SCOTUS ruling on habeas corpus for Gitmo detainees outlines Bush administration failing
Today the Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration with a ruling 5-4 that asserted that detainees at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba have habeas corpus rights and can thus challenge the lawfulness of their detention.
“Cernig” at Newshoggers.com represents my thoughts well:
Some very bad people are likely to walk free along with the innocent because the Bush administration tried to walk around domestic and international principles of law, creating an entirely spurious new designation of “unlawful combatant” so that they could either hide detainees from due process indefinitely or, failing that, conduct kangaroo courts.
If they’d just stuck with the existing definitions, all the Gitmo detainees against whom they could build a real case under the actual rules of law, without torture and without rigging the courts, would have been tried as POW’s already. If found guilty, the death penalty would have been warranted in some cases. I would personally have had no problem with that. That it hasn’t happened is a failure of the Bush administration, no-one else. They have proven themselves incompetent to shepherd America’s national security.
The only thing worse than setting suspected terrorists free is the idea that the government can imprison anybody for as long as they like, for any reason, without giving that person legal recourse. That isn’t just a leap towards tyranny – that is tyranny. Justice Scalia’s dissent states that “[the decision] will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” So be it. That’s the price we pay for upholding human rights in a dangerous world.
Had the Bush administration kept those human rights in mind and pursued a legal path towards fairly convicting the detainees that could be convicted, and freeing the ones for whom there was insufficient evidence (or who weren’t captured as combatants on a battlefield), we could have avoided this situation. Now, even the ones we have evidence on could be set free by challenging the legality of their detention. Blame Bush for that.
