SCOTUS Grants Guantanamo Prisoners Habeas Corpus 1065
beebee and other readers sent word that the US Supreme Court has, by a 5 to 4 majority, ruled that the Constitution applies at Guantanamo. Accused terrorists can now go to federal court to challenge their continued detention (the right to habeas corpus), meaning that civil judges will now have the power to check the government's designation of Gitmo detainees as enemy combatants. This should remedy one of the major issues Human Rights activists have with the detention center. However, Gitmo is unlikely to close any time soon. The NYTimes reporting on the SCOTUS decision goes into more detail on the vigor of the minority opinion. McClatchy reports the outrage the decision has caused on the right, with one senator calling for a Constitutional amendment "to blunt the effect of this decision."
5 to 4? I'm torn. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm glad that this went through. I think it's the right thing to do.
I'm concerned that it went through on 5-4. Then again, I feel somewhat content that we do have some varying opinions within SCOTUS. I suppose I'd rather we have conflicting opinions for the advancement of discussion than 9 Justices all working towards the same agenda.
Re:How's that for.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Extend welfare and voting rights too! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm at a loss as to how anyone can be upset at this decision. Its not like we're turning known terrorists out onto American streets. We're just saying that the people being detained have a right to challenge their detainment.
Sometimes you wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:stupid, confusing war on terror... (Score:5, Interesting)
We've only had habeas corpus since the 12th C. (Score:5, Interesting)
These fundamental freedoms are MORE important, not LESS important, during times of national stress. It is those times when cowards like Bush are most prepared to sell our freedom, so hard-won over the centuries, for the promise of a little temporary security.
Guantanamo is Bush's Manzanar. In the hysteria of the time it might have seemed like the right thing to do, to a few frightened people. The judgment of history will be firmly otherwise.
Re:Sudden? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hardly an outbreak of common sense... (Score:4, Interesting)
-Sean
I'm not sure I agree with you. The court throughout its history has had 5-4 (or otherwise decided by 1 vote) cases because they seldom accept cases which aren't close. That is, if it isn't a legal point on which there's substantial disagreement, the Court won't grant cert. Moreover, members may concur in the result of the case, but not the legal reasoning, so they end up joining only certain sections of the majority (or plurality) opinion.
Close cases will always be a part of the Supreme Court. I would say that is the way we want it, most of the time.
In this instant case, I think more of the justices should have agreed with the majority, but they didn't ask me...
Re:Hudson Institute outright lying on Constitution (Score:1, Interesting)
Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? The parties who may be arrested may be charged instantly with a well defined crime; of course, the judge will remand them. If the public safety requires that the government should have a man imprisoned on less probable testimony in those than in other emergencies, let him be taken and tried, retaken and retried, while the necessity continues, only giving him redress against the government for damages. Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1788. ME 7:97
Re: Extend welfare and voting rights too! (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea of not torturing someone until they confess -- quaint, really. He wants a fair trial? Oh, how cute. Thinks we're being unjust in keeping him in jail for years without charging him with anything? Aww, poor baby.
History will judge this administration, and us for not speaking out against it. And history will not be kind.
A similar case before the supreme court (Score:5, Interesting)
Then FDR also created the concept of "enemy combatants" for handling people who were spies captured inside the US boarders. While he should have treated them as Spies under war common law, instead he wanted their trials publicly suppressed and created a special tribunal outside the jurisdictions of any state but on US soil. The supremes had to argue about it. The argument was that clearly the US legal system can try people crimes so why not let it. And it would set a bad precedent for removing habeous for people captured outside war zones.
The book "In time of War" [slashdot.org] covers this an it's a great well written read. I recommend it highly.
I thought the following quote captured one aspect of the issue:
"But the real problem is the interminable detention period, which has no reasonable judicial excuse. The dissenters are quite right that America has offered a quite generous set of procedural protections for enemy combatants. But these are mocked when a detainee is an indefinite prisoner with indefinitely incomprehensible status. The problem is not the legal process but what happens when the federal government holds that process, at its whim, in open-ended abeyance. The federal government still gets a lot of leeway, and the benefit of the doubt, from the Court, especially in wartime. But ours is so nonobviously wartime, and the Bush administration has been so lax, opaque, and seemingly quite pointless in its interminable detention of a wide range of variably important prisoners, that todayÂs ruling seems to me to confirm the wisdom of both the majority and the dissent. I suspect the ruling will, if anything, cause most of these detainees to actually be tried, which would be nice, but not released, which would not be. And that strikes me as not only nice but just."
link [ithoughtth...oftheissue]
A good question is where does McCain stand on obeying the Constituional restrictions faithfully. Here's two articles from Reason Magazine (libertarian bent):
Longer [reason.com] and Shorter [reason.com]
Re: Extend welfare and voting rights too! (Score:4, Interesting)
Kind of like how the US would spy on British citizens of interest while they did the same to the US, and then share the info. Got around the constitutionality of wiretapping citizens... Until we decided to cut out the middle man.
Re:Sudden? (Score:5, Interesting)
There was an Italian prisoner of war camp in the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland; a lot of the prisoners of war decided not to go back to Italy after the war and stayed there, marrying locals.
The place is worth a visit; among other things, the prisoners painted frescoes on the ceiling of the Nissen Hut they were using as a chapel. It's gorgeous, and still an active church.
The minority opinion (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Earier Supremes say it's okay for Bush to deny Habeous in US criminal courts so long as an alternative is provided that is substanially simmiar to the habeous right to contest incarceration.
2) congress provides an alternative tribunal system that fulfills this requirement
3) Said new tribunal turns around and refuses to hear any Habeous claims because it decrees the prisoners have no Habeous rights. (WILD!)
4) Today's court ruling reverses that saying they do have habeous rights.
The question then is Does it go back to the Kangaroo court or to a real crimminal court for hearing of habeous claims. I think this is the point of contention.
Also here's a link [slashdot.org] to a longer slashdot post that talks about this:
Re:Pressure? (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking at the past verdicts of the court, they have been ruling in complete disregard of the american constitution and serving political interests. There are a lot of examples proving that in the past 50 years, just to limit our scope to more recent times.
A solution to decontaminate the SCOTUS would be to require a 2/3rd majority in the House or Senate to appoint SCOTUS members. That would ensure that only politically neutral people get elected. (Although this leads us back to the evils of the two party system, but that's another problem we'll address in another session with your friendly foreigner "how to fix your country in a few easy steps" guy.)
Re:Hardly an outbreak of common sense... (Score:4, Interesting)
I also agree that I'm shocked over Scalia's comments. It reminds me of when I was on a jury and one lady repeatedly said "But they didn't PROVE the defendent was innocent!!!!" She finally backed down- but I don't think she ever understood that the prosecution really did have to prove the defendent guilt even after we explained it to her.
You want to be really scared? (Score:5, Interesting)
Read the dissenting opinion.
Bolding mine. How would anyone know if they've tried to use the courts if they haven't had access to them in the first place? And saying that Habeas Corpus isn't a "time-honored legal principal"?
Amazing, isn't it?
Quotes taken from here. [dailykos.com]
Re:Isn't this the same SCOTUS that Bush packed? (Score:4, Interesting)
In addition, it is likely that 3 of the 5 justices that voted with the majority will be retiring in the next 4 years, so the next President will be responsible for replacing them.
If you like this week's decision, then you should strongly consider not voting for John McCain in the next election, because he is on record as saying that Justices Roberts and Alito are the kind of candidates that he would submit as replacements.
Re:Sudden? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Extend welfare and voting rights too! (Score:5, Interesting)
In 2003, Khalid El-Masri, a Kuwait-born citizen with German nationality, was detained by Macedonian agents in the Republic of Macedonia. While on vacation in Macedonia, local police, apparently acting on a tip, took him off a bus, held him for three weeks, then took him to the Skopje airport where he was turned over to the CIA.
El-Masri says he was injected with drugs, and after his flight, he woke up in an American-run prison in Afghanistan containing prisoners from Pakistan, Tanzania, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. El-Masri said that he was held five months and interrogated by Americans through an interpreter. He declared that he had been beaten and kept in solitary confinement. Participating in some of these interrogation sessions was an officer of the German foreign intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND) using the pseudonym "Sam", who has reportedly been identified by al-Masri as Gerhard Lehmann. Lehmann served on the UN Mehlis commission into the Rafik Hariri assassination before he was withdrawn in early February 2006, possibly to prevent the repercussions of his identification.[39]
Then, after his five months of questioning, he was simply released. "They told me that they had confused names and that they had cleared it up, but I can't imagine that," El-Masri told ABC News. "You can clear up switching names in a few minutes." Khalid el-Masri had allegedly been confused with Khalid al-Masri, wanted for contacts with the Hamburg Cell involved in the September 2001 attacks.
Khalid el-Masri was then flown out of Afghanistan and dumped on a road in Albania, from where he made his way back home in Germany. Using a method called isotope analysis, scientists at the Bavarian archive for geology in Munich subsequently analyzed several strands of his hair and verified his story. During a visit to Washington, German Interior Minister Otto Schily was told that American agents admitted to kidnapping El-Masri, and indicated that the matter had somehow got out of hand. Masri was held for five months largely because the head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center's al Qaeda unit "believed he was someone else," one former CIA official said. "She didn't really know. She just had a hunch."
Re:Even scarier... (Score:3, Interesting)
OR is your point that the Constitution is only for white folks?
Re:stupid, confusing war on terror... (Score:5, Interesting)
My grandfather was an Electrician in the US Navy, and an American of German heritage. He was scheduled to ship out from NY to Africa to lay cabling for airstrips during WWII, but as he was about to board his ship, the "G-Men" grabbed him for interrogation to see if, as a German, he knew anything about his U-Boat off the coast of Long Island. He didn't, of course, and wasn't involved, but by the time the Feds were done with him, his ship had already left port, and he had to be reassigned.
It turns out that his ship was sunk in the Atlantic by a Wolf Pack, and all hands onboard were lost. My Grandfather, of course, survived and went on to meet and marry my Grandmother, who gave birth to my Mother. Thus, I (and my Mother) owe my very existance to the odd actions and timing of the FBI at this point in history.
Re:Even scarier... (Score:4, Interesting)
I want a one world government, not a one government world.
Re:Even scarier... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sudden? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ever see Control Room [imdb.com]? It's mostly about Al Jazeera, which most Americans consider to be the media arm of Al Qaida. That's nonsense, of course, but they do put on a lot of stuff that makes us look bad. They also have a lot of reason to be pissed at us, not just over the war, but because the believe that U.S. forces have been deliberately targeting their reporters.
And yet their individual attitudes towards the U.S. are surprisingly positive. One reporter admits he'd like nothing better than to get an offer from Fox News, move to the U.S., and educate his children here. Another says that he has an infinite faith in the U.S. constitution.
His faith would seem to have been vindicated.
Re:Even scarier... (Score:2, Interesting)
And Scalia agrees with Roberts, mentions precedent (an important legal principle, in the US), and (from how I read it) states that the prosecution simply did not make its case.
Re:Sudden? (Score:3, Interesting)
Crazy bastard walked all the way home from Siberia to Koln, then from Koln to the village where my family was relocated. And my mother still wonders why he hated my great-uncle, who was an SS officer. Duh...
Re:Sudden? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sudden? (Score:3, Interesting)
The first time I read The Prince I was 10. Either you:
1) Are George Bush.
2) Think you're George Bush.
3) Don't understand the intended audience of the book.
You see if we'd simply shot them when we had the chance the would be nothing more than a memory. There would have been a short public outrage, maybe, then the whole incident would have been forgotten. It would have been over with an that would have been the end of it.
Who are you calling "we"? If George Bush had ordered their murder, then that might have aided him in maintaining greater control over us, but that works out to my detriment. It is also IMO detrimental to my country, so there is no "we" there.
Besides I'm not talking about innocent people here. I'm talking about enemy combatants.
No, you're talking about people that Bush arbitrarily declared to be enemy combatants. We know for a fact that some of them were not enemy anything. No shit, that wouldn't be known had they been murdered which would have worked out better for Bush, which would be all that Machiavelli was concerned about. It's still a negative for everybody else.
So the entire basis of your point rests on the integrity of a known liar.
Not too solid, and in fact long ago proven false.
Re:Worst SCOTUS Decision in History?? (Score:3, Interesting)
As long as state powers conduct expeditionary missions, set up military bases overseas, hijack oil fields, sell arms to those having no business with them, allowing it's religious organizations to "spread the word of God" to foreign lands and then not reign them in, but instead send troops to protect megaphones offending indigenous peoples... well, what the hell CAN people expect.
9/11 didn't happen out of sheer evil, or hatred for 'merkuns out of jealousy. Those terrorists were like bees in a hive that was struck. Struck through decade after decade of imperialist or nationalist or economic strike and blow. After decades of propping up illegitimate regimes, after destabilizing local elections, after selling arms to local insurgents or revolutionaries or others only to have blowback haunt the larger powers. Then, selling out or cutting loose the very instruments, leaving them to fend for themselves, only to be killed, or their families killed, too.
No, this is all about bad karma coming home to roost. Nothing more, nothing less. And that make part of the problem ANY citizen who fails to vote, votes badly, or votes for tyrannical assholes who thing only THEIR god is THE one, and who run amok, pissing off others who create stateless, ad-hoc, hard-to-track, assymetrical fighters, and then have the nerve to call cowards people who don't have nukes, don't have bunker busters, don't have satellites, no Masters-of-the-Universe intel agencies, no vast, deep arsenals of troops and weapons...
Well, we can sum this up by saying, "It's complicated. We're talking about reckless, destructive, greedy, myopic, selfish, jealous, petty, vindictive, shameless humans jockeying for power, unwilling to compromise, unwilling to assent to a higher cause over the long run..."
(needs a valium or something...)
Re:Sudden? (Score:5, Interesting)
The failure to have a cohesive, worst case scenario, plan for how we were going to rebuild Iraq and make its people our bestest friends is the single biggest failure of an administration fraught with colossal failures. Since impeachment of the president is impossible given the current layout of Senate, the best I an hope for is that this administration is simply remembered by history as the worst in modern history.
I served in a New Orleans, Louisiana based National Guard Field Artillery Battalion. We went over to Iraq to fight in the war that the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence reports to justify and failed to properly plan for. In our last month in country we watched from satellite television as a hurricane tore our city apart, and that same administration failed to provide relief. I then spent a year living in the city that the administration all but abandoned. At this point, if George W. Bush says the sky is blue, I'm walking outside to make sure it hasn't turned purple while I was typing this post.
Re:Sudden? (Score:5, Interesting)
We could have easily taken 1% of that, had a sit-down with Saddam Hussein and said, "look, you and your family and your core leadership take this money and transition quickly out of power and set up in a nice Caribbean resort for the rest of your life, and we won't wipe you out," then gradually shifted to a more representative government, and still had 2.7 trillion to throw around for little things like rebuilding after Katrina, widespread environmental projects, and lap dances for every adult male in America and Iraq put together.