Supreme Court blocks "exceptional" injustice

Thanks for a Constitution which withholds absolute power from the political panics of the day--and for a Supreme Court majority which can still recognize exceptional injustice when it slaps them in the face.

It was with a profound sense of relief that I read the New York Times wire story this afternoon reporting on the U.S. Supreme Court holding in the Guantanamo Bay prisoners case. The Court found that Congress and the President violated the U.S. Constitution when they purported to strip the Guantanamo prisoners of their right to a full American judicial review of their detention.

Consider the basic circumstances of this case. Prisoners bringing this appeal include legal residents of Bosnia who were arrested by Bosnian police within weeks of the 9/11/01 attacks (by Saudi nationals) on the U.S., on "suspicion" of involvement in planning to attack the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. The Supreme Court of Bosnia and Hercegovina soon thereafter found that the charges were unsupported by evidence and ordered the prisoners released. Instead, the Bosnian police making the original arrests (now ruled invalid by their own Supreme Court) turned the detainees over to U.S. military representatives, who whisked them to Guantanamo. There, they have been held without trial for over six years.

The Bush Administration has argued (and the then Republican-controlled Congress agreed) that these prisoners had no rights under the U.S. Constitution because they are not U.S. citizens and are being held on foreign territory as "illegal combatants". The prisoners deny any involvement with any anti-U.S. plots.

What's the evidence that they're lying and they really are "illegal combatants" against the U.S.? They don't know. We don't know. Because our government won't tell them or us. Why? Because our government (at least the Bush Administration) TELLS us that they're "illegal combatants"--and that's all anyone is entitled to know.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision, by a 5 to 4 vote, that this Orwellian argument isn't good enough. The Court's majority even took the highly unusual step of deciding the case on grounds that the lower court had refused to even consider, because the case represents such "grave" questions concerning abuse of powers, and because the prisoners have already "been denied meaningful access to a judicial forum for years."

There is very little more fundamental to our Constitutional democracy than the ability of an arrested person to demand a public statement of charges and trial on the alleged offense. For the non-lawyers among us, this right is referred to as "habeas corpus"--literally, "you have the body" of the prisoner, and the prisoner is calling on you (the government) to put up or shut with those claims in court.

Without that right, every other liberty we hold is subject to the whim and abuse of the party or persons currently in power in Washington. Protesting an illegal war or other outrageous abuse of civil or human rights? You're starting to look mighty like an "illegal combatant" to me, buddy...

Brace yourselves for five months of wailing and gnashing of teeth by the Republicans that the Supreme Court (and the Democrats) have put Americans' lives in jeopardy by insisting that "terrorists" be released. John McCain has already announced his "concern" over today's ruling.

No, folks. We're insisting--with support from a majority of those known anti-American radicals, the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court--that the White House produce more than its unsupported assertion that someone is a criminal in the first place. A little evidence of wrongdoing. Something, anything, to justify yanking people away from their families and homes, far away from any war zone, on the mere allegation they are "illegal combatants" and holding them incommunicado for years--and years--and years.

That George W. Bush, John McCain, and most of the other Republicans in Congress don't see anything wrong with doing that is as clear a case as I can imagine of their fundamental unfitness to hold power in our American democracy. It is the kind of abuse that our nation was founded to resist, and that Americans have fought and died for centuries to keep out.

And here is the final kicker: Four of the nine Supreme Court justices said that it's all OK. One more, and the U.S. Supreme Court, our final line of Constitutional defense, would have agreed. Whomever we elect president this fall will decide whether that thin line holds or falls. For anyone still smarting over the results of a hard-fought primary, please keep that in mind.