There is an interesting New Yorker article posted today on the detainee cases the Obama administration is going to have to deal with. The article talks about the difficulties in balancing legitimate national security concerns against individual rights and due process, focusing on the story of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri (detained since 2001 as an alleged al Qaeda sleeper agent) as one example.

It’s a sobering article overall, but this portion, describing Marri’s status following a 2005 lawsuit that led to the improvement of his detention conditions, caught my eye and made me smile a bit (my emphasis added):

The Hard Cases
Will Obama institute a new kind of preventive detention for terrorist suspects?
by Jane Mayer
February 23, 2009

. . .

Marri’s conditions have so improved that his lawyers jokingly refer to him these days as “the Emir of the S.H.U.”—the high-security wing of the brig is known as the Special Housing Unit. He remains the sole prisoner in the wing, but he now has the regular use of three cells, which he refers to as his “executive suite.” One cell contains a memory-foam mattress. Another houses a personal library containing hundreds of volumes. The third contains alcohol-free cleaning supplies, in compliance with his Muslim religious needs. When visitors come, he sees them in an upper-tier room that he calls his “summer chalet.” He also has exclusive access to a thousand-square-foot dayroom equipped with a treadmill and an elliptical machine. Officially barred from watching the evening news, Marri has become a devotee of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart—whom he calls “that Jewish guy.”

. . .

Read the full article here

It’s nice to see that the appeal of Stephen and Jon can penetrate even the walls of detention cells.

The article also quotes friend of the show Neal Katyal (a two-time guest) on his suggestion that the Obama administration create a “national security court” to deal with these detainees. I’m honestly not sure I can get behind that idea; I’m afraid it still leaves too much to the “trust us, we won’t abuse our authority” school of government … and I don’t have a whole lot of faith that the Obama administration will live up to the hopes/expectations of civil rights proponents (consider his flipping on FISA during the campaign, his embrace of the Bush administration’s “state secrets” stance, and his most recent announcement that detainees being held at Bagram do not have the legal right even to challenge their detentions). I believe that the existing justice system, given the proper safeguards, is capable of handling these cases. Still, it’s an interesting read, and it’s an issue that deserves a lot of attention.

As food for thought on the detainee problem, I leave you with this, the Guantánamo Bay entry of one of my favorite recurring segments, “Formidable Opponent”:

Tip of the hat to loudfan, who mentioned the Fresh Air interview with Mayer that led me to this article.

Related posts