Roberts Champions President Bush’s War on Terror
Roberts Champions President Bush’s War on Terror
To better understand the O’Connor versus Roberts approach to the President’s waging of the war on terror, here’s a little more background as to how it all got to this point.
After September 11th, President Bush claimed the “authority to seize and hold suspected terrorists or their protectors and indefinitely deny them access to courts or lawyers while interrogating them.” In the case of Hamdi v Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court accepted that Congress had authorized President Bush to seize and hold U.S. citizens under the so-called “enemy combatant” title but that Hamdi had the right to challenge his detention. However, the Court did not grant the detainee “the full panoply of rights that are afforded criminal defendants in civilian courts. Only Justices Scalia and Stevens were willing to go that far.”
Similar to the Hamdi case, in Rasul v Bush, the Bush administration argued that “enemy combatants” could be held indefinitely but this time at Guantanamo Bay. The administration’s argument was that Guanatanamo Bay was under Cuban sovereignty and so not under the jurisdiction of the American legal system. However, the Supreme Court again rebuffed the administration and forced it to create “procedures that would provide appropriate legal process” to enemy combatants. However, the Court chose to remain silent on “the substantive legal test the government must meet to hold someone there.”
Now back to Roberts.
Last week, Roberts joined a three-judge panel that overturned an earlier ruling on the case of Hamdan v Rumsfeld. The previous ruling had put “an abrupt halt” to the tribunals by determining that the administration had wrongfully “declared that those captured in Afghanistan were not entitled to prisoner-of-war protections.” The most recent ruling on the case serves as a “significant legal victory for the administration” but comes in direct opposition to “many retired senior officers” who continue to warn that “the way detainees at Guantanamo had been treated imperiled American troops who might themselves be captured on the battlefield.”
Unfortunately, Roberts may have been looking out for his future instead of the long term safety of our soldiers.
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Bush claims not to be a “quid pro quo” kind of guy, but this appointment sure looks like payback.
July 20th, 2005 at 12:06 pmal qaeda and islamo fascists don’t respect the geneva conventions already. you people do realize, and there’s tons of video on the internet documenting this, that they kill their prisoners.
no american government’s policies, democrat or republican, will change this.
July 20th, 2005 at 12:33 pmthe appointment is also not payback. bush wasn’t thinking, “hey wonderful white man, you ruled in favor for me on this one case out of thousands. let me show you how much i love you by nominating you for the supreme court. white men rule!”.
July 20th, 2005 at 12:37 pmStomp the Faux Federalists! ACS!
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_07_17.php#006140
July 20th, 2005 at 12:38 pmWith all due respect to concerns over Roberts’ views on reproductive rights, environment, workers rights (etc.), this is what concerns me the most. I was very dissapointed that not a single of Bush’s post news conferance news “experts” mentioned this. It goes to the very heart of what scares me most about Bush, neo-cons and so much of their ruthless policies.
My sense is W’s powerbrokers have been working on this selection for a long, long time. These people are disciplined, and determined to not repeat Souter. I’d bet my bank account this guy’s been given the 3rd degree, processed, queried, and stamped w/guarantee of dependable, predictable service.
July 20th, 2005 at 1:02 pmLyle (#3): Okay, amuse us. Tell us how you know that that couldn’t have been what Bush was thinking (other than Bush being such an idjit that the word “thinking” generally doesn’t apply to him at all).
July 20th, 2005 at 1:03 pmbush wasn’t thinking
Lyle gets one right.
July 20th, 2005 at 1:26 pmal qaeda and islamo fascists don’t respect the geneva conventions already. you people do realize, and there’s tons of video on the internet documenting this, that they kill their prisoners.
no american government’s policies, democrat or republican, will change this.
Comment by Lyle  July 20, 2005 @ 12:33 pm
Lyle is a genius!
no american government’s policies, democrat or republican, will change this.
No matter what we do, they will do evil things. So we must be just as evil for… what reason?
Don’t you wish all Bushies were this well prepared?
July 20th, 2005 at 1:30 pmRoberts will tilt the court even more rightward than it is. Now Scalia & Thomas will have a third to join their double secret circle & make things more interesting.
Lyle goes out to show us the trogladite version of enlightened thought: “We must be as brutally oppressive and tyranical as the least civilized people on the planet”. Dim bulb. That isn’t the definition of a civilization in ascent. It is the definition of a civilization in decline when you are striving for the lowest common denominator being the high bar you are trying to reach.
I guess I should be glad. At least they weren’t trying to be more fascist and thuggish than the most brutal people in the whole universe. Then there would be hell on earth.
July 20th, 2005 at 2:30 pmYou’re right Lyle. Let’s just bomb Mecca, there’ll be no Moslams to worry about. Of course you’ll have to label all of ‘em “enemy combatants” the day before.
- Tom Tancredo
July 20th, 2005 at 3:13 pmPolitical Parties Reverse Roles in Debate Over CIA Leak
The debate over the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity has caused a curious about-face by Washington politicians, with Democrats who have long favored a laissez-faire attitude toward leaks of classified information now decrying them, and Republicans who once wanted to criminalize every such leak suggesting that the one involving Ms. Plame wasn’t so terrible.
“This is just shameless,” a former Justice Department official, Bruce Fein, said. He said the political posturing on both sides may actually encourage more leaks. “It really is staggering. It undercuts their own claim that it’s serious business, because it makes people in the bureaucracy think the only issue is whether you have enough politicians lined up behind you.”
Those who track government classification policy were left spinning by last week’s political developments, as Democrats moved to take advantage of the disclosure that President Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, apparently played some role as a source for news stories that exposed Ms. Plame’s employment at the CIA.
Several Democratic senators, including Senator Schumer, pushed for a new law stripping security clearances from leakers. The Senate’s Republican leadership countered with a proposal aimed at denying clearances to lawmakers who release classified FBI reports or make comments that are used as propaganda by terrorist organizations.
“It teaches us to be a little bit more skeptical of claims of national security,” said a leading authority on government secrecy, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. “Our classification policies are inevitably filtered through a political lens.”
Five years ago, the roles of Democrats and Republicans were essentially reversed as Congress passed a law making every leak of classified information a crime. The measure, attached to an intelligence appropriations bill, was championed by Senator Shelby, a Republican of Alabama, and supported by all the major intelligence agencies. Over the objections of those agencies, President Clinton vetoed the bill. He warned that the anti-leak measure could be used to stifle dissent.
Mr. Aftergood said that as he watched the political dynamic in Congress last week, he feared that it would again pass such a measure, which critics have compared to Britain’s Official Secrets Act. “If someone had been alert and ready to do a little political jujitsu, they might have re-enacted an anti-leak statute,” the policy analyst said. “I was holding my breath.”
Earlier this month, a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was jailed in connection with the criminal investigation into who leaked Ms. Plame’s identity. Mr. Aftergood said such jailings would be commonplace if the 2000 anti-leak law were resurrected. “It would just mean journalism is the shortest path to jail,” he said. “It would have been a disaster.”
Mr. Schumer, who staged three press events last week about Mr. Rove’s alleged role in the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity, is facing particular criticism for his stance. In an e-mail to reporters, Republican Party officials noted that in 1982 Mr. Schumer was one of 32 House members who voted against the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the law at the center of the investigation that has swept up Mr. Rove and other White House officials.
A spokesman for Mr. Schumer, Israel Klein, said the senator has been consistent. “Senator Schumer, who has been a longtime advocate for whistle-blower rights, felt that the initial law that was passed was a little bit too broad,” Mr. Klein said.
Mr. Schumer also denounced the anti-leak legislation Congress passed in 2000. “We should never forget that one of the core purposes of the First Amendment was to prohibit government from suppressing embarrassing information, not criminalizing its release,” the senator said. He complained that the measure “would require all current and past government officials to guess at what might be illegal, while the threat of serious jail time hangs over their heads.”
Some conservative commentators have argued that if Mr. Rove did contribute to the disclosure of Ms. Plame’s identity, he did so unintentionally and in the context of White House efforts to shake up an entrenched bureaucracy at the CIA. However, the anti-leak measure most Republican lawmakers supported five years ago included no requirement that prosecutors prove a leaker’s intent before shipping him or her off to jail.
In another twist, the man most responsible for persuading Mr. Clinton to veto the bill with the anti-leak pro vision has emerged as a vocal critic of Mr. Rove. A former chief of staff to Mr. Clinton, John Podesta, appeared yesterday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” to call for Mr. Rove’s ouster.
In an interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Podesta said he sees the disclosure of an agent’s identity as far more serious than most other leaks of classified information. “There’s simply something different about naming agents’ names,” he said. “I don’t think I’m splitting hairs here.”
Mr. Podesta said his main criticism of Mr. Rove is not that he violated any law, but that he may have lied about his involvement in the matter when asked by the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan.
Mr. Clinton’s impeachment has even been pulled into the debate over Mr. Rove’s conduct. Last week, the Democratic Party sent reporters a list of quotations in which Republican lawmakers call any public official who lies unfit for office. The quotes were taken from the debate surrounding Mr. Clinton’s false public statements about his relationship with a White House intern, Monica Lewsinky.
Mr. Fein, who served in the Justice Department under President Reagan, said politicians appear to be incapable of holding a consistent position on leaks. He noted that Republicans complained loudly when Mr. Clinton pardoned a former director of central intelligence, John Deutch, who was facing misdemeanor charges for mishandling classified data. Democrats were similarly up in arms when a former national security adviser to Mr. Clinton, Samuel Berger, was charged criminally for removing classified documents from the National Archives.
A Washington author who has been writing about American intelligence agencies for more than two decades, James Bamford, said he saw little consistency in the current debate.
“The Republicans have been battling for years to criminalize this, criminalize that, creating enormous secrecy. Now all of a sudden this is just business as usual?” he said. “It’s very hypocritical.”
Mr. Bamford said Democrats did little during the Clinton years to crack down on leaks. “It’s all of a sudden come up now because they’ve found a potential midterm election issue here,” he said.
The lead advocate for the antileak measure in 2000, Senator Shelby, has been less vocal this time around. One reason may be that he is under investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee for allegedly leaking classified communications intercepts to CNN and Fox in 2002. Mr. Shelby’s office has said “he has never knowingly compromised classified information.”
http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=17134
July 20th, 2005 at 5:43 pmYou guys are right, not giving terrorists Geneva protection that they are not legally entitled to is just like chopping off their heads. Point well taken.
July 20th, 2005 at 6:06 pmIf Roberts wants to be included in the indictments for crimes against humanity, thats his choice.
July 20th, 2005 at 6:20 pmIts America’s “moral standard” at stake, fake, not the terrorists’. Its to maintain our standard, not to justify lowering it just as long as it is higher than that of the terrorists’.
July 20th, 2005 at 6:54 pmVery good skid.
July 20th, 2005 at 9:23 pmwhere do i say we should bomb Mecca or that the American government should behead Muslim terrorists?
one of you fools actually said compared what goes on at Gitmo to the beheadings that Muslim jihadists carry out. that’s absurd and asinine.
just because the Muslim terrorists down in Gitmo don’t get the protection of the Geneva conventions doesn’t mean they are treated bad. and they certainly are not murdered.
the Muslims terrorists are not signatories to the Geneva convention and do not respect it. they kill prisoners, be they combatant or non-combatant (like the Margaret Hassan). so even if the Gitmo guys get the Geneva conventions their comrades aren’t going to respect any of our soldiers.
furthermore al Qaeda doesn’t give a damn about the prisoners in Gitmo. why? cause they send men to their deaths as suicide bombers. why in the world would they care what happens to their imprisoned brethern if they don’t care about when they’re free and willing to kill themselves for a backwards Islamist worldview?
please don’t ever misquote me again. it’s pathetic and infantile.
July 20th, 2005 at 10:32 pm“Roberts Champions President Bush’s War on Terror”
It is America’s war on terror. Roberts and Bush are patriotic Americans.
July 20th, 2005 at 10:47 pmLyle said “just because the Muslim terrorists down in Gitmo don’t get the protection of the Geneva conventions doesn’t mean they are treated bad”
Could you please show me the court documents that prove these “muslims” are “terrorists” Lyle. Please show me a judges guilty verdict.
This is exactly why the world hates us, we convict without the right to a fair and speedy trial.
Folks like Lyle portray American’s like the “terrorists” he describes.
July 20th, 2005 at 10:55 pmSusan,
we haven’t convicted anybody. we picked up these terrorists in afghanistan and elsewhere because they were part of al Qaeda or the Taliban or some other Muslim terrorist group. if you’re part of al Qaeda, ipso facto, you’re a terrorist.
furthermore we don’t have to try these men as long as there is open hostilities between the groups they’re a part of and the united states government. they get to stay locked up, as all prisoners do, for the duration of the war. they decided to be jihadists and now they have to suffer the consequences of being jihadists.
if we captured german soldiers in wwii, we didn’t have to convict them of being german soldiers to call them german soldiers or nazis.
not to mention that if you are muslim man who is a member of al qaeda or the taliban you’re a misogynist and profoundly guilty of oppressing women.
o.j. simpson is not a killer i guess either.
July 20th, 2005 at 11:25 pmLooks like terrorism is turning out to be the republicans best friend.MMMMMmmm And no, it’s a war on terra.
July 20th, 2005 at 11:27 pmProud terrorists George.
July 20th, 2005 at 11:57 pm#2
al qaeda and islamo fascists don’t respect the geneva conventions already. you people do realize, and there’s tons of video on the internet documenting this, that they kill their prisoners.
Comment by Lyle
you do realize that not every person your administration labelled “enemy combatant” (and locked them up accordingly) actually IS a member of al qaeda, though. Some of them ARE innocent…..
July 21st, 2005 at 4:42 amKind of hard to prove for them though without access to a lawyer and/or an actual trial ….
Bush’s team is looking an awful lot like a college frat house redux with old pals from elite Ivy Colleges getting the nod for important positions.
Msybe that’s just how the GOP old boys’ network works?
. . .
July 21st, 2005 at 8:04 am–Lyle, if you’d been watching your TeeVee like a good citizen you’d've seen an injured prisoner in Fallujah being shot dead by a Marine. All armies kill prisoners — do you think war is a Sunday School outing? No, it’s organized legal murder on a grand scale.
–More info for Lyle;
–Rumsfeld: “The people down there at Guantanamo Bay, under the President’s orders, have been treated humanely and they should be treated humanely. But these are terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, suicide bombers, UBL’s bodyguards, the 20th hijacker [none have yet ben charged with anything -- the Pentagon has plans to charge four people out of several hundred that they kidnapped]. . . We’ve been letting a number of them go back to their home countries in the custody of their countries [because they were innocent, even under torture], and already we’ve found 12 back on the battlefield trying to kill our people that were let go by mistake [what would you do if you were tortured, Rummy, forgive and forget?], probably because they used an alias [they don't play by the rules when they're kidnapped] and we weren’t able to sort it out. . . Those that are suggesting that the management or the handling by our military of what’s going on in Guantanamo Bay is not the way it should be, are just flat wrong.
–GENEVA – U.N. human rights experts said Thursday (6/23) they have reliable accounts of detainees being tortured at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The experts also said Washington had not responded to their latest request to check on the conditions of terror suspects at the facility in eastern Cuba. That request was made in April.
–The FBI visited Guatanamo and they saw torture: http://www.thehawaiichannel.com/helenthomas/4023757/detail.html
(their only problem with it was that the torturers were pretending to be FBI agents.)
–AP News: They fed them well. The Pakistani tribesmen slaughtered a sheep in honor of their guests, Arabs and Chinese Muslims famished from fleeing US bombing in the Afghan mountains. But their hosts had ulterior motives: to sell them to the Americans, said the men who are now prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Bounties ranged from $3,000 to $25,000, the detainees testified during military tribunals, according to transcripts the US government gave The Associated Press to comply with a Freedom of Information lawsuit. A former CIA intelligence officer who helped lead the search for Osama bin Laden told AP the accounts sounded legitimate because US allies regularly got money to help catch Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. Gary Schroen said he took a suitcase of $3 million in cash into Afghanistan to help supply and win over warlords.
–6/24: GENEVA (AFP) – Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said. The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.
–Lyle, I’m afraid that we have exceeded even your standards of brutal aggression and tyranny, and Roberts will make sure we continue to wear the yellow jersey in the Tour de Terrorismo.
July 23rd, 2005 at 12:40 pm