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Douglas Jehl has a NY Times article that provides an excellent summary of the current legal issues with regard to the prisoners at Guantnamo.
To start with, the Supreme Court ruled last June that detainees at Guantnamo could have access to U.S. courts:
...last June, the Supreme Court ruled that United States law applied to Guantnamo and that prisoners there could challenge their detentions in federal courts.
So the Supreme Court is trying to protect American civil rights by extending those rights to those who are trying to kill us.
American citizens are not the same as citizens from other countries who are trying to kill them. You’d think that wouldn’t be that hard to figure out.
The law has more functions than only to protect Americans from possible wrongful use of power by the State, although that is surely one of its key functions.
The law is intended to make Americans safer in every way. By empowering those who are trying to kill us, the Supreme Court has perhaps lost sight of this.
In August, a federal district judge ruled that the Geneva Conventions apply to Guantnamo prisoners and that the special military commissions to try war crimes were unconstitutional. The government’s appeal of that ruling is scheduled to be heard next month.
The federal district judge’s ruling is not in the best interests of the people of the U.S., and is not supported by the Geneva Conventions, which are silent on the status of prisoners of war who have willfully violated those conventions. See this post for details.
Now check this out:
As many as 200 of those now at Guantnamo will most likely remain there indefinitely, the officials said, on grounds that they are too dangerous to be turned over to other nations or would probably face mistreatment if returned to those nations.
The Left often claims that when we turn prisoners over to other governments for detention, it is so that they can be tortured. So the Left doesn’t want these prisoners imprisoned elsewhere, and they don’t want them treated as what they are—prisoners of war—at Guantnamo. They want them treated as common criminals, with access to the U.S. court system to defend themselves—which is exactly what works best for Al Qaeda: the U.S. would have to reveal classified information to prosecute them; and the U.S. would be bogged down with hundreds of such prosecutions.
Once again the Left is doing exactly what the terrorists want them to do.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that future transfers into Guantnamo remained a “possibility,” but made clear that the court decisions and the burdens of detaining prisoners at the American facility had made it seem less attractive to administration policymakers than before.
“It’s fair to say that the calculus now is different than it was before, because the legal landscape has changed and those are factors that might be considered,” a senior Defense Department official said.
The rulings of the courts are making America less safe:
Indeed, officials have been concerned that transfer of some detainees could threaten American security because they might escape from foreign prisons or the foreign governments might free them.
...In November, a lawyer for Mamdouh Habib, a prisoner who claimed he had been tortured in Egypt before being transferred to Guantnamo, asked a federal district court to stop the Bush administration from returning him to Egypt. Before the court ruled, he was sent to Australia in January and freed.
The opposition of the Left to pro-American views of any nature under any circumstances, results in a de facto collaboration of the Left with our enemies, and increases the danger to the Liberals themselves as well as to all Americans.
