Easy to Find Middle Ground on Gitmo: Klein

Military courts wouldn't allow torture evidence, get civilian review

By Kevin Spak, Newser Staff

Posted May 21, 2009 10:20 AM CDT

(Newser) – Lawyers and soldiers are divided on how to deal with enemy combatants, but “it shouldn’t be too hard to find a middle ground,” writes Joe Klein in Time, because both arguments “are being made by unappealing extremists.” It’s unrealistic to try detainees in open civilian courts, as the ACLU wants, but Dick Cheney’s vision of an all-powerful executive imprisoning them forever is reprehensible.

The only serious problem is how to try detainees without endangering classified secrets. President Obama has proposed that evidence obtained from coercive techniques be inadmissible, and Sen. Lindsay Graham’s idea that civilian judges be allowed to see that evidence in closed hearings “seems an eminently reasonable middle course,” Klein writes. The battle over where to put the prisoners is “tawdry politics”—US jails can and do hold terrorists.

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In this photo taken May 12, 2009 and reviewed by the US military, a US trooper guards a door at Camp 6 detention facility, inside Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base, Cuba. (AP Photo)

Troopers walk through an entrance to Guantanamo's Camp 6 maximum security detention facility. (AP Photo)

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The recent fuss over where to put the Guantanamo prisoners is tawdry politics, incited by desperate Republicans with the supine complicity of congressional Democrats. - Joe Klein

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Easy to Find Middle Ground on Gitmo: Klein