President Obama -- Excerpt, interview with Associated Press, July 2, 2009
Q: You've talked about wanting to set up a legal framework for prolonged detention, which would be a pretty big sea chain in this country's jurisprudence. As a constitutional scholar, expert, does it give you any pause to have, as your legacy, this kind of legalized limbo?
Obama: It gives me huge pause, and that's why we're going to proceed very carefully on this front. And it may turn out that after looking at all the dimensions of this, that I don't feel comfortable with the proposals that surface in how to deal with this issue and ...
Q: What might make you uncomfortable?
Obama: Well, as you said, we don't have a tradition of detaining people without trial. The problem that we're confronting here is that there's been a clear distinction in the past between criminals here in the United States and war, which happens in the theater somewhere. We've detained war prisoners during times of war, but the war ended.
Here you've got a situation where we have and other extremists who would gladly blow up Americans, and yet we don't have a clear terminal point, there's not going to be some surrender ceremony where Emperor Hirohito signs the papers. And given that fact, how to manage extremists who want to do us harm and may not fall neatly under traditional criminal jurisprudence here in the United States or even international laws, but making sure that both the American people are safe and our Constitution is upheld is a very difficult thing.
I'm confident that we can do much better than we're doing so far. What we've done in Guantanamo is just leave them there in limbo for seven years without any recourse. We now know that they have habeas rights, and that means that they are able to answer charges and have legal representation. We're going to be able to prosecute a sizable number of those who are being held in our U.S. courts. The military commissions structure that we are setting up, I think, will meet the demands of our legal traditions.
And the question then is going to be, how do we handle folks who we have very strong evidence have engaged in criminal activities or violated laws of war, but the evidence is, through multiple, you know, hearsay documents that can't be introduced in court or comes from classified information that we can't compromise in a open situation - how we deal with those situations is going to be one of the biggest challenges of my administration.
Q: If you can't get legislation through Congress to establish some kind of framework, will you do it by executive order?
Obama: I am not comfortable with doing something this significant through executive order. I think it is very important that the American people and Congress, in conjunction with my administration, come up with a structure that is not only legitimate in the eyes of our constitutional traditions, but also in the eyes of the international community, because part of our task in defeating these extremists is winning over allies and populations that right now feel as if we haven't been living up to our highest ideals.
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