So SCOTUS thinks the military ought to kill unlawful combatants (people captured on the battlefield who are not in uniform and who are not signatories to the Geneva Convention.) Well, they didn’t say that, exactly, but how many people do you really think are going to make it into custody now, when custody means, “treat them like the US citizens they are not,” and when the next logical step is “prepare to defend yourself in a criminal case with an ACLU lawyer explaining to a jury why you should not have arrested or did not Mirandize this suspect.”
Not too many.
Does anybody really think that this isn’t going to result in more deaths? The deaths of suspected terrorists, and the deaths of innocent civilians who are not going to benefit from the information received from those detainees. The unspoken policy now is going to be to kill them when you can, because it’s going to be a real pain to deal with them later. And given the liberals propensity to haul our soldiers into court on criminal charges, killing the detainee so he can’t testify against you – and remember, the al Qaeda playbook specifically instructs them to lie and make up charges against you – seems like the best way to go.
Typical liberal policy; set out to achieve some noble-sounding goal and end up with a bad result. Burn the food to “save the environment,” and never mind that people starve. Ban the DDT to save the birds, and never mind that people die of malaria. And now they give rights to unlawful combatants that will certainly result in more deaths.
There’s no easy solution to the problem of an enemy who commits not crimes, but acts of war – yet does not wear a uniform or officially represent a country. It’s a win-win for them because they can – obviously – use our system against us. If we respond in kind, we have a “war” within the country that weakens us. If we treat it like a criminal case, we cannot respond effectively. There’s no good answer except to – long term – destroy the ideology that drives them, and before that can be done, we have to make it a painful belief system to live by.
From Scalia:
Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separation-of- powers principles to establish a manipulable “functional” test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus (and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes important precedents, most conspicuously Justice Jackson’s opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager. It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.
The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today.
This has nothing to do with your post but I had to share with someone. lol Score one for LEGAL immigration. After FOUR long years of waiting, three interviews, five sets of fingerprints, two medicals, the three year long process of the FBI name check (don’t get me started on the inefficiency of that), two inquiries by Congressmen…. we have a Green Card! (son-in-law from Russia) The LEGAL way. Was it easy? Nope. Was it worth it? You bet. No hiding here. Yes it would be nice if they would streamline the process, get rid of some the redundancy built into it but it’s still the best way to come. Legally!
I had the exact same thought when I heard about this asinine decision this morning, and Rush Limbaugh later echoed my thoughts on the radio. The only reason these monsters are alive to begin with is because we chose not to kill them on the battlefield. It is simple logic, and you can bet that most soldiers will grasp it. Basically, the court is sending the message: Take no prisoners.
This decision is the inevitable outcome of President Bush not asking for, and receiving, a Congressional Declaration of War against Al Qeada. In the immediate months following Sept 11,2001, Congress and the Nation was predisposed to such a declaration. A declaration against Al Qeada only, no inclusion of any existing states would have been an extremely useful tool for America to deal with terrorists and those nations that harbor them (Pakistan, for example, with whom we do much trade). America could have then sought Al Qeada wherever they were, held them without trial, and still been in compliance with Article 1, Section 9, Clause 2. of the Constitution. But no. The Bush’s, like the Kennedy’s, always leave America worse off than before.