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With a stroke of his pen, President Obama today extinguished any last lingering hopes that his administration would eventually do the right thing on Guantanamo and restore due process rights to all the detainees held there.
In an Executive Order and accompanying fact sheet and press release, the White House formally announced the resumption of Military Commission hearings – memorably denounced as “an enormous failure” by candidate Obama – and outlined the new review process that will accompany the indefinite detention of individuals deemed to dangerous to release and to hard to prosecute.
For detainees slated for indefinite detention the administration has to all intents and purposes resurrected the widely discredited Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) used at Guantanamo by the Bush administration.
The new body has been rebranded as the Periodic Review Board (PRB), presumably for cosmetic purposes, and is patterned after the review mechanism currently operating in the main US detention facility in Kabul, Afghanistan."