal groups that have signed eighteen amicus briefs on Marri’s behalf. Individual lawyers who have taken up his cause include Nicholas Katzenbach, the Attorney General in the Johnson Administration, and William Sessions, who was appointed director of the F.B.I. by President Reagan. The editorial page of the Times has written repeatedly about the case, demanding that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals’ affirmation of Marri’s military detention be reversed: “People accused of bad deeds should be tried in court—not in sham proceedings. They should be put in jail—not secret detention.”

No matter how Obama responds to the case, his decision is likely to arouse controversy. Hafetz says, “If President Obama is serious about restoring the rule of law in America, they can’t defend what’s been done to Marri. They would be completely buying into the Bush Administration’s war on terror.” This view is widely held by Obama’s political base. Yet the political risks of change are obvious…

Read all seven pages:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_fact_mayer

This is an agony–to have hopes and expectations raised by rhetoric and then little or no follow through. How much are these men’s psyches supposed to endure before they completely zombify? What about their poor suffering lawyers who have to present these distasteful and unjustifiable delays? When are we going to stop toying with these people, manipulating and controlling them? It’s paperwork. Scan it and press send. Stay overtime to get it done. Who are these people who can be so cavalier about another person’s liberty and freedom?

It’s time for our new administration to show some measure of mercy, to begin to ab-normalize the hideous and psychopathic detention of fellow human beings who have done nothing,absolutely nothing, to deserve it.

As far as the cry for more time, we live our lives by deadlines, some self-imposed, some — most — imposed by others. Two weeks is more than enough time to know what exists. After all, according to these same people that would cry for more time, they have, by your very account, had more than six years to know whether there is any evidence at all. I didn’t say to give them two weeks to make it pretty. I say two weeks to park it on the doorsteps.

They have bluffed for six years. It is time to lay down the hand, to show the cards, and to accept the consequences of what they have been holding — or not holding — all this time.

We as a nation — and a community of nations — should no longer suffer the tyrannical grip of those who would continue to prosecute these pretend offenses. We must no longer permit the obstruction of justice by refusal to assent to laws. And we should never again allow such abdication of government as permitted these sad events by which so many have suffered and, perhaps, our character suffered most.