This idiot and his DOJ comrade just don’t get it.
Congressional Republicans just back from a trip to Afghanistan said Tuesday that the Obama administration’s approach to the war has confused U.S. troops, leaving them “dangerously” preoccupied with worrying about captured enemy fighters’ rights.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, said the confusion was evident in his conversations with U.S. troops, and said it runs so deep that there are two different standards of detention, depending on whether the troops are under NATO command or not.
“We see this preoccupation with prisoners’ rights, both on the foreign battlefield and here at home — it seems to be consuming the administration in the war on terror,” Mr. McConnell said.
Fellow senators who joined Mr. McConnell on the short, official trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said morale among U.S. troops is very high, and added there are signs of great progress in Afghanistan. They also praised Afghanistan’s troops for taking the lead in fighting in some parts of the country.
But the lawmakers also said that, when asked, military leaders said President Obama’s specified troop withdrawal timetable poses a problem.
Sen. Roger Wicker, Mississippi Republican, said the Taliban is using next year’s announced beginning of a withdrawal as “a propaganda tool” to pressure wavering Afghans to rally against U.S. efforts.
……Last year, the Obama administration confirmed reports that FBI agents conducting interrogations were reading legal “Miranda rights” to some fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The administration said that had happened some times under the George W. Bush administration as well.
Mr. McConnell said the confusion among troops about detainee policy ran throughout the ranks.
He said at one point he asked a General about policies and the General “didn’t want to answer the question without turning to his lawyer, who was also in the room.”
Mr. McConnell said the approach is part of the same mentality that led the administration to put the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airplane bombing into criminal court proceedings, instead of treating him as a captured enemy combatant.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/13/republicans-say-troops-confused/
They’re not just confused with this asinine PC ROE, they’re angry. Obama is a stupid, dangerous scatterbrain, with no clue how to run a country or a war. The “community organizer” in the White House thinks his socialist ideology and his Dhimmi approach are a good idea.
I’ve said this before: Take no prisoners; kill them on the battlefield. I cannot fathom great Generals like Patton, MacArthur, or McAuliffe tolerating this kind of chickenshit from a so-called “Commander-in-Chief”.
In 2008, the Supreme Court opened this hideous can of worms by giving Al Qaeda and Taliban GITMO prisoners the writ of habeus corpus.
More here: http://rhymeswithright.mu.nu/archives/266517.php
There’s no way the United States would have allowed Japanese, German, or Italian POWs habeas corpus, or the Supreme Court to grant enemy prisoners the “right” to petition a civilian court for release. That kind of idiocy would have been met with a resounding HELL NO.
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a scathing dissent which reads in part:
“Today, for the first time in our Nation’s history, the Court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war. THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s dissent, which I join, shows that the procedures prescribed by Congress in the Detainee Treatment Act provide the essential protections that habeas corpus guarantees; there has thus been no suspension of the writ, and no basis exists for judicial intervention beyond what the Act allows. My problem with today’s opinion is more fundamental still:
The writ of habeas corpus does not, and never has, run in favor of aliens abroad; the Suspension Clause thus has no application, and the Court’s intervention in this military matter is entirely ultra vires.I shall devote most of what will be a lengthy opinion to the legal errors contained in the opinion of the Court. Contrary to my usual practice, however, I think it appropriate to begin with a description of the disastrous consequences of what the Court has done today.
America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 60–61, 70, 190 (2004). On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., and 40 in Pennsylvania. See id., at 552, n. 9. It has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our countrymen in arms were killed.
The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court’s blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today. The President relied on our settled precedent in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U. S. 763 (1950), when he established the prison at Guantanamo Bay for enemy aliens. Citing that case, the President’s Office of Legal Counsel advised him “that the great weight of legal authority indicates that a federal district court could not properly exercise habeas jurisdiction over an alien detained at [Guantanamo Bay].” Memorandum from Patrick F. Philbin and John C. Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorneys General, Office of Legal Counsel, to William J. Haynes II, General Counsel, Dept. of Defense (Dec. 28, 2001). Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners there, but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention. Those other facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves.In the long term, then, the Court’s decision today accomplishes little, except perhaps to reduce the well-being of enemy combatants that the Court ostensibly seeks to protect. In the short term, however, the decision is devastating. At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield. See S. Rep. No. 110–90, pt. 7, p. 13 (2007) (Minority Views of Sens. Kyl, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, and Coburn) (hereinafter Minority Report). Some have been captured or killed. See ibid.; see also Mintz, Released Detainees Rejoining the Fight, Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2004, pp. A1, A12. But others have succeeded in carrying on their atrocities against innocent civilians. In one case, a detainee released from Guantanamo Bay masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese dam workers, one of whom was later shot to death when used as a human shield against Pakistani commandoes. See Khan & Lancaster, Pakistanis Rescue Hostage; 2nd Dies, Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2004, p. A18. Another former detainee promptly resumed his post as a senior Taliban commander and murdered a United Nations engineer and three Afghan soldiers. Mintz, supra. Still another murdered an Afghan judge. See Minority Report 13. It was reported only last month that a released detainee carried out a suicide bombing against Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq. See White, Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack, Washington Post, May 8, 2008, p. A18.
These, mind you, were detainees whom the military had concluded were not enemy combatants. Their return to the kill illustrates the incredible difficulty of assessing who is and who is not an enemy combatant in a foreign theater of operations where the environment does not lend itself to rigorous evidence collection. Astoundingly, the Court today raises the bar, requiring military officials to appear before civilian courts and defend their decisions under procedural and evidentiary rules that go beyond what Congress has specified. As THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s dissent makes clear, we have no idea what those procedural and evidentiary rules are, but they will be determined by civil courts and (in the Court’s contemplation at least) will be more detainee-friendly than those now applied, since otherwise there would no reason to hold the congressionally prescribed procedures unconstitutional. If they impose a higher standard of proof (from foreign battlefields) than the current procedures require, the number of the enemy returned to combat will obviously increase.
But even when the military has evidence that it can bring forward, it is often foolhardy to release that evidence to the attorneys representing our enemies…
* * *
Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separation-of- powers principles to establish a manipulable “functional” test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus (and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes important precedents, most conspicuously Justice Jackson’s opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager. It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today. I dissent.”
It’s heinous enough that the Supreme Court allowed Islamic terrorists the opportunity to pervert the American justice system to their advantage; thereby picking up where they left off on the battlfield. Now we are saddled with a “president” who takes that a step further by actually trying them in a civilian court.
Obama’s moronic obsession with the “rights” of muslim cuthroats will get more American troops and citizens killed.
‘Regret’ is an understatement.