Political Quotes

“And those are the only channels that have been created where the detainee himself can pursue a remedy on his own in a semi- adversarial forum. These complaints about conditions of confinement, these are for the military itself to enforce through its own procedures and systems of accountability for monitoring its soldiers. And we have no reason to believe that those systems are not adequate to investigate and remedy abuses. For all the attention to cases such as Abu Ghraib, one thing that deserves emphasis is that it was our own military that discovered, investigated, and punished those abuses. That is as it should be. These standards of treatment are important, but they need to be enforced through the military's internal systems of accountability and Congressional oversight, not through lawsuits and adversarial proceedings brought by detainees. The military's own accountability systems ultimately, I think, will be more effective in monitoring our detention centers and in remedying abuses. All that litigation would do--letting these detainees into court--is undermine intelligence gathering through interrogation.”