KAREN GREENBERG
Greenberg is executive director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University Law School. She just wrote the piece “Guantánamo: No Closure for Obama,” which states: “In the nine years since the opening of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the country has moved incrementally towards institutionalizing the existence of the facility. On Monday, the Obama administration took the process of institutionalization one step further, issuing both an executive order on detention — the first since the path-breaking executive order that began his presidency, calling for the closure of Guantánamo and promising a rethink on the detention policy — and the revocation of the ban on military tribunals there.

“In contrast to its predecessor, yesterday’s executive order was anything but path-breaking. It tacitly acknowledged that the premises of detention in the ‘war on terror’ begun by the Bush administration in the fall of 2001 still hold. More tellingly still, it demonstrated that the Obama administration now not only accepts the fact of Guantánamo’s existence as a given, but has also abandoned any debate over whether or not indefinite detention should be the policy of the land.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167