Guantanamo
Posted at 10:54am on Jun. 16, 2008 Ignore the Court
By Mark I
Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling in the consolidated cases of Boumediene v. Bush and Al-Odah v. United States for the first time grants foreign-born enemy combatants of the United States, captured on the battlefield in the process of planning or participating in attacks against U.S. targets, the right to challenge the circumstances of their detention in federal court. It is difficult to overestimate the impact that this ruling will have on the prosecution of the war on terror and, indeed, all future armed conflicts. The specter of American troops Mirandizing enemy combatants on the battlefield, or being called back from the front to testify in civilian court about the manner that a prisoner was captured, and the practical impossibility each of those outcomes would present to the U.S. military, should trouble every American who is concerned about the nation’s safety.
President Bush, reacting almost immediately to the Court’s decision, said that his Administration, “would abide,” with the ruling, adding, “That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.” He spoke too soon, and did not go far enough. For the reasons cited above, and others, he should ignore this decision of the Court, and continue to apply the Military Commissions Act of 2006 as duly passed into law by Congress.
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Posted in detainees | Guantanamo | military tribunals | Supreme Court | terrorists | The Bush Administration | War — Comments (50) / Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 5:40pm on Jun. 12, 2008 Guantanamo and A Tale of Two Campaigns
Middle vs. Left = Muddle
By Dan McLaughlin
As Chief Justice Roberts pointed out, the core issue in today's detainee decision is the struggle between the power of Congress and the power of the courts: it's not whether the U.S. has the right to detain enemy combatants, and not whether non-U.S. citizen detainees have access to legal process to challenge their detention, but simply whether Congress has a right to define and limit those procedures (as it did by statute in 2005 and 2006), or whether the Supreme Court has absolute authority to require that all procedural rules be determined by the district courts and reviewed by the Supreme Court. For this President and his successor, however, the bottom-line question remains what to do with enemy combatants: continue to hold them at Guantanamo or some similar facility subject to the new procedures, go back to Congress for yet another set of rules, or perhaps ship more detainees off to other countries to handle in their own way.
In a serious world, we'd expect presidential candidates to present competing visions of how to answer both sets of questions. But the responses of the McCain and Obama campaigns to today's decision shows that each is too busy struggling in their own ways with the politics of this issue to address it meaningfully.
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Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Guantanamo | John McCain | Obamafiles | Sigh. I Guess I'm For McCain. — Comments (15)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 10:14am on Jun. 12, 2008 BREAKING: 5-4 Supreme Court Extends Habeas Corpus To Foreign Nationals Detained At Guantanamo
Court Overturns Congress' Military Commissions Act
By Dan McLaughlin
Initial report from SCOTUSBlog here. 5-4 decision written by Justice Kennedy, with the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito dissenting.
UPDATES: The opinions, all 134 pages, are here. More below the fold.
Posted in Guantanamo | Justice Kennedy | Supreme Court | War — Comments (119)/ Email this page » / Read More »
