The Enemy Within
Who are we more afraid of: enemy combatants or federal courts?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Slate.com
Posted Thursday, June 12, 2008
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.
(Continued here.)
By Dahlia Lithwick
Slate.com
Posted Thursday, June 12, 2008
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.
(Continued here.)
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1 Comments:
Bush may have lost on this one, but with Congress acting as his accomplice, he is winning by stalling with defective legislation.
Worst yet, Congress has not figured it out yet.
Case in point, READ THIS : Reacting to leaks that House and Senate negotiators are on the verge of striking an accord regarding telecom immunity, Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the deal appears unconstitutional. "Whatever silk purse Hoyer tries to make of Bond's sow's ear and no matter how they try to sell it, the end result of all this negotiating will be exactly what the administration has wanted from the beginning - FISA rewritten to delete court oversight of surveillance and immunity for its pals at the telephone companies.”
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