What's Obama's Plan for Gitmo?

This morning the AP has an exclusive on Obama's plans for Gitmo. The important part is in paragraph four:

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.

In other words, "national security courts."

The "national security court" thing was promoted prominently in a July 2007 NYT op-ed by Jack Goldsmith and Neal Katyal -- with Katyal having credibility, in some sense, because he had been lead counsel on Hamdan (on the good side).

For arguments against the need for 'national security courts' -- as opposed to just using federal courts -- see federal judge John Coughenour and the Human Rights First report from May on how federal courts are sufficient.

Spencer Ackerman was among the first to catch the significance of the AP article this morning:

The concern, stripped of euphemism, is that the evidentiary basis for many trials of Guantanamo detainees — including, in many cases, torture — would never be admissible in any court worthy of the name. That’s the Bush administration’s legacy. But it can’t be the basis for cheapening our legal system.

So is this basically a trial balloon? If it is a trial balloon, let's make sure to shoot it down, ASAP. I think it's important to remember that this 'national security court' is something that the Bush Administration, and Lindsey Graham and John McCain and a few others, quietly talked about a few times over the past year or two, but never moved forward on, even though you might think they could have won (The New Yorker -- correctly predicting a Bush Administration loss in Boumediene earlier this year -- even said "An adverse ruling from the Supreme Court may be less a legal setback for Bush than a political opportunity for the Republicans.") It would be unfortunate if Obama ends up making this national security court and thereby doing what the Republicans presumably decided they couldn't accomplish themselves..