Posted on 06/15/2008 12:16:25 PM PDT by Red Steel
WASHINGTON -- When the Supreme Court goes on recess at the end of this month, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy will be off to his summer teaching job in Salzburg, Austria. For the 19th year, he will teach a class called "Fundamental Rights in Europe and the United States" for the McGeorge Law School.
He tells his American and European students that the belief in individual freedom and the respect for human dignity transcends national borders. There is, he once said in an interview, "some underlying common shared aspiration" in legal systems that protects the rights and liberties of all.
That international perspective was on display Thursday as Kennedy spoke for the Supreme Court in extending legal rights to the foreign military prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "Security subsists too in fidelity to freedom's first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers," Kennedy said.
The 5-4 ruling highlighted the sharp divide over the law and the war on terrorism. The dissenters, agreeing with the Bush administration, said foreigners captured abroad in the war on terrorism had no rights in American courts.
Justice Antonin Scalia dissented with the decision "to extend the right of habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war." The ruling "warps our Constitution," he wrote in his dissent.
The majority, led by Kennedy, was more in tune with the views across Europe and of civil libertarians in this country, who have condemned the prison at Guantanamo Bay as a "legal black hole" where foreigners are shackled and held in harsh conditions without due process of law. The justices in the majority said that when U.S. authorities take someone into
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Thanks very much for posting. Interesting.
Except they're missing one thing...The opportunity to kill Christians and Jews and our Soldiers.
I love how they slipped in the lies about the hellish conditions at Gitmo.
The Boumediene v. Bush decision was a power grab by five justices or more specifically by Kennedy. The Constitution created three branches and it did not make the court supreme to the other two branches. Article III Section 2 second paragraph; establishes that the supreme Court shall have Jurisdiction “with such Exceptions and under such Regulations as Congress shall make.” The Military Commissions act explicitly stated that the military tribunals were constitutional and the courts to which enemy combatants had access. The Supreme Court has declared that they believe the courts are supreme to congress and entitled to makeup the rules for how to judge enemy combatants, then apply the rules that they make up, and order the other branches of government and the citizens to obey the judicial tyrants. If Congress were interested in anything other than playing politics, like asserting their constitutional authority to write the rules that the courts apply, then Congress would attempt to maintain the balance of power necessary for our Republic.
Pretty soon you will see General “Midnight Jogger” Souter telling the 101st Airborne where they may place their drop zones.
Yep. I think it was Rush that said some of the detainees at Gitmo have gained weight.
Kennedy is well known in taking legal decision based on international laws first and then on the Constitution.
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His “teachings” show him to be the liberal hypocrite that he is. The leftist justices on the SCOTUS just cannot separate their PERSONAL POLITICS from the job of UPHOLDING OUR CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AS WRITTEN.
Yep. I think it was Rush that said some of the detainees at Gitmo have gained weight.
There, fix it.
Kennedy has gone looney tunes.
Yet, the food and air conditioning at the jail in Guantanamo would still be superior.
Eurotrash are such suckers.
It would be so much better if he would based his opinions on the US Constitution.
When the Caliphate is established the first ones on the chopping block will be the Supremes....
What law firm was behind Boumediene and what law firm and what individuals plead the case before the Supreme Court?
Kennedy will be remembered for being the deciding vote in one of the worst decisions ever from the Supreme Court on Guantanamo prisioners coming into civilian courts.
What burden does this place on the government? The government must merely demonstrate that there is a legitimate and lawful reason for holding these prisonsers prisoner. It would require for instance military officers stating under oath that said gentleman was captured bearing arms on the battlefield and is an enemy POW.
The reason that this is an important right in the war on terror is that many of the folks in Guantanimo were captured elsewhere. They may be illegal combatants. They may also be someone who was caught on the wrong airplane at the wrong time and has never had the opportunity to make his case. Until a neutral judge hears that, with a record of fact that is appealable, you don't know.
I understand the exigencies of war, but the guys at Guantanimo are hors de combat, thousands of miles from any front, and processing them through the legal system is hardly a legal strain on US government resources (most of which is standing around doing not very much anyway).
Me, I am awfully jealous of constitutional protections against arbitrary executive authority. I would not give up habeas corpus lightly.
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