McCain Slams The Supreme Court’s Habeas Decision (emphasis added):
The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country. Sen. Graham and Sen. Lieberman and I had worked very hard to make sure that we didn’t torture any prisoners, that we didn’t mistreat them, that we abided by the Geneva Conventions, which applies to all prisoners. But we also made it perfectly clear, and I won’t go through all the legislation we passed, and the prohibition against torture, but we made it very clear that these are enemy combatants, these are people who are not citizens, they do not and never have been given the rights that citizens of this country have. And my friends there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people. So now what are we going to do. We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate, because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases. By the way, 30 of the people who have already been released from Guantanamo Bay have already tried to attack America again, one of them just a couple weeks ago, a suicide bomber in Iraq. Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation, and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.
As Ace pointed out yesterday,
The Court holds that not only do the terrorists have a habeas right, but they have a Super Special Celebrity Killer Habeas Right, entitling them to judicial “review” — pre-review, actually, as there’s nothing yet to review — of the entire scheme of the once-upcoming process before it actually unfolds.
Flopping Aces quotes Justice Roberts,
Today the Court strikes down as inadequate the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants. The political branches crafted these procedures amidst an ongoing military conflict, after much careful investigation and thorough debate. The Court rejects them today out of hand, without bothering to say what due process rights the detainees possess, without explaining how the statute fails to vindicate those rights, and before a single petitioner has even attempted to avail himself of the law’s operation.
This is probably the worst decision the Supreme Court has made in my lifetime.
Amazing, isn’t it? I thought nothing could surpass the stupidity of Kelo, but this managed to do it — in spades.
Just when you think they have outdone themselves, Anthony…
McCain:
…that we abided by the Geneva Conventions, which applies to all prisoners.
One point I forgot to make: while I admire McCain quite a bit, he’s dead wrong here. The Geneva conventions’ protection only apply to the uniformed soldiers of signatory parties. They in no way apply to al Qaeda, the Taliban, or other jihadis. The Senator’s misinterpretation (and it’s a common one) really ties our hands in dealing with these thugs.
I wish it were that simple because the Third Convention does indeed address the different types of categories of combatants it does say that the signatories must treat all captured humanely while their status is being investigated. Plus a signatory is obliged to honor the various conventions even if their opponents do not. The idea that the US summarily executed captured Germans in US uniforms, thus a precedent, is the stuff of films as their are no record of any such incident or even anecdotes of such events ever taken place.
Even some of the soldiers that took part in the Malmedy Massacre were held as POWs until the end of the war and then prosecuted for war crimes. The problem remains in that the Geneva Conventions simply do not mention unlawful combatants as a category either eligible or not eligible for protection.
The bothersome part of this decision is simply two fold; Overturning precedent that previous courts had upheld and interjecting the Court into an area that the Court had originally admonished to make changes to a few years ago.