Wednesday - February 21, 2007

Gitmo Detainees Denied By Court

Here we go again. The filthy scum lost their legal trickery again. I’m referring to the lawyers representing the Gitmo detainees. The last time we went through this, the Supreme Court said no, it wasn’t right the way they were being handled and Congress should write a law specifying how they should be handled. So Congress passed legislation (which was signed into law).

So the detainees managed to contact a new bunch of lawyers who filed suit again, alleging the new law was unconstitutional. So now we’ve come full circle and once again a federal appeals court has upheld the law and told the detainees to go take a hike - which means it is now going to the Supreme Court AGAIN.

If SCOTUS has any sense at all they’ll decide not to even hear this farce of a case. I urge Chief Justice Roberts to toss this one. HOWEVER ... Democrats in Congress are already rattling their chains and now that they’re in power they want to change the rules (and the law) again. You can guess who the bleeding heart lamestream media is rooting for.

Lawyers ... Democrats ... Media. They themselves need to be detained at Gitmo. Although my personal preference would be to drop them all off on Devil’s Island with the other snakes and sharks ...

Court Endorses Law’s Curbs on Detainees
_{WASHINGTON (NY TIMES) - February 21, 2007}

A divided federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a new law stripping federal judges of authority to review foreign prisoners’ challenges to their detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The decision set the stage for a third trip to the Supreme Court for the detainees, who will once again ask the justices to consider a complex issue that tests the balance of power among the White House, Congress and the courts in the murky context of the fight against international terrorism.

It also prompted some senior Democratic lawmakers, who have fought the Bush administration on the matter before and who now hold sway in Congress, to vow enactment of a law more favorable to the prisoners.

The Supreme Court previously ruled twice that federal statutes empowered the courts to consider Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions challenging the grounds for their detention. In response to those rulings, Congress twice rewrote law to limit the detainees’ avenues of appeal. The most recent rewriting was at issue in Tuesday’s 2-to-1 decision.

That law, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, was signed by President Bush last October. Its enactment followed the Supreme Court’s rejection of his administration’s earlier arguments that the right of habeas corpus — the fundamental right, centuries old, to ask a judge for release from unjust imprisonment — did not apply to foreigners being held outside the United States as enemy combatants.

The new law explicitly eliminated the federal courts’ jurisdiction over habeas challenges by such prisoners. It instead set up military panels to review the justification of detention in individual cases, with limited right of appeal to the courts afterward.

In its ruling Tuesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the new law did not violate the constitutional provision that bars the government from suspending habeas corpus except in “cases of rebellion or invasion.” Two of the three appeals court judges, citing Supreme Court and other historical precedent, held that the right of habeas corpus did not extend to foreign citizens detained outside the United States.

The majority decision was written by Judge A. Raymond Randolph, whose two earlier opinions on habeas corpus and Guantánamo prisoners had also favored the Bush administration. Those opinions were reversed by the Supreme Court, but on statutory grounds rather than constitutional ones. The dissenting judge on Tuesday, Judith W. Rogers, said the new law did violate the constitutional provision restricting the suspension of habeas corpus.

Administration officials welcomed the decision as a vindication of its position on the rights of detainees, after years of its halting efforts to create a legal process that would withstand tests in court.

“The decision,” said Erik Ablin, a Justice Department spokesman, “reaffirms the validity of the framework that Congress established in the Military Commissions Act permitting Guantánamo detainees to challenge their detention through combatant status review tribunals with the opportunity for judicial review before the D.C. Circuit.”

Lawyers representing the detainees vowed to seek a new review by the Supreme Court. Shayana Kadidal, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many of the detainees, said, “This decision empowers the president to do whatever he wishes to prisoners without any legal limitation as long as he does it offshore.”

Mr. Kadidal said the ruling encouraged “a contempt for international human rights law” and “such notorious practices as extraordinary rendition”: sending terrorism suspects abroad for interrogation, where, rights advocates say, they may face torture.

Democrats now in control of Congress said they would move quickly on legislation they recently introduced that would unambiguously give federal courts the right to consider detainees’ habeas petitions.

“The Military Commissions Act is a dangerous and misguided law that undercuts our freedoms and assaults our Constitution by removing vital checks and balances designed to prevent government overreaching and lawlessness,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Last week Mr. Leahy joined a group of other Senate Democrats, including Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, in introducing the legislation restoring habeas rights for the Guantánamo prisoners. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, also endorsed that measure last week, and said Tuesday that he believed the dissent from the new appeals court decision would ultimately prevail in the Supreme Court.

But other Republican lawmakers, including Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both of whom also serve on the committee, applauded the ruling.

- More ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 02/21/2007 at 09:30 AM   
Filed Under: • Judges-Courts-Lawyers • Terrorists •  
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