No sooner do I finish posting about the G-20’s not-so-safe haven in London than I stumble across this AP dispatch: a federal court ruling extended to prisoners in Afghanistan the legal right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
Here I think the fascinating parallel is easier to make: The thought immediately occurred to me that over the past eight years, the U.S. has essentially created its own safe havens, with the network of black-site detention centers being the functional equivalent of the Pakistani FATA, i.e., beyond the rule of law and outside of global governance mechanisms.
Significantly, the Obama administration, which is going after al-Qaida’s Pakistani safe havens aggressively, argued against the court ruling today. That’s consistent with Geoffrey Corn’s WPR Briefing on the Obama administration’s legal stance on detention policy so far.
Glad to see the courts are ready to dismantle our own private FATA.