Supreme Court Ruling.
The US Supreme Court made several rulings regarding the detention of terrorist suspects yesterday. The decisions concerned three cases. The first, Rumsfeld v. Padilla, was remanded on a technical issue and resulted in no substantive ruling. Padilla, as you may recall, is an American citizen who was arrested in Chicago after plotting with al Qaeda members in Pakistan to make a dirty bomb. The second case, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, is certainly of more importance. Hamdi is a US citizen who was detained as an enemy fighter by the Northern Alliance in the early days of the Afghanistan war. He was originally sent to Guantanamo Bay for detention, but when it was learned he was a US citizen he was sent to a Naval prison and has been since held without access to counsel. The third case, Rasul v. Bush, concerns a foreign national detained on foreign soil in Guantanamo. In the latter two cases, the court agreed that the administration could hold "enemy combatants" without trial. What the court did have a problem with was the indefinite nature of such detentions. Basically, the purpose of detaining enemy soldiers is not punitive, but is for the purpose of preventing them to return to the field of battle. When hostilities cease, the detainees must be released or otherwise charged as war criminals. Unfortunately, in the war on terror, there is no clear-cut line of demarcation when hostilities are over.

Base10 gives a caveat here. He did not finish reading the decisions. But it seems to me that the media is playing this up as a Bush failure, when it doesn't seem that way at all. See for example, this AP article or this from Reuters. CNN was more evenhanded. The rulings held that the US government could detain a US citizen as an enemy combatant. It also did not foreclose trials by military tribunals as planned by the Defense Department.
- posted by Base10 @ 10:01 AM