Posted on 06/15/2008 12:16:25 PM PDT by Red Steel
WASHINGTON -- When the Supreme Court goes on recess at the end of this month, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy will be off to his summer teaching job in Salzburg, Austria. For the 19th year, he will teach a class called "Fundamental Rights in Europe and the United States" for the McGeorge Law School.
He tells his American and European students that the belief in individual freedom and the respect for human dignity transcends national borders. There is, he once said in an interview, "some underlying common shared aspiration" in legal systems that protects the rights and liberties of all.
That international perspective was on display Thursday as Kennedy spoke for the Supreme Court in extending legal rights to the foreign military prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "Security subsists too in fidelity to freedom's first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers," Kennedy said.
The 5-4 ruling highlighted the sharp divide over the law and the war on terrorism. The dissenters, agreeing with the Bush administration, said foreigners captured abroad in the war on terrorism had no rights in American courts.
Justice Antonin Scalia dissented with the decision "to extend the right of habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war." The ruling "warps our Constitution," he wrote in his dissent.
The majority, led by Kennedy, was more in tune with the views across Europe and of civil libertarians in this country, who have condemned the prison at Guantanamo Bay as a "legal black hole" where foreigners are shackled and held in harsh conditions without due process of law. The justices in the majority said that when U.S. authorities take someone into
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
And if a detainee can be held without a right to a habeas proceeding where do you get to claim that you are a citizen? No right to file in any court because the military claims you are an enemy combatant is no right to file. It is in the resulting habeas hearing that you get to claim that you are US citizen. Get it?
You could not be more mistaken
If the lefty lawyers get their habeas corpus hearings in Federal courts the will then demand the detainees be tried in Federal courts on US soil. They are non stop campaigners for "human rights" They get no glory unless the venue is Federal court. They are not versed in military law. The Supreme Court rolled over for them two days ago and they'll do it again
There are only two choices here Jackson, either Scalia is factually wrong in that paragraph or you're a liberal pimping for the liberals on the court.
Your move becuase the lease agreement is clear, GITMO is sovereign to Cuba.
So you mean that Cuba can state that they are sovereign and take possession of the detainees. That is what sovereignty means. Either you are sovereign or you are not and someone else is. We invented this Guantanamo thing in slightly to clever effort to have it all ways. It just makes us look bad in the eyes of the world.
I don’t believe you are correct in lumping US jurisdiction as being the same as Military jurisdiction.
Military bases are subject to the UCMJ not the US legal system.
Just because it fits your argument doesn’t make it so.
I already said it. Scalia is factually wrong. I disagree with Scalia on a lot of things. While he claims to be an originalist, he is very quick to defer to stare decisis and legislative and executive prerogatives when he doesn't actually like where adherence to the original intent of the constitution would force him to go.
I get that you are a liberal puke who thinks being a member of the United States military means violating your oath to the constitution every chance you get. We entrust our COmmanders to kill bad guys but we can't trust them to check dteainees citizenship claims? Horses manure all over that strawman.
I also get that you raise idiotic strawman arguments because the facts aren't your friend. Only liberal pukes claim that the US military would hold citizens unconstitutionally.
Like you.
And btw, I don't care if you've served, lot's of folks have served who make idiotic liberal arguments. So if that shoe fits...
Be careful what you think you are giving up.
You didn’t read the case did you? Exactly what one of the detainees was denied was the right to prove he was not a member of Al Qaida.
I think you need to look at a globe.
Or at least get out once in a while.
Is the US now the battlefield?
Do we have troops on patrol rounding up citizens in the dead of the night?
Your strawman here is ridiculous and beyond silly.
If that is all you have then you have proven my point that you are a lefty.
You can goddamned well tell me right now what oath you are accusing me of violating.
Since Robert Gates has called for shutting down Guantanamo are you accusing him of violating his oath too?
Why are you so afraid of habeas corpus rights?
I am waiting for you to tell me what oath I have violated.
You lied. Scalia is factually correct, the lease agreement makes that painfully clear.
Closing down Guantanamo and bestowing constitutional rights on enemy combatants are two different things.
Once again your strawman falls miles short.
How do you get that?
You are just completely off the reservation.
LOL< I read the majority opinion and the dissents. And I know from you're arguments here that you are functionally illiterate where both are concerned.
ANd there's no reason to take the Lords name in vain because you misundertood what I wrote, I'm happy to clarify.
By saying that the military will keep citizens unlawfully you have accused them of knowingly violating their oaths.
Should they be as outraged at your direct accusation as you are by assuming incorrectly that the accusation was made to you?
This is where you foot meets your mouth Andy. Can't wait to hear this!
Scalia is trying to have his cake and eat it to. As the majority argued it, the US has exclusive control over Cuba and are therefore de facto sovereign. If Scalia wants to argue the we have merely leased it and that Cuba is de facto sovereign, then Cuba has jurisdication and can take possession of the detainees. Of course we would not turn the detainees over to Cuba, would refuse to recognize their sovereignty, and therefore we are sovereign.
Sorry, but Scalia is trying to argue an excluded middle here and he falls into the same kind of logical hole that makes some observers believe that Scalia is losing the mental powers for which he is so esteemed.
To me his dissent reads as an emotional rant, not a legal argument.
Where did I violate my oath under the constitution? We are going nowhere until you answer that scurrilous goddamned charge.
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