Free Republic

Who could have guessed that Osama bin Laden's driver/bodyguard would be one of the privileged few to be granted a hearing by the high and mighty U.S. Supreme Court justices! After refusing to hear appeals from thousands of Americans during the past year, the Court's liberals jumped at a chance to rule that President Bush was wrong. It wasn't compassion for Gitmo prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan. It was that Hamdan v. Rumsfeld offered an opportunity to proclaim judicial supremacy over both the other two branches of government and to slap the Bush Administration in the process. The Supreme Court had...

It is not wise to place yourself between a Stinger missile and its target. So, normally, I wouldn't dare stand in the way when the great Mark Steyn goes on the attack. But, like a lot of conservatives, he was so irritated by the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that he fired a bit wildly in a recent column. It is not true that the Court's ruling, invoking a provision of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, gives terrorists "all the benefits with none of the obligations" set down in the convention. It's not even true that...

Hamdan primer I've been waiting to comment on Hamdan until I had a chance to read the rather lengthy decision (as opposed to just commenting on what makes it through the media filter). After reading it, I created a primer, since I believe that there's been a lot of misleading spin on this case in the MSM. If you scan the MSM accounts, you'd come away with the impression that Bush made up military commissions, that the president believes he doesn't have to abide by the law, and that the court doesn't think Hamdan should be detained anymore. None of...

1861. 1941. 2001. Our big wars -- and the war on terrorism ranks with the big ones -- have a way of starting in the first year of a decade. Supreme Courts, which historically have been loath to intervene against presidential war powers in the midst of conflict, have tended to give the president until mid-decade to do what he wishes to the Constitution in order to win the war.During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus -- trashing the Bill of Rights or exercising necessary emergency executive power, depending on your point of view. But...

In a 5-3 decision on June 29th reversing the Court of Appeals (D.C. Circuit) in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court upheld the Geneva Conventions of 1949 as enforceable U.S. law. A plurality of the justices also relied on international law to strengthen another key finding in the case. They restored the critical partnership that international law has with federal law. The Supreme Court justices demonstrated how fundamental tenets of international law amplify American values and are deeply embedded in U.S. law. No other decision of the Supreme Court in recent years has so forthrightly reaffirmed American obligations under international...

The Supreme Court killed a small forest yesterday with the 185 pages of conflicting opinions it issued yesterday in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, but it all boils down to only two points. First, the courts are ill equipped to deal with the legal complexities raised by the war on terror. And second, Congress can no longer avoid doing something about it. Although the ruling is a defeat for President Bush, it's certainly not a victory for his opponents. Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a citizen of Yemen, was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001, having spent the previous five years serving al Qaeda...

June 30, 2006, 0:49 a.m. An Outrage By The Editors The Supreme Court’s decision to impose by judicial fiat a treaty that no politically accountable official would dare propose — a one-sided compact wherein the United States gives elevated due process to al Qaeda’s terrorists while they continue slaughtering civilians and torturing their captives to death — is an abomination. The extent of the abomination is difficult to quantify. Thursday’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld gets worse the more one studies it. To begin with, the Court had no business deciding this case at all. Not only did it...

Supreme Court: Ruling for bin Laden's former chauffeur, liberal justices have once again hampered our ability to wage war on terror......Justice Stevens' ruling ignored the clear language of the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), passed and signed into law last year, and went on a fishing expedition to find ways around it.Congress believed that in passing the DTA it was removing the federal courts' jurisdiction over Gitmo detainees. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Specter, who opposed the DTA, complained on the floor of the Senate that under the legislation, "no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to consider the application for...

Conservative legal scho;ars have long warned that judges' reliance on foreign opinions might undermine the mechanism for setting domestic policy under the Constitution. Now, for the second time, a friend of the court brief has been submitted to the Supreme Court by foreign politicians in a case relating to detainees at Guantánamo, suggesting that constitutional control over foreign policy could be similarly jeopardized. The case is Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, challenging the administration's military commissions for trying Guantánamo detainees. In the course of the litigation, a shifting group of "current and former members of the United Kingdom and European Union Parliaments"...

Does John Roberts have an ethics problem? Three ethics professors argue that Roberts, whom President Bush has just nominated to be chief justice, should have disqualified himself from a case he helped decide earlier this year while serving as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which concerns a key issue in the administration's war on terrorism, may be headed for the Supreme Court, and at the time of the appeals court ruling, Roberts was being considered for a vacancy on the high court, though it did not yet exist....