This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 18, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When President Obama took office, he pledged to close Guantanamo Bay,

a prison for those indefinitely detained following September 11th.

Two years later, President Obama has not only failed to close Guantanamo Bay, he's announced

his own policy, setting the terms for those indefinitely detained.

And if you believe that you as a U.S. citizen aren't affected by these policies, think again.

So says David Ritker's legal policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

The president does have the power to do this.

Congress has sanctioned the detention of persons captured within the theater of conflict and the executive order lays out in spite of his earlier objections to the policy of military detention

the review boards to ensure that we're not keeping people that we're not supposed to be, it's unclear

if we're going to be as nuanced at this as other countries.

The Israelis have a six-month review mandated

for their military detainees, but they also have an intelligent service that can

gauge whether those people that they have in custody still have the street credibility that they

fear that they would go back and become leaders on the battlefield, it seems that we don't

have quite that level of understanding of who we have and who still has

credibility within al-Qaeda or the Taliban. But he does have this power and this is a reversal of policy.

So far, since this policy was passed into law shortly after 9-11, what is the history of these trials of detainees?

Well, the Bush administration fought repeatedly with the Supreme Court over what the status of the detainees would be, the standards of review for their continued detention and their trial by military commission.

The Congress has since provided the necessary groundwork for trial by military commissions

under both the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and 2009, but even at this late

...