SCOTUS rules in favor of detainees

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Lorizael
The alternative is like, you know, declaring war. Then it's totally cool if we kill people.

Apparently that still requires a warrant according to the Court.

[Ramo]

SCOTUS

It's worth pointing out, incidentally:

On the issue of appointments to the Supreme Court, McCain mentioned that Sam Brownback would play an advisory role in helping decide who he should nominate for the Supreme Court. As models of who he would select, John McCain pointed to Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia.

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=11558

[snoopy369]

I actually generally didn't have a huge problem with Scalia, until 9/11. He went from being an independent (true) conservative idealogue, to a Republican/statist tool... I'm all for strict intepretationalism if you actually abide by it, but he's turned into a strong-executive/strong-central-government tool, which is most definitively the opposite of the point of the original Constitution...

[Ramo]

I think Scalia might be the least objectionable of the four dissenters...

[Theben]

Originally posted by Wiglaf

You know nothing. Personal opinion is necessary to interpret the constitution. Also, if you think it's constitutional to give non-citizen, non-state terror fighters the right to habeas corpus, I'd love to know what part of the constitution you're reading.

Then you know less than nothing. What part of the Constitution does, “at war with radical Islamists/will almost certainly cause more Americans to get killed" invoke? 'Cuz I don't remember reading that Article.

I'll grant you I don't know the full quote, but Scalia hasn't impressed me with his ability to put Constitutional interpretation above his ideologies lately.

[Wezil]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Don't worry, Wezil. We're gonna get that Khadr yet.

My "hope" was for due process in the US not for Khadr. He and others may benefit from the ruling though.

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by Theben
Then you know less than nothing. What part of the Constitution does, “at war with radical Islamists/will almost certainly cause more Americans to get killed" invoke? 'Cuz I don't remember reading that Article.

I'll grant you I don't know the full quote, but Scalia hasn't impressed me with his ability to put Constitutional interpretation above his ideologies lately.

What part of "Originally posted by Wiglaf" warranted a serious response?

[LordShiva]

All of it

[Wiglaf]

Scalia's dissent is great. He has every right to mention potential effects of the court's decision, especially when the effects would counteract the supposed benefits of the ruling in the first place. He writes, for example, if there had been no Gitmo, the army "would have kept detainees in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention. Those other facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves."

Today, for the first time in our Nation’s history, the Court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war. The Chief Justice’s dissent, which I join, shows that the procedures prescribed by Congress in the Detainee Treatment Act provide the essential protections that habeas corpus guarantees; there has thus been no suspension of the writ, and no basis exists for judicial intervention beyond what the Act allows. My problem with today’s opinion is more fundamental still: The writ of habeas corpus does not, and never has, run in favor of aliens abroad; the Suspension Clause thus has no application, and the Court’s intervention in this military matter is entirely ultra vires.

This is unprecedented and dangerous behavior, and it's a shame people are willing to go to unusual lengths to protect war criminals.

Also, for those of you calling him a right-wing tool mouth piece of Bush, please note the lack of name calling and actual legal argument contained here:

Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separation-of-powers principles to establish a manipulable “functional” test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus (and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes important precedents, most conspicuously Justice Jackson’s opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager. It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically, it 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.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

No need to close Gitmo now.

[SpencerH]

So now we need to do what should have been done years ago. Those captured in Afghanistan or Iraq should be retuned to Afghanistan or Iraq etc to face trial for their actions.

[Wiglaf]

Yes, because Afghanistan and Iraq have such sophisticated justice systems. Half the detainees would be lost in the system or escape jail, and the other half would be hanged by US appointed judges.

Aliens who are also suspected terror fighters (detained in foreign lands) can piss off as far as the constitution is concerned. And as Scalia said, this unprecedented decision to extend the constitutions protection to these bastards will probably cost American lives.

[snoopy369]

How will it cost American lives?

[Wiglaf]

They released a bunch of Gitmo detainees a while back this year. They turned up in Iraq suicide bombing checkpoints and killing civilians/troops. Read Scalia's dissent for specifics. Don't get the impression that these people are harmless.

Also, there's the whole thing that the military has limited ability to extract intel from the detainees, has no incentive to get prisoners unless it can establish before a federal court that it has authority somehow, etc.

[Wiglaf]

In the long term, then, the Court’s decision today accomplishes little, except perhaps to reduce the well-being of enemy combatants that the Court ostensibly seeks to protect. In the short term, however, the decision is devastating. At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield. See S. Rep. No. 110–90, pt. 7, p. 13 (2007) (Minority Views of Sens. Kyl, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, and Coburn) (hereinafter Minority Report). Some have been captured or killed. See ibid.; see also Mintz, Released Detainees Rejoining the Fight, Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2004, pp. A1, A12. But others have succeeded in carrying on their atrocities against innocent civilians. In one case, a detainee released from Guantanamo Bay masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese dam workers, one of whom was later shot to death when used as a human shield against Pakistani commandoes. See Khan & Lancaster, Pakistanis Rescue Hostage; 2nd Dies, Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2004, p. A18. Another former detainee promptly resumed his post as a senior Taliban commander and murdered a United Nations engineer and three Afghan soldiers. Mintz, supra. Still another murdered an Afghan judge. See Minority Report 13. It was reported only last month that a released detainee carried out a suicide bombing against Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq. See White, Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack, Washington Post, May 8, 2008, p. A18.

These, mind you, were detainees whom the military had concluded were not enemy combatants. Their return to the kill illustrates the incredible difficulty of assessing who is and who is not an enemy combatant in a foreign theater of operations where the environment does not lend itself to rigorous evidence collection. Astoundingly, the Court today raises the bar, requiring military officials to appear before civilian courts and defend their decisions under procedural and evidentiary rules that go beyond what Congress has specified. As The Chief Justice’s dissent makes clear, we have no idea what those procedural and evidentiary rules are, but they will be determined by civil courts and (in the Court’s contemplation at least) will be more detainee-friendly than those now applied, since otherwise there would no reason to hold the congressionally prescribed procedures unconstitutional. If they impose a higher standard of proof (from foreign battlefields) than the current procedures require, the number of the enemy returned to combat will obviously increase.