GREAT WEEKEND, HUH? - AT 10:15 A.M. ET:  There's a rule of thumb in Washington:  Announce all bad news on Friday afternoon, or over the weekend.  Fewer people are tuned in.

This weekend began with the announcement that we were accepting Iran's pathetic offer to begin negotiations - even though the Iranians ruled out any discussion of their nuclear program, which is the main thing we want to talk about.  The weekend continued with the announcement that we're granting North Korea's wish for one-on-one talks with the United States, even though they've constantly defied us, and even though all negotiations with North Korea have ultimately failed. 

Now reader Joseph J. Gallick alerts us to something new.  From The Washington Post:

Hundreds of prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan will for the first time have the right to challenge their indefinite detention and call witnesses in their defense under a new review system being put in place this week, according to administration officials.

The new system will be applied to the more than 600 Afghans held at the Bagram military base, and will mark the first substantive change in the overseas detention policies that President Obama inherited from the Bush administration.

International human rights organizations have long criticized conditions at the Bagram facility, where detainees have been held -- many of them for years -- without access to lawyers or even the right to know the reason for their imprisonment. Afghans have cited Bagram, where virtually all prisoners in U.S. custody are held, as a major source of resentment toward coalition forces, a senior administration official said.

COMMENT:  First of all, I don't think we should take our cues from "international human rights organizations," some of which are hopelessly corrupt.  Human Rights Watch is a cesspool of dishonesty and bias. 

Obviously, we must meet our international obligations.  However, why do I think this new set of rules will open a Pandora's box that will make it harder and harder to apprehend people who are a danger to our soldiers and to Afghan civilians?  Who'll want to stick his neck out?  When will we read that the American interrogators are under investigation?

We'll see how this plays.  But given Attorney General Holder's recent move to reinvestigate CIA agents of the Bush era, I suspect we know how the script will be written.

September 13,  2009