SCOTUS gone nuts
As per usual, The Crawfish and his staff have incapacitated the folks running this part of the VAJoe website and posted our own missive without their knowledge or consent. Don’t worry about them. They’ll be fine when they wake up. They’ll just wonder why they’re so happy for the next few days…..
WHAT IN TARNATION IS GOING ON IN OUR COURTS???
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.
In its third rebuke of the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners, the court ruled 5-4 that the government is violating the rights of prisoners being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The court’s liberal justices were in the majority.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”
Unfortunately for the 5 Justices who ruled for the Gitmo detainees, those detainees do not qualify for POW status in accordance with the
Geneva Conventions. If the US military wants to, they can summarily execute the whole bunch.
Kennedy said federal judges could ultimately order some detainees to be released, but that such orders would depend on security concerns and other circumstances.The ruling could resurrect many detainee lawsuits that federal judges put on hold pending the outcome of the high court case.
The decision sent judges, law clerks and court administrators scrambling to read Kennedy’s 70-page opinion and figure out how to proceed. Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth said he would call a special meeting of federal judges to address how to handle the cases.
The court said not only that the detainees have rights under the Constitution, but that the system the administration has put in place to classify them as enemy combatants and review those decisions is inadequate.
WHERE does the Constitution give them rights? It isn’t in any copy we’ve ever seen!
The administration had argued first that the detainees have no rights. But it also contended that the classification and review process was a sufficient substitute for the civilian court hearings that the detainees seek.
According to Geneva, the Administration is correct in that the detainees have no rights.
In dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts criticized his colleagues for striking down what he called “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.”
Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas also dissented.
The Crawfish and his people have said repeatedly that there are a FEW things that the W Administration has done well. His record on judicial appointments has been very good. Justices Roberts and Alito have been superb, so far.
Scalia said the nation is “at war with radical Islamists” and that the court’s decision “will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”
Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens joined Kennedy to form the majority.
Imagine that. Ruth Bader Ginsburg ruling against the actual words of the Constitution and the best interests of the USA.
Folks, remember that Ginsburg is one of the people that Barack Obama has said he will use as the model for any judicial nominations he makes if he gets elected. While The Crawfish and his people aren’t fans of McCain, the thought of another Ginsburg on the Court should be enough to deter any person who actually knows what is in the Constitution from voting for Barry O.
Souter wrote a separate opinion in which he emphasized the length of the detentions.”A second fact insufficiently appreciated by the dissents is the length of the disputed imprisonments, some of the prisoners represented here today having been locked up for six years,” Souter said. “Hence the hollow ring when the dissenters suggest that the court is somehow precipitating the judiciary into reviewing claims that the military … could handle within some reasonable period of time.”
The Crawfish has a simple solution to their lengthy imprisonments…firing squads.
The court has ruled twice previously that people held at Guantanamo without charges can go into civilian courts to ask that the government justify their continued detention. Each time, the administration and Congress, then controlled by Republicans, changed the law to try to close the courthouse doors to the detainees. The court specifically struck down a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that denies Guantanamo detainees the right to file petition of habeas corpus.
Habeas corpus is a centuries-old legal principle, enshrined in the Constitution, that allows courts to determine whether a prisoner is being held illegally.
If they were illegal combatants in the first place, then they have no rights and can be held, executed, or tortured however we please.
The head of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of prisoners at Guantanamo, welcomed the ruling.
That Center is for rights that are in the “living, breathing Constitution,” not the actual Constitution.
“The Supreme Court has finally brought an end to one of our nation’s most egregious injustices,” said CCR Executive Director Vincent Warren. “By granting the writ of habeas corpus, the Supreme Court recognizes a rule of law established hundreds of years ago and essential to American jurisprudence since our nation’s founding.”
So, according to these schmucks, all POWs are also eligible to put their cases into the US court system during war. If that’s true, they could completely overload our system with tens of thousands of cases. Looks like the definitions of legal combatants and prisoners of war, according to
Geneva, are null and void.
In addition to those held without charges, the U.S. has said it plans to try as many as 80 of the detainees in war crimes tribunals, which have not been held since World War II.
Bush has said he wants to close the facility once countries can be found to take the prisoners who are there.
Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama also support shutting down the prison.
By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer
If any of you wonder what the actual Geneva definitions are….well, The Crawfish has done the research for ya!
Adopted on 12 August 1949 by the Diplomatic Conference for the Establishment of
International Conventions for the Protection of Victims of War, held in Geneva
from 21 April to 12 August, 1949. Entry into force 21 October 1950
PART I
GENERAL PROVISIONS
Article 4
A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
1. Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.
2. Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfill the following conditions:
(a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) That of carrying arms openly;
(d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
Darn. All of those terrorists and terrorist sympathyzers we’ve detained seem to fail parts (a) through (d). Looks like they don’t qualify! They fall under the general category of spies and sabateurs. The Germans landed a few men in the southeast US during WW2. They were to perform sabatoge operations. They were captured. Since they were operating out of uniform (in civilian attire, like all those Taliban, Mahdi Army, and other such folks are), they were executed without trial.
June 18th, 2008 at 8:15 am
Where’s the Checks and Balances?
The Supreme Court was a later addition to the government, sometime after the Congress and the Presidency.
Congress and the Presidency keep each other in line with the “checks and balances”. If congress passes a bad law, the president vetoes it. If the president proposes a bad law, congress does not pass it. Some early forefather and the name Madison seems to come before me, but an early forefather was dead set against a supreme court. Perhaps he knew or saw something in such a court none other saw. Checks and Balances.
Where are the checks and balances for the Supreme Court? When it goes outside its judicial boundaries and decides to legislate from the bench, What recourse do the other two branches have? The fact there are NO checks and balances on the Supreme Court’s legislation should cause grave alarm to American citizens. Legislation from the bench by the Supreme Court or any other court IS IN ITSELF UNCONSTITUTIONAL!
June 20th, 2008 at 11:32 am
C-Fish, this blogsite is about like going on liberty in Decatur, TX…