Supreme Court to hear appeal by Gitmo detainees.
By on Jun 29th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Supreme Court to hear appeal by Gitmo detainees.
AP reports:
The Supreme Court, reversing course, agreed Friday to review whether Guantanamo Bay detainees may go to federal court to challenge their indefinite confinement.
The action, announced without comment along with other end-of-term orders, is a setback for the Bush administration. It had argued that a new law strips courts of their jurisdiction to hear detainee cases.
In April, the court turned down an identical request, although several justices indicated they could be persuaded otherwise.
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Well the 5 Supreme Court stooge Justices in the pocket of Bush will rule against them. 5 to 4 decision again.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:10 amGee, this must not set well with the Torture Team, and it flies in the face of the ongoing efforts to sh!t all over the constitution. Probably is ruining a perfectly good Friday for Gonzo, Darth, Rover and l’il Bush.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:11 amIm sure we can find a few sensitive liberal-types to take these men into their homes while awaiting civilian trial. No breakfast sausage anymore.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:11 amThere’s always the Kennedy swing vote to make it a 5-4 rebuttal of Georgie.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:14 am#3
Or we could listen in on your phone calls and monitor your emails or that of your family and find probable cause to throw you and yours in Gitmo with no chance to get out. But that would be OK, as 95% of the people in there now are just as guilty as you!
That’s what we call collateral damage.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:15 amIt sickens me that the court is even hearing such a case.
The constitution was written under “positive grant” – meaning that the only powers the government could exercise are those specifically listed in the constitution.
There’s not a thing in there that allows the government the power to prevent people from challenging their detentions.
We’re less safe because of the policies of this government…
Some reading:
“Secret Trials Endanger Security”
June 29th, 2007 at 10:16 amhttp://www.populistamerica.com/secret_trials_endanger_security
good news… i’m not optimistic about the outcome, but at least it’s being heard where it needs to be heard and should have been heard a long time ago…
And, yes, I DO take it personally
June 29th, 2007 at 10:16 amOh lordy, good luck with that……
June 29th, 2007 at 10:19 amDateline -October 2007: “In a 5-4 decision, today…”
June 29th, 2007 at 10:21 ami’d bet it’s a setup… bushco just needs the gravitas…
June 29th, 2007 at 10:23 am.
time for another exciting game of spin Justice Kennedy! where o where will he land this time!??
gee i wonder… the fuker
June 29th, 2007 at 10:30 amcan we impeach the supreme court? they are not protecting the constitution. they need to go.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:30 amThere’s only one reason why they agreed….they already have the 5-4 in the pocket.
I call shenanigans.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:34 amAnd what wine would you like served with this Red Herring?
June 29th, 2007 at 10:44 amThis is significant, given the talk about closing Guantanamo and moving it to Afghanistan.
It may be the move is designed to further remove the accused “enemy combatants” away from the reach of any court of law, and an attempt to moot out this case.
Many here might be surprised at the outcome. My guess would make it closer to a 7-2 vote to grant Habeas.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:45 amFaire > I wish you were right, but 5 of the Justices are Bush stooges, so they will do whatever he wants them to do.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:52 amstopthecons @ 6: actually, the Constitution does apparently address this. “In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.” (emphasis added)
I don’t know if this gives the Congress the power to do what it did; you could argue that the Fifth Amendment supercedes, of course, but that means the Fifth Amendment applies here, and that’s not entirely clear either.
I tend to agree with you, but I am just not sure.
However, I totally agree the federal government cannot do what the Constitution doesn’t say it can do, which is why I assume you, like me, believe Social Security, Medicare, public school funding, universal health care, and most other social programs at the federal level are unconstitutional.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:03 amI am posting the findings of a report that was done when there were 517 inmates at Gitmo. More than a hundred of them have been released since.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=885659
1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.
2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.
3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that, in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed “fighters for;” 30% considered “members of;” a large majority – 60% – are detained merely because they are “associated with” a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners, a nexus to any terrorist group is not identified by the Government.
4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.
5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants – mostly Uighers – are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:04 amActually I think this is a good sign that Scalia et al. realize that President Hillary will not hesitate to use these new found powers, unless they do something about it now. I don’t want Hillary or anybody else to ever think that it is ok to do what Bushco has done in treating the Constitution as if it were toilet paper.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:10 am“Bush administration had argued that a new law strips courts of their jurisdiction to hear detainee cases.”
Yeah, the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction here. This is America!
June 29th, 2007 at 11:36 amre 19,
unless they repeal the 22nd amendment and then vote 5 to 4 to keep bush until the war on terror is over and we’ve won and the islamofacists have quit hating us for our freedoms and not because we invaded their country, stole their oil, and killed family members,…or the oil runs out and we leave.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:39 am#17 pudge, you’re very stupid.
June 29th, 2007 at 12:07 pmWhy the sudden reversal? Has Bushco persuaded the Supreme Court to hear the case so they can continue to violate people’s rights with a greater appearance of legitimacy or do these justices want to preserve a few vestiges at least of speaking for those who can’t speak for themselves, whose voices won’t reach that far? If I had to wager money on the outcome I’d say the court will either uphold Bushco or deal him a rebuff so he can appear humbled and garner enough sympathy to finish out his term.
June 29th, 2007 at 12:30 pmComment by Chris L — June 29, 2007 @ 11:04 am
You forgot to mention in #4 that those 86% were captured and turned over when the United States was offering a bounty for anyone turned in as an Al Queda/Taliban affiliate.
June 29th, 2007 at 12:36 pmYou forgot to mention in #4 that those 86% were captured and turned over when the United States was offering a bounty for anyone turned in as an Al Queda/Taliban affiliate.
Comment by erock — June 29, 2007 @ 12:36 pm
Nevermind, you did mention it. I’m a bit slow today.
June 29th, 2007 at 12:36 pmBeware what you ask for.
This could well turn out to be a victory for Bush as this court could reverse Hamdan and sprinkle Holy Water on the confinement issue. I would be very wary of anything this court handles.
June 29th, 2007 at 12:40 pmIf Hillary Clinton is elected she will be President Clinton, not President Hillary. A little respect is owed.
June 29th, 2007 at 12:48 pmGranted the Supreme Court this term has shown no respect whatsoever for precedents, but I want to remind people that Hamdan was an 8-1 decision (Thomas dissented — the worst dissent in the history of American Constitutional law), and Scalia, among others (including Kennedy) said that the President couldn’t just declare people enemy combatants and deprive them of all their rights by doing so.
The Supreme Court as presently constituted has shown contempt for the rights of ordinary people, but I find it VERY unlikely that they are willing to go on record saying that judicial review — and therefore the institution of the Supreme Court itself — is irrelevant.
June 29th, 2007 at 2:52 pmIf these Gitmo guys are such a threat, then there must be some credible evidence that reasonable people would accept to demostrate that fact, right? I mean, our leaders wouldn’t just call people “terrorists” and think that that is all that is needed to establish that fact, would they? Isn’t the whole purpose of due process to insure that people are not punished for something until they have a right to know what it is, and an opportunity to defend themselves before an independent tribunal – just in the unlikely event that a couple of them might be innocent? Oh, and by the way, doesn’t Justice Roberts bear a strange resemblence to the Burt Lancaster character in “Judgment at Nuremburg”? Whatever happened to that guy?
June 29th, 2007 at 3:05 pmI must have missed something, but aren’t laws made by Congress? How did the President get to make a law and declare it unreviewable? Isn’t our whole system of checks and balances made to stop any one individual from ruling by unquestionable orders? I should hope the court is smart enough to realize that making the office of president above the law is just plain dumb, not to mention completely job threatening (the president makes a law abolishing the Court)!
June 29th, 2007 at 5:30 pmI wonder if they will be more motivated by the impulse to give Bush more power to incarcerate during his last year in office, or more motivated by the fear of giving such powers to incarcerate to the next Democratic President, which may only be a year away. Does that kind of long range thinking ever pass through their minds.
Of course, there is the other possibility, that they will decide this based on a rational reading of the Constitution, regardless of politics… Uh, forget that.
June 29th, 2007 at 6:22 pmThe Supreme Court will hear this case just to assert that they are still “relevant.”
Of course, they’ll still rubber-stamp the crimes of the Bush administration, or at least the five, Catholic justices who are racist and sexist, will rubber-stamp the “high crimes and misdemeanors” of the most corrupt administration in American history. But, at least in their own minds they’ll have asserted their “relevancy” as part of Bush and Cheney’s banana republic.
Oh, by the way, without Sandra Day O’Connor’s help, George W. Bush would not have been president…ever…and our country would have seen peace and prosperity over the past six and a half years instead of the obscenities of the Bush administration. O’Connor said she wanted a Republican president to choose her successor when she retired. O’Connor was the swing vote on the Supreme Court who sided with the four radical right-wing fanatic justices to butt into Florida’s electoral process in 2000, bypassing the U.S. Constitution in the process. Thus, when people mention the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore in 2000, I realize that it was actually Sandra Day O’Connor who put Bush, Cheney and their obscenity into the White House, because without her, the Supreme Court wouldn’t have unconstitutionally intervened in Florida, throwing the election to Bush and Cheney. May God have mercy on O’Connor’s sorry soul.
June 29th, 2007 at 8:06 pmWeeelll, isn’t that special…
June 29th, 2007 at 10:39 pmit’s not a step backward with this tilted court, but the first step on the moon. i hope i am wrong. nope, someone put clay in the core of the weights…
June 30th, 2007 at 2:12 amIn response to #17: “I don’t know if this gives the Congress the power to do what it did”
No, it doesn’t. The “exceptions” are to the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction; Congress could conceivably grant final jurisdiction to a *different*, inferior federal court. For instance, Congress could have said that all habeas petitions stopped at the DC Circuit Court and could never go to the Supreme Court.
What Congress can’t do is remove the habeas power from the federal courts *entirely*, which is what the MCA purported to do. The scope of the judicial power extends to “all controversies”, and habeas corpus cannot be revoked.
July 1st, 2007 at 10:00 amThe court will okay the total negation of any rights of prisoners. And while they’re at it, they’ll restore Dred Scott.
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:03 am