OBAMA WATCH: Stem Cell, Abortion, Gitmo, Drilling

Obama planning US trials for Guantanamo detainees

By MATT APUZZO and LARA JAKES JORDAN
WASHINGTON (AP)


President-elect Obama's advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but could require creation of a controversial new system of justice.

During his campaign, Obama described Guantanamo as a "sad chapter in American history" and has said generally that the U.S. legal system is equipped to handle the detainees. But he has offered few details on what he planned to do once the facility is closed.

Under plans being put together in Obama's camp, some detainees would be released and many others would be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts.

A third group of detainees — the ones whose cases are most entangled in highly classified information — might have to go before a new court designed especially to handle sensitive national security cases, according to advisers and Democrats involved in the talks. Advisers participating directly in the planning spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans aren't final.

The move would be a sharp deviation from the Bush administration, which established military tribunals to prosecute detainees at the Navy base in Cuba and strongly opposes bringing prisoners to the United States.

Obama's Republican challenger, John McCain, had also pledged to close Guantanamo. But McCain opposed criminal trials, saying the Bush administration's tribunals should continue on U.S. soil.

Obama Weighs Quick Undoing of Bush Policy

New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY
November 9, 2008

CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama is poised to move swiftly to reverse actions that President Bush took using executive authority, and his transition team is reviewing limits on stem cell research and the expansion of oil and gas drilling, among other issues, members of the team said Sunday.

As Mr. Obama prepared to make his first post-election visit to the White House on Monday, his advisers were compiling a list of policies that could be reversed by the executive powers of the new president. The assessment is under way, aides said, but a full list of policies to be overturned will not be announced by Mr. Obama until he confers with new members of his cabinet....

In January 2001, on his first full day in office, Mr. Bush reinstated the so-called global gag rule, initiated during the Reagan administration and overturned by President Bill Clinton, which prohibited taxpayer dollars from being given to international family planning groups that perform abortions and provide abortion counseling. After Mr. Obama’s victory last week, the Center for Reproductive Rights delivered a 23-page memorandum to his transition team, calling for “bold policy change,” including a repeal of the gag rule....

The idea of turning the auto industry’s crisis into a chance to enact changes with energy and environmental benefits is one that Mr. Emanuel has promoted in Congress. But he said that Mr. Obama had yet to settle on his proposals or whether he would announce them before he was sworn in.

“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview on Sunday. “They are opportunities to do big things.”...

The Bureau of Land Management is poised to open about 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling, a plan that the Bush administration has argued would not harm the land. Environmentalists have opposed the idea, a sentiment echoed by Mr. Podesta on Sunday. ...They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah that they’re going to try to do right as they are walking out the door. I think that’s a mistake.”...

Mr. Bush used his first prime-time address, on Aug. 9, 2001, to announce his decision (technically a policy pronouncement and not an executive order) to permit federal financing for human embryonic stem cell research, albeit with strict limitations. Scientists and patient advocates have spent years pressing him to loosen the restrictions; Mr. Bush has twice vetoed legislation that would have done so.

“It will have been eight years that we have been operating in a limited funding environment,” said Larry Soler, a board member of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, an umbrella group representing 100 organizations. “I think everyone in the scientific community and the patient community is geared up and expecting this and excited to make this happen. It’s been a long struggle.”