The five-page letter (PDF) that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder issued this week defending the decision to treat the Christmas Day bomber suspect as a criminal suspect, rather than as a wartime captive, offered new insight into the Obama administration's view of the limits of preventive detention. The letter suggests that the administration sees virtually no legal foundation for holding terrorism suspects arrested on U.S. soil in preventive detention and has very little interest in trying to create any. He didn't confine his reasoning to the specifics of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's case, but instead offered an overarching view of the current state of the law. “Some have argued that had Abdulmutallab been declared an enemy combatant, the government could have held him indefinitely without providing him access to an attorney,” Holder wrote. “But the government's legal authority to do so is far from clear.” Holder suggested that the administration would need to see a “court-approved system” for domestic military detentions to conclude that it did have the authority. http://rawstory.com/2010/02/holder-shows-interest-justifying-preventive-detentio… added by: SleepDirt
