Free Republic

LAST week’s Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush settled a key constitutional issue: all prisoners detained at Guantánamo Bay are constitutionally entitled to bring habeas corpus in federal court to challenge the legality of their detention. This 5-4 decision was correct. The conservative justices in the minority were wrong to suggest that the decision constitutes reckless judicial intervention in military matters that the Constitution reserves exclusively for Congress and the president. (Disclosure: I joined in a friend-of-the-court brief filed on the plaintiff’s behalf.) Yet Boumediene is rich in constitutional ironies. In addressing whether non-Americans detained outside the United States...

Our Constitution works best when its custodians--the president, Congress, and the judiciary--behave well. In the matter of suspected "enemy combatants," all three have behaved badly. That's why the Guantanamo Bay prison camp has been such a running sore. Even if Guantanamo ends up being closed, the human-rights and public-relations debacles that it symbolizes will continue until a new president and Congress take a grown-up approach to some extremely thorny problems. Problems such as: What should we do with a Guantanamo detainee who, the best available evidence suggests, is probably a jihadist bent on mass murder but who cannot be convicted...

Respondents, who are nonresident enemy aliens, were captured in China by the United States Army and tried and convicted in China by an American military commission for violations of the laws of war committed in China prior to their capture. They were transported to the American-occupied part of Germany and imprisoned there in the custody of the Army. At no time were they within the territorial jurisdiction of any American civil court. Claiming that their trial, conviction and imprisonment violated Articles I and III, the Fifth Amendment, and other provisions of our Constitution, laws of the United States and provisions...