Checks and balances? Bah, humbug. Like the legislative branch on the matter of Iraq, the judiciary has now also capitulated to the chief executive, allowing Dubya to detain American citizens at will in the name of fighting terrorism. Oh, heck, let’s bring back torture too while we’re at it.
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I don’t understand why you’re so upset about this. The guy admitted that he was found armed on the battlefield. It doesn’t strike me that this is something that someone could “accidentally” do during the course of their normal day.
In thinking about it further, he may be better off. Right now, he’s a prisoner of war. Once they stop detaining him indefinitely, he’s likely to be shot as a traitor.
Now that’s something I can live with – a US citizen captures as an enemy combatant has one right – to make a choice between military detention or a trial for treason.
Like I said, my problems aren’t so much with this particular case (although I would like to know more about that too) as with the precedent it sets. Basically, the courts have ceded their authority to the President in the name of fighting terrorism. Without judicial review, there’s much more of a chance that the executive branch will abuse its authority to keep citizens in detention, as it did during the Alien and Sedition Acts, WWI, WWII, and as it arguably is doing now.
I guess I saw their answer as that they never had the authority to “oversee” military operations in the first place. This is certainly a debatable point, but I’m trying to imagine the alternatives.
a) we take the military’s word for it
b) we station non-military judicial monitors on every battlefield to verify that the captive was captured on a battlefield.
If you have other ideas of how they could verify the status of a captive, I would love to hear it. Besides, they didn’t rule either way on detaining US citizens captured on a US battlefield, so I don’t think they’ve ceded their authority there. That is obviously a much touchier subject, and goes right to the heart of the illegal detainments you describe.
I do take heart in the fact that the military had nothing to gain by announcing they had captured a US citizen (but they did), and he did get a day in court.
Well, yes, that is what they seem to be arguing…that the court has no business contesting the reasons why a person is held indefinitely under military law, only to accept these facts as given. If that doesn’t set off any warning bells with you, than so be it. I’m more inclined to err on the side of too much information when it comes to these matters.
Regarding your final paragraph, I refer to the article: “Hamdi has been held since he was taken prisoner with Taliban forces in Afghanistan in November 2001. He has been charged with no crime and has been held without any legal rights. His case is in court only because his father hired a lawyer to challenge his detention.”
He’s essentially a prisoner of war, right? As far as I know, you don’t need a trial to convict someone of that, and you don’t have to set a timetable to free them. They get freed when the war ends.
The fact that this war may not end, while frustrating and disturbing to you and I, should act as an effective deterrent for future treason.