Who are we more afraid of: enemy combatants or federal courts?

[BurtWorm]

http://www.slate.com/id/2193468/

The Enemy Within

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, June 12, 2008, at 7:06 PM ET

The Supreme Court's decision Thursday in Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States is—as all the big enemy-combatant cases have been—both enormously important and relatively insignificant. This is, after all, the third stinging setback and blistering rebuke the court has handed the Bush administration with respect to prisoner rights at Guantanamo. Yet you may have noticed that all of these setbacks and rebukes have mostly meant more hot days in orange jumpsuits, more solitary confinement, and ever more plus ça change for the detainees there. At his pretrial hearing in April, one of the detainees "lucky" enough to actually face a trial, Salim Hamdan, pointed out to the presiding judge that winning his own appeal at the Supreme Court in 2006 got him precisely nothing.

"You won. Your name is all over the law books," the military judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, told Hamdan that day, in an effort to persuade him that the system isn't rigged. "But the government changed the law to its advantage," Hamdan replied. Certainly the detainees at Guantanamo who don't face charges were granted some substantive constitutional rights today (although whether Hamdan himself will benefit remains to be seen). But it's a mistake to see this ruling for more than it is.

The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 margin, determined that neither the president, nor the president plus Congress, could strip detainees at Guantanamo of the ancient right to habeas corpus via the 2006 Military Commissions Act (PDF). This is pretty legal and technical, and the concrete ramifications are still baffling to just about everyone. Judging by the tone of Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent, however, you'd think that Justice Anthony Kennedy and his colleagues in the majority not only released Hamdan and his buddies from their imprisonment at Guantanamo, but also armed them with a rocket launcher and paid their collective train fare to Philadelphia. "The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed," Scalia wrote. He concluded his dissent with this warning: "The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today."

Scalia points to the 30 detainees released from Guantanamo—by an order of the Bush administration, not a court, it should be noted—who have allegedly "returned to the battlefield." One detonated a suicide bomb in Iraq in May. Scalia notes that this "return to the kill" happened even after "the military had concluded they were not enemy combatants" (italics his). So you see, even those who were deemed innocent at Guantanamo are actually guilty in Scalia's mind. And whether or not they ever get to go home, the mere act of providing them with civilian court oversight will surely endanger yet more American lives. For this proposition, Scalia cites the trial of Omar Abdel Rahman in federal court in 1995, in which the names of 200 unindicted conspirators were leaked to Osama Bin Laden. Just to recap, then, everyone at Guantanamo is guilty, and the mere act of trying them will result in more American deaths. This raises the question of what Scalia would do with these prisoners, many of whom have been held for six years without charges. If they can't reasonably be tried or released, it must be a great comfort to believe that they are all killers and terrorists, and no further proof is needed.

...

And in the end, this is the fight between the majority and the dissent: Kennedy and the justices who signed his opinion (David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) are worried about the very real risk of a lifetime of mistaken imprisonment. And the dissenters (Scalia, Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito) are worried about the risk of ... what? Not an actual mistaken release, but a day in court. The big threat here is of federal court review that may—somewhere far down the line, and at the moment entirely hypothetically—result in the release of a detainee or (more attenuated still) the disclosure of a piece of hypothetical information that could help the terrorists in their fight against us....

[ColbertWatcher]

1. The GOP is afraid of accountability. n/t

[Hydra]

2. These "enemy combatants" are simply guinea pigs

Once they get everyone used to the idea that there are terrorists under every rock, they'll come for us...

Oh, wait. They already did. Jose Padilla, tortured, held without charge and forced to stand trial after his mind had been reduced to rubble.

What a glorious future lay ahead of us...

[The Stranger]

4. Given the incredible amount of resources devoted to prisoners with no intelligence value, the ONLY

reason can be to create a new set of precedents allowing for the establishment of a "court" system under the Executive.

And if that doesn't scare the living fuck out of you, I don't know what would.

[Hydra]

5. You bring up a good point

The reason I've always felt the "terrorists" were on our payroll was because the people they were imprisoning were NOT terrorists.

They only way you could feel safe in that situation is if you controlled all the players.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

3. I think the reason the Bushies are so afraid

of allowing the Gitmo detainees to avail themselves of habeas corpus is that if these guys get to go before a court and demand to know the charges against them and the evidentiary basis for those charges, the public will find out that some, maybe a lot of them, are innocent. A lot of the Gitmo prisoners were picked up in Afghanistan because the warlords were offered bounties for suspected "terrorists," and men were just grabbed off the streets and taken into custody. If the world found out that our government has been holding innocent people for six years in crappy conditions without access to counsel, contact with their families or any way of contesting the charges against them, the Bushies would be revealed as antidemocratic despots.

[Hydra]

6. We already know that

Buchco has admitted that 90% of the Gitmo people are innocent. No torches and pitchforks.

Frankly, we don't care about these people, and we don't care that Bush is killing people around the world.

[EFerrari]

8. BushCo didn't admit it. IIrc, it was the Red Cross that released

the information that 83+% had never pointed a weapon at an American soldier.

[BurtWorm]

7. I don't think the Bushists really care what anyone thinks.

Least of all "the people." Nor do they care if any of these detainees are "innocent." They intend these people to be examples. They don't care one whit if they have to strip their humanity away to accomplish that. They think this is a good thing. If they cared to make their case in the court of world opinion, they would probably get a lot of sympathy from Americans of all political stripes--certainly from those who have access to the media.

[mmonk]

9. Anyone afraid of justice is afraid of the truth.

There is NO risk in that whatsoever. Without it, the terrorists win. There is no other "fight".

[KharmaTrain]

10. So Now What Defines A "Terrorist"???

Not long ago I had fun with a repugnican acquaintance on the concept of what is a "terrorist" as opposed to an enemy combantant as opposed to a common crook? The definition changed depending on which group this person cared to spew his vile about. It's a nice, tidy box, too...any "enemy" of America is a "terrorist". This not only means those scary A-rabs but also applies to Hispanics and "radicals" (ya know the black preacher types) to Democrats (who surely enable the "terrorists"). It's a box filled with strawmen and boogiemen who used to be named Ivan but now are Abdul. In essence, these people are sub-human and thus are not worthy of any humane treatment...epecially a trial or any habeus corpus.

This definition even trumps that of a P.O.W....which is what this person classified any American who was captured in Iraq or Afghanistan. I asked if we should accept them being tortured? Of course he cites that they're "combantants"...and the Geneva convention must apply :crazy:

Then I asked about Domestic terrorists...ya know, your garden vareity Aryan nation types. They sure haven't gone away. Now if there were a plot uncovered like another Oklahoma City...should the same rules apply? Should we have just locked McVeigh away? In that case, this dude punted...claiming that he was "fried" anyway, so it showed the "system worked". But I asked about the others who assisted...should they have been detained with no trial or even the ability to defend themselves? I think that was just too much for his head to grasp.