The Supreme Court says that enemy combatants get habeus corpus rights. Amazingly bad idea on a lot of levels. People will call this a rebuke to George Bush, but it's worth remembering that this decision also blows away a law that Congress passed with bi-partisan support. Here's my guess on what happens.
1) We'll close down Gitmo. No reason to keep it open now.
2) We'll repatriate a lot of these dudes to their home countries. They'll all miss Gitmo once they get subjected to the tender mercies of the "justice systems" of Hosni Mubarak and the Saudi princes, among others. One or two might get away and return to the fray and probably that will mean that Americans will die as a result of this decision. I guess Kennedy, Breyer, Souter, Ginsburg and Stevens can live with that. Oddly enough, these enemy combatants won't respect us more because of the actions that our enlightened philosopher-kings undertook on their behalf.
3) Going forward, we won't capture illegal combatants when we encounter them. We'll just shoot them instead. Bullets are a lot cheaper than battling ACLU lawyers.
1 comment:
So much for the concept of Stare Decisis on which the Democrats made such a huge deal about in grilling Roberts and Alito in their confirmation hearings.
As you said, the decision is bad on so many levels. Check out Justice Scalia's dissent for a detailed, as well as a very well reasoned rebuttal of this judicial activism.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/06-1195.ZD1.html
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