Posted by Tina
I offer some first thoughts on today’s Supreme Courts decision regarding Gitmo…more will follow as these learned observe and digest the decision and it’s effect on the war and our nation:
“The Guantanimo Decision,” by John Podhoretz – Commentary Blog
The Supreme Court has ruled that detainees at Guantanamo Bay have the right to appeal their detention in federal court, effectively bringing to an end the nearly seven-year policy of keeping those seized on battlefields or in terror cells in other countries outside the conventional American legal system. The impetus for the Gitmo system, let us not forget, was that Congress declared the nation at war with terrorists, and that it was understood terrorists posed a particular problem because they were operating outside the bounds of the nation-state sytem. They declared their allegiance not to country, but to organization; they lived parasitically inside countries they intended either to attack or to use as a base of operations; and the history of modern terrorism suggested that it was too dangerous to detain them in ordinary prisons, particularly ones outside the U.S., because of the possibility that subsequent terrorist acts would be staged to lead a shell-shocked nation to bargain for their release. By this understanding, the entire world had to be viewed as a battlefield, and a terrorist seized on the battlefield was to be considered not a civil prisoner, but a prisoner of war.
“The Jihad Five” – IBD Editorial
The court held that foreign enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. base in Cuba have the right to pursue habeas challenges to their detention in U.S. courts. ** It is unprecedented in the history of U.S. law, and for all the soaring rhetoric in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion that “the laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” the fact is that Gitmo detainees already had the equivalent of habeas corpus rights. ** As Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his dissent, those terrorist POWs enjoy “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.” ** The real issue, according to Roberts, writing also for Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, “is whether the system the political branches designed protects whatever rights the detainees may possess. If so, there is no need for any additional process, whether called ‘habeas’ or something else.” ** Boumediene (Boumediene v. Bush) will force military attorneys to release evidence against enemy combatants to the terrorists’ own lawyers. It will likely see U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan be called as witnesses. And detainees will have a legal right of access to classified information. ** The decision “sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.” He concluded: “The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today.”
