US President Barack Obama risks creating "future Guantanamos" by continuing his predecessor's policy of indefinitely holding Al-Qaeda suspects, a prominent Democrat warned on Tuesday.
Senator Russ Feingold said he was "troubled" by Obama's policies, warning the practice of holding some suspected terrorists indefinitely risked being "effectively enshrined as acceptable in our system of justice."
Feingold warned the current administration risked mimicking the policies of the Bush administration, which "claimed the right" to detain anyone, anywhere, he said.
During a major security speech at the National Archives in May, Obama acknowledged for the first time that a legal framework could be established to hold the most dangerous US detainees indefinitely without trial.
Speaking during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the consequences of "prolonged detention," Feingold said that could set "the stage for future Guantanamos, whether on our shores or elsewhere, with potentially disastrous consequences for our national security."
If Obama follows through on the proposal for establishing "a new legal regime for prolonged detention to deal with a few individuals at Guantanamo," Feingold said "he runs the very real risk of establishing policies and legal precedents."
Feingold said it would be worse if these policies were "effectively enshrined as acceptable in our system of justice, having been established not by a largely discredited administration, but by a successive administration with a greatly contrasting position on legal and constitutional issues."
Also at the hearing, former White House lawyer Richard Klingler warned prolonged detention was "already widespread" and set to continue "on a wide scale."
Klingler, a former lawyer in the Office of White House Counsel under former president George W. Bush, told senators the "debate on indefinite detention often wrongly focuses on Guantanamo Bay," arguing the practice is "considerably more widespread."
It is a practice Obama "will continue to pursue," in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at Guantanamo, and he noted they have already followed in the Bush administration's footsteps by defending it repeatedly in court, added Klingler.
The "wartime framework underlying [these tactics] have settled well within the mainstream of the American tradition," he said.
The president has pledged to close the controversial prison by early next year.
Signaling a major move toward reaching that goal, on Tuesday a Tanzanian Guantanamo detainee became the first to be transferred to a civilian court on US soil.
He pleaded not guilty to taking part in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in East Africa.
