Indefinite preventive detention without trial is unconstitutional but, apart from that minor objection . . . .
Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, it's the spirit of three strikes and you're out, sort of, but maybe more like, oh hell, this is bad, one strike and you're out, and you don't get a trial.
So why is the executive so hot to avoid an actual trial on a charge that might well lead to imprisonment for life with no possibility of parole?
Who so hot not to have to have any sort of actual trial to prove the accused have committed whatever crime it is that makes them so dangerous?
Often because the evidence, though compelling if true, is tainted testimony obtained under torture.
But maybe not always that.
Once Jailed in Guantánamo, 5 Taliban Now Face U.S. at Peace Talks
When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and toppled the Taliban government, even those who surrendered were treated as terrorists: handcuffed, hooded and shipped to the American detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Now, in a stark demonstration of the twists and contradictions of the long American involvement in Afghanistan, five of those men are sitting across a negotiating table from their former captors, part of the Taliban team discussing the terms of an American troop withdrawal.
“During our time in Guantánamo, the feeling was with us that we had been brought there unjustly and that we would be freed,” said one of the former detainees, Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwa.
“But it never occurred to me that one day there would be negotiations with them, and I would be sitting there with them on one side and us on the other.”
The five senior Taliban officials were held at Guantánamo for 13 years before catching a lucky break in 2014.
They were exchanged for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only known American service member to be held by the insurgents as a prisoner of war.
Not really a great deal.
Testing Novel Power, Trump Administration Detains Palestinian After Sentence Ends
Swept up by authorities after the Sept. 11 attacks, Adham Hassoun, a Palestinian computer programmer who lived in Florida, served 15 years in prison for sending support to Islamist militants abroad.
His sentence completed, he then waited in immigration detention more than a year and a half while the government fruitlessly hunted for a place to deport him.
Finally, a judge ordered him temporarily released in the United States.
But instead, the Trump administration, citing a little-used immigration regulation issued after 9/11, notified Mr. Hassoun last month that he was being declared a security risk and would be kept locked up indefinitely.
. . . .
“The government is saying it can hold someone solely because it claims he is a danger, without a justification like he’s a combatant in an armed conflict or has a mental illness that prevents him from controlling his own actions,” said Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civil Liberties Union, who is consulting in the case.
“This is a monumentally important issue courts have never addressed.”
. . . .
Before Mr. Hassoun’s case, the government had invoked the Bush-era regulation only once, the Department of Homeland Security said.
That was in a 2015 case in which the Obama administration cited the regulation to justify keeping another Palestinian man detained; he had finished a prison sentence for planting a bomb on a Hawaii-bound airliner in 1982, and the government was having trouble finding a place to deport him, too.
But before a judge could rule on whether his continued detention was lawful, Mauritania took him in.
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