Fred Thompson smacks this one out of the park:
Upon reading the opinion in Boumediene v Bush, one must conclude that the majority knew where they wanted to go and simply had to figure out how to get there. The trip was not a pretty one. How could it be when the justices seemingly wrote a map based on ideas cherry picked from over 400 years of established law and backfilled with justifications to create a new right for alien combatants that Americans themselves do not enjoy?
They could have saved us all a lot of time if they’d told us what was clearly on their minds.
They don’t trust military tribunals to deal with those accused of being enemy combatants, even if the tribunals are following guidelines established by Congress.
That the government has probably detained some prisoners at Guantanamo for longer than they should have.
And that Guantanamo should just be closed.
Though they are willing to give it lip service, they don’t really believe we are at war … at least not a “real” war.
Therefore, they should create a new right for our nation’s enemies commiserate with the displeasure that they and the rest of the “enlightened” people have with this “war,” Guantanamo and the Bush Administration.
At least this approach would have been an honest one and based upon about as much legal justification as the approach they took.
But, instead – as Justice Scalia pointed out in his dissent – they for the first time in our nation’s history, conferred a Constitutional right of habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war – a broader right than has been given to our own citizens. The court majority did so acknowledging that they could find no precedent to confer such a right to alien enemies not within sovereign U.S. territory
The majority had simply decided that prior courts had denied such rulings based on “practical considerations.” In other words in prior cases and prior wars it had just been too inconvenient to bestow the right of habeas corpus upon non-citizens in foreign jurisdictions.
And whats amazing is that this court somehow can see into the future. You see, we will never have a war like those in the past where tens of thousands of combatants may be taken prisoner. It would still be mighty inconvenient to give those tens of thousands the right of habeas corpus….but alas, according to the majority, this is exactly what will be bestowed upon them.
But Fred doesn’t stop there….stand by to stand by:
In reading the majority opinion I am struck by the utter waste that is involved here. No, not the waste of military resources and human life, although such a result is tragically obvious. I refer to the waste of all those years these justices spent in law school studying how adherence to legal precedent is the bedrock of the rule of law, when it turns out, all they really needed was a Pew poll, a subscription to the New York Times, and the latest edition of “How to Make War for Dummies.”
Ouch!
And so true.
Man, he would of been some kind of President…but c’est la vie.
I’ve said this in the past over and over again. I don’t agree with McCain on many issues, but on the courts and the war I believe he will be true to the conservative cause. This ruling just shows how important it is to put a conservative justice on SCOTUS.
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