US Supreme Court: Gitmo Prisoners Have Habeus Corpus Rights

This is a major victory for the prisoners and yet another slap in the face from the court to the Bush administration.

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.
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Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."
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It was not immediately clear whether this ruling, unlike the first two, would lead to prompt hearings for the detainees, some of whom have been held more than 6 years. Roughly 270 men remain at the island prison, classified as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

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.

And here's Scalia's version of judicial "wisdom":

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."

Shorter Scalia: FEAR blah blah blah FEAR blah blah blah.

And the article also reminds us of how the Republicans have subverted the constitution every chance they got:

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.

They won't get away with that this time around.

The disposition of Omar Khadr's trial will likely be affected by this decision as well and the fact that we've now learned that notes about his detention were destroyed and that the judge handling his case was most likely dismissed because he ruled against US government lawyers should be more than enough for our Conservative government to stop stonewalling on bringing him home. It should be but since they don't even care that he was a child soldier when he was picked up - the first to be charged with war crimes - I'm sure we'll just keep getting the same "let the legal process play out" talking point in response to these developments. Like it was ever a legitimate legal process to begin with.
 

Video: Boston Legal's Alan Shore at the Supreme Court

During Tuesday nite's episode, Boston Legal character Alan Shore (James Spader) presented his defence of a mentally-disabled black man convicted of raping a child and who had been sentenced to death in Louisiana as a result:



Love the digs he took at the supremes and a great performance, as always.
 

Supreme Court to Hear Gitmo Detainees' Cases

I don't think this is good news considering the obvious right turn the US Supreme Court has taken with Roberts in charge. As Justice Breyer said this week about the school desegregation decision:

"The majority is wrong," Breyer said.

And about the court in general:

"It's not often in law that so few have changed so much so quickly."

I find that to be quite a remarkable statement coming from a supreme court judge.

So, the fact that the court has suddenly decided to take up the case of the Gitmo detainees' rights doesn't bode well for them, as far as I'm concerned:

High Court to Hear Terror Detainee Case

By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 29, 2007; 11:42 AM

The Supreme Court said today that it would review the rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees to challenge their confinements in federal court, reversing a decision in April not to take up that issue.

The justices did not say what had changed their minds. The Bush administration had praised the court's earlier decision not to review the matter.

In my mind, that means the court will most likely rule against the detainees.

At the time, only three of four justices necessary to grant review--David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer--were willing to take the two cases involved, saying "these questions deserve this court's immediate attention.'' Two other justices, John Paul Stevens and Anthony M. Kennedy, issued a statement saying they might want to hear the issue in the future.

Mainly the "liberals". So why do the conservatives now want to hear the case?

Today's order, by tradition, does not indicate which justices decided to hear the cases, but the decision to reopen the matter is unusual.

I'm not as excited as this guy, obviously:

"This is a stunning victory for the detainees," Eric M. Freedman, a professor of constitutional law at Hofstra Law School who has been advising some of the captives, told the Associated Press. "It goes well beyond what we asked for, and clearly indicates the unease up there" at the Supreme Court.

How's that war against drugs working out?

Well, let's see:

VIENNA — Afghanistan produced dramatically more opium in 2006, increasing its yield by nearly 50 per cent from a year earlier and pushing global opium production to a record high, a UN report said Tuesday.
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Afghanistan's opium production increased from about 4,500 tonnes in 2005 to 6,700 tonnes in 2006, according to the 2007 World Drug Report released by the Vienna-based UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Opium is the main ingredient for heroin.

In 2006, Afghanistan accounted for 92 per cent of global illicit opium production, up from 70 per cent in 2000 and 52 per cent a decade earlier. The higher yields in Afghanistan brought global opium production to a record high of nearly 7,300 tonnes last year, a 43 per cent increase over 2005.

The area under opium poppy cultivation in the country has also expanded, from nearly 257,000 acres in 2005 to more than 407,000 acres in 2006 — an increase of about 59 per cent.

“This is the largest area under opium poppy cultivation ever recorded in Afghanistan,” the report said, noting that two-thirds of cultivation was concentrated in the country's south.
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UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa warned that Afghanistan's insurgency-plagued Helmand province was becoming the world's biggest drug supplier, with opium cultivation there larger than in the rest of the country put together.

Oh and despite the best efforts of that Alaskan "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" teenager, whom the US Supremes decided on Monday should have his first amendment rights curtailed, apparently cannabis use has reportedly declined in America. Obviously, his nefarious plot to "promote illegal drug use" has failed miserably.

And remember, pay no attention to the drug lords behind the curtain. It's students with banners who are the real threat.

Related: A new US Government Accountability Office report "slams the federal government for failing to coordinate the work of U.S. law enforcement agencies overseas to fight terrorism." What caught my eye was this part:

As a result of these weaknesses, LEAs [law enforcement agencies], a key element of national power, are not being fully used abroad to protect U.S. citizens and interest from future terrorist attacks," the GAO concluded.

For national security reasons, the GAO did not name the four countries its investigators visited, describing them only as having "key roles in combating terrorism."

In all four there was more U.S. funding devoted to fighting drugs than to fighting terrorism, the report said

In one country, described as an "extremely high terrorist threat to American interests globally," the State Department provided six times more funding to stop illicit drugs and crime than it did for anti-terrorism assistance, the report said.

In another country, an embassy official said most training and assistance funding from the U.S. was dedicated to counter-narcotics efforts "even though drugs were no longer a strategic concern in that country."

So, I guess that begs the next question: How's that war against terrorism working out?