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 ...
I could not agree more that it is necessary to do this under a military tribunal, which is why you should be very angry with the Secretary of the Navy for screwing it up. Kennedy's principal objection in his opinion was that secretary of the Navy's implementing regulations turned what should have been a neutral adversarial process in a military tribunal into a kanagaroo court. This is not on left wing lawyers. It is on him and the administration. They were shot with the gun they loaded and handed over.
They are not MY leftist lawyers. Murdering terrorists should be put on trial for their lives, and if convicted in a fair and neutral forum, an appropriate military tribunal, the should be executed. From the WP article: Under the previous order, all commission members functioned as both judge and jury. Under the new order, the presiding officer will function as the judge
What idiot suit lawyer for the administration is writing these rules. One thing that we know how to do is to run military tribunals. There are 100s of years of precedent. There is always a judge.
But some clueless twit didn't even want a judge? NO F'IN Judge? Why not just commission a lynch mob? We claim to a a member of the civilized countries of the world, and we intend to hold trials to put terrorist murderers to death, and we don't even have a judge? This crap makes us an international laughing stock. Did we steal a page from the Trial by Court Martials manual of Mugabe? The Iraq war is being won by competent serving military. The peace is being lost by the most incompetent boobs I can imagine have been assembled in one administration.
NO JUDGE? What did they think they were doing? This is the silliest most outrageous thing I have ever read.
When you try to execute people without a judge, that is likely to happen.
When you try to execute people without a judge, that is likely to happen.
Execute people after being tried by a military commission in Guantanamo. Are you against this? A simple yes or no will suffice. I have no problem with it
But we have three choices: 1. fair trial. 2. Mock trial. 3. Summary execution. SECNAV is doing his best to avoid option 1, and he cannot do option 3 so he is doing his damndest to get option 2, just like for the Haditha Marines.
You missed off the key quibble that has lead to all the litigation.... tried by a military commission that flying in the face of all precedent, is not headed by an impartial [military if you wish] judge to conduct the trial. The process for military tribunals is as old as the hills. Why did this administration decided to go off on a flier and attempt to rewrite the whole thing.
Regardless of what the Navy Secretary did... The obvious intent of the left wing lawyers is to get the trials out of Guantanamo, onto the Mainland USA and into Federal courts. This Supreme decision brings them one step closer
You miss the obvious incentive of these commie lawyers. To get more glory and recognition. They can only get this if they represent these Jihadists in Federal courts on the Mainland USA
That has been their game all along. Why does the administration do dumb things that plays into it?
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