A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight. ...NYT
Throw away the key? Well, actually, throw away the Constitution. I mean, why bother with the rules when we have a situation where the rules challenge political power?
Two Yemenis and a Tunisian have been denied habeas corpus by the Obama administration and a three-judge panel overrules earlier decisions and says it's okay.
...A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the three had no right to habeas corpus hearings, in which judges would review evidence against them and could order their release. The court reasoned that Bagram was on the sovereign territory of another government and emphasized the “pragmatic obstacles” of giving hearings to detainees “in an active theater of war.”
The ruling dealt a severe blow to wider efforts by lawyers to extend a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A lower court judge had previously ruled that the three Bagram detainees were entitled to the same rights, although he had found that others captured in Afghanistan and held there were not.
It takes Lindsey Graham to clarify this act of defiant Constitutional-law-breaking on the part of the administration.
“Allowing a noncitizen enemy combatant detained in a combat zone access to American courts would have been a change of historic proportions,” he said. “It also would have dealt a severe blow to our war effort.
“There is a reason we have never allowed enemy prisoners detained overseas in an active war zone to sue in federal court for their release. It simply makes no sense and would be the ultimate act of turning the war into a crime.”
The purpose is political: no act of war can be considered "criminal." Get it? If you're "anti war," you're just being political. The issue of morality and the rule of law are deleted in one decision by a federal judge.
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When Barack Obama came to Washington as a US senator he was struck by the extent to which Republicans in both the White House and Congress seemed to assume that those in power weren't "bound by any rules of law at all."
The issues of how America was led into war, of whether Congress could intervene in the case of Terry Schiavo, and, of course, the illicit use of torture approved by the Department of Justice -- these all weighed on the young Constitutional lawyer/senator. It wasn't up to Alberto Gonzales to decide what was and wasn't torture; nor was it Bill Frist's and Tom Delay's right to decide whether Terry Schiavo was to "live" or die.
These weren't easy issues; as much as I disagreed with Republican policies, I believed they were worthy of serious debate. No, what troubled me was the process -- or lack of process -- by which the White House and its congressional allies disposed of opposing views; the sense that the rules of governing no longer applied, and that there were no fixed meanings or standards to which we could appeal. It was if those in power had decided that habeas corpus and separation of powers were niceties that only got in the way, that they complicated what was obvious (the need to stop terrorists) or impeded what was right (the sanctity of life) and could therefore be disregarded,or at least bent to strong wills.
The irony, of course, was that such a disregard of the rules and the manipulation of language to achieve a particular outcome were precisely what conservatives had long accused liberals of doing. It was one of the rationales behind Newt Gingrich's Contract with America ... The Audacity of Hope, chapter on "Our Constitution"
