When our children askin the future how the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus, the foundation of law, died, this is the time and this is the answer.

The Obama administration is preparing an executive order that would formalize indefinite detention without trial for some detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but allow those detainees and their lawyers to challenge the basis for continued incarceration.

There is peril to the very fabric of American society when our founding principles are discarded and/or compromised, yet that is exactly what has occurred in the wake of 9/11. The stunning tale of Zeitoun and the Gitmo style gulag known as Camp Greyhound erected five years ago in the wake of Katrina tells us just how far down the slippery slope we have fallen as a nation.

A Federal Court in Washington DC has issued a very hard slap down by of the government’s continued use of bogus evidence obtained by brutal torture to try to justify continued detention of detainees at Guantanamo.

The handwriting for a complete ObamaRhama cave to the neocon howlers on military commissions instead of civilian trials is getting carved awfully deep in the granite wall.

The CIA prevented DOJ’s OIG from interviewing Abu Zubaydah for their report on detainee interrogation methods. As when they destroyed the tapes of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation, CIA seems to have been intent on preventing any evidence of what they did to Zubaydah from coming out.

The entire opinion disqualifying General Thomas Hartmann in Salim Hamdan’s show trial is worth reading. But I’m particularly struck by the coincidence of timing. The Bush Administration started focusing on show trials at precisely the same time as it was firing a bunch of US Attorneys for political reasons.

Scott Horton has more details on what Jim Haynes might face before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

I’m not really surprised that the Gitmo command is disseminating propaganda about the prison. But I just wish those that engage in propaganda for the government not be so pathetically bad at it.