More on Boumediene

PoliBlog
By Dr. Steven Taylor

Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune regarding Boumediene v. Bush (Guantanamo and the limits of power) wrote:

The administration asserted that in time of war, even an unconventional war against a shadowy foe, the executive branch has the power to capture a foreigner abroad and hold him for the rest of his life, without any independent review by the courts

Short of claiming the right to do that to an American citizen arrested on U.S. soil—a claim the administration had also made, only to see it repudiated by the courts—that’s about as vast and dangerous a power as you could find. So it is not surprising that the Supreme Court balked.

This is why claims (made by people like Scott Johnson at Powerline) that we “give al Qaeda more rights than German POW’s during World War II” are absurd. First, we did not claim the right to hold German POW’s for the the rest of their lives. Second, and more to the point, not everyone in our custody is a member of al Qaeda and therefore it is not unreasonable for detainees to have the right to challenge their captivity. Too many in the administration and too many of their defenders have bought into the poisonous notion that the United States only capture the guilty, which is manifestly not the case.

I noted yesterday the case of Nazar Chaman Gul, who was imprisoned both in Afghansitan and at Guantanamo. There is also the case of Murat Kurnaz, who was rounded up during a security check in Pakistan at the age of 19, and turned over to the US, which held him as a prisoner for almost five years. Several other examples are noted in a post today by Glenn Greenwald, including al Jazeera camerman Sami al-Haj, who spent years in captivity. It is worth noting that neither man was captured in combat. Gul was arrested in a private residence based on a tip (that proved to be false) that he was a terriorist and al-Haj was detained as part of a customs check. Yet both where treated to the “enemy combatant” routine.

(Continued here.)