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Suspend the Writ. Those are both my words and the title of commentary this morning by Andrew C. McCarthy, the now former federal prosecutor who led the investigation and related prosecutions of the Landmark bomb plotters, as well as of those who conducted the first attack upon the World Trade Center: For the protection of our troops on the battlefield and the security of all Americans, Congress needs, right now, to take action to reverse Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision granting constitutional habeas-corpus rights to alien enemy combatants. It’s time to suspend the writ of habeas corpus....

Federal District judges in Washington, D.C., who will handle scores of pending and likely future challenges by Guantanamo Bay detainees to their confinement, decided on Monday to shift them temporarily to one judge to work on ways to coordinate the courts’ response. Attorneys for detainees began receiving notices Tuesday that the judges, in a closed-door session earlier in the day, had agreed that District Judge Thomas F. Hogan would handle “coordination and management” issues. The underlying cases will remain with the individual judges for future action on the merits. The judges acted after holding two meetings with lawyers for the...

The recent Supreme Court decision of Boumediene v. Bush concerning the habeas corpus rights of enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Naval Base illustrates the need for a president who will nominate jurists that follow the Constitution and not their own political ideology. For the first time, the Court has now extended U.S. constitutional rights to foreign nationals residing outside the country. What’s all the more galling is that the recipients of this right were engaged in killing U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Now, this same court has agreed to hear the petition of a deported Pakistani national...

The Supreme Court's decision in Boumediene v. Bush is being hailed in many quarters as a great victory for civil rights and the rule of law. It is not. In fact, it is a watershed in judicial hubris, and in the continuing trend in our society to convert every form of decision making into a lawsuit. For the first time in our history, the Supreme Court has rejected the considered judgment of both the Congress and the president on an issue of national security. The writ of habeas corpus, a bulwark of domestic liberty, has been extended to foreign nationals...

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...

Battlefield 'Habeas Corpus'Janet M. LaRueTuesday, June 17, 2008 Here’s my advice to our troops in harm’s way based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s reprehensible ruling June 12, which forces the military to treat enemy fighters captured in combat as if they were caught insider trading on Wall Street. In Boumedine v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States, a 5-4 Court majority declared that illegal enemy jihadists you captured outside America, now being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a constitutional right to challenge their confinement in civilian courts inside America. The decision is based on a legal principle called...

The day after the Supreme Court ruled that detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo are entitled to seek habeas corpus hearings, John McCain called it "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." Well. Does it rank with Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), which concocted a constitutional right, unmentioned in the document, to own slaves and held that black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect? With Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which affirmed the constitutionality of legally enforced racial segregation? With Korematsu v. United States (1944), which affirmed the wartime right to sweep American citizens...

So it is extraordinary that during the Bush administration's seven years, nearly all of them a time of war that began on Sept. 11, 2001, the court has been prompted to push back four times. Last week's decision in Boumediene v. Bush, in which the court ruled that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have a right to challenge their detentions in the federal courts, marks only the most recent rebuke. It is not hard to see why the court has traditionally been so quick to side with presidents during armed conflicts. The justices presumably lack the expertise of White House military...

Supreme Disgrace Thursday’s Guantánamo Bay decision was a power grab. By Peter Wehner I have now read through the Supreme Court’s decision, as well as the dissents, in Boumediene v. Bush, in which the Court held that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantánamo Bay have constitutional rights to challenge their detention there in U.S. courts. In doing so, the Court, in Chief Justice Roberts’s words, “strikes down as inadequate the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.” It’s worth considering what needed to be done in order to achieve this outcome....

As the world has just learned, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 5-4 yesterday that “for the first time in our Nation’s history, the Court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war.” So summed up Justice Scalia in a stinging dissent in which he was joined by justices Roberts, Thomas, and Alito. Justices Kennedy, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, made up the majority Breyer.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) vowed Thursday to do everything in his power to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision on Guantanamo Bay detainees, saying that, “if necessary,” he would push for a constitutional amendment to modify the decision. A former military prosecutor, Graham blasted the decision as “irresponsible and outrageous,” echoing the sentiments of many congressional Republicans and President Bush. Earlier in the day, the court ruled 5-4 that suspected terrorists held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their detention in federal court. When talking to reporters Thursday afternoon, Graham cautioned that it he was...

I have been invited by Aljazeera English to debate today's ruling by the USSC granting rights to terrorist suspects at Gitmo. You may view the live webcast at 9pm EST tonight.

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty. Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons. Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be...

Presiddent Lincoln wrote this letter in June, 1863: "The resolutions, as I understand them, are resolvable into two propositions: first, the expression of a purpose to the case of the Union, to secure peace through victory, and to support the administration in every constitutional and lawful measure to suppress the rebellion; and, second, a declaration of censure upon the administration for supposed unconstitutional action, such as the making of military arrests. And from the two propositions a third is deduced, which is that the gentlemen composing the meeting are resolved on doing their part to maintain our common government and ...

ACLU Applauds House Armed Services Hearing on Restoring Habeas Corpus Due Process Rights (7/26/2007) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: media@dcaclu.org Washington, DC - The American Civil Liberties Union was encouraged today by the House Armed Services Committee hearing titled Upholding the Principle of Habeas Corpus for Detainees. The committee discussed Chairman Ike Skelton's (D-MO) proposed bipartisan legislation restoring the due process right of habeas corpus that was taken away by the Military Commissions Act last fall. The ACLU hopes this hearing will lead to the enactment of Chairman Skelton's bill. "Chairman Skelton and the House Armed Services Committee should be commended...

ATLANTA — A Georgia judge on Monday voided a 10-year sentence given to a man who was convicted while a teenager of having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. Monroe County Superior Court Judge Thomas Wilson voided Genarlow Wilson's sentence and dropped it to misdemeanor aggravated child molestation with a 12-month sentence, plus credit for time served. Under the new ruling, he will not be required to register as a sex offender

Attorney general's remarks on citizens' right astound the chair of Senate judiciary panelOne of the Bush administration's most far-reaching assertions of government power was revealed quietly last week when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified that habeas corpus -- the right to go to federal court and challenge one's imprisonment -- is not protected by the Constitution. "The Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas,'' Gonzales told Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Jan. 17. Gonzales acknowledged that the Constitution declares "habeas corpus...

In one of the most chilling public statements ever made by a U.S. Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales questioned whether the U.S. Constitution grants habeas corpus rights of a fair trial to every American. Responding to questions from Sen. Arlen Specter at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Jan. 18, Gonzales argued that the Constitution doesn’t explicitly bestow habeas corpus rights; it merely says when the so-called Great Writ can be suspended. “There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there’s a prohibition against taking it away,” Gonzales said. Gonzales’s remark left Specter, the committee’s ranking Republican, stammering. “Wait...

A federal judge Wednesday dismissed a habeas corpus petition brought by Guantanamo detainee Salim Hamdan, finding it was clearly barred under the controversial habeas-stripping language of the new Military Commissions Act (MCA) even though it was pending at the time the Act was passed. Agreeing with a position on pending habeas petitions taken earlier this fall by the US Department of Justice, US District Judge James Robertson wrote in the first ruling to construe the MCA: "Hamdan's lengthy detention beyond American borders but within the jurisdictional authority of the United States is historically unique. Nevertheless, as the government argues in...

Jose Padilla was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1970, the son of Puerto Rican immigrants. He was a troubled youth, joining a street gang when the family moved to Chicago, and was once jailed for aggravated assault. After serving his sentence, he converted to Islam and professed non-violence. He went to the Masjid Al-Iman mosque in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and worked for a charity suspected of Islamist terror ties. He visited Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Returning to Chicago on May 8, 2002, Padilla was arrested and held under a warrant related to the 9/11 attacks. A...

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" - Benjamin FranklinThe response was predictable. After sending our alert last Thursday regarding the passing of the Military Commissions Act, we received a flood of email. Many were supportive, but others took exception: "Don't you care that terrorists want to kill us?" "Olbermann's obviously a left-wing nut who wants conservatives out of power." "The act isn't that bad..." It is bemusing to watch certain conservatives -- conservatives who once screamed that Bill Clinton was going to suspend the Constitution, establish martial law,...

On Tuesday, October 17, 2006, another nail was pounded into freedom's coffin when President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act into law. Within the Act, the 800-year tradition of Habeas Corpus -- the right of the accused to face their accuser in court -- was essentially eliminated.While much of the mainstream media glossed over this news with a disinterested yawn, one brave commentator made no bones about the magnitude of this treachery. Watch MSNBC's Keith Olbermann at http://tinyurl.com/yk6osh as he comments on this appalling development. If you do nothing else, WATCH THIS VIDEO! It will make your blood boil, to...

BURIED IN THE complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights. This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against...

We have been lulled into a dangerous sense of complacency towards the evils capable of being inflicted upon us, our country and our way of life by the EU. Our proposed membership of the euro is, it seems, a dead letter. The French and the Dutch buried the EU constitution more than a year ago. However, something that could prove even more poisonous to our liberties than either of those anti-democratic impositions could be about to be foisted on us. This Friday, in Tampere in Finland, there will be a meeting of EU interior and justice ministers. Up for debate...

Rep. Curt Weldon, who broke the Able Danger story last year revealing that military intelligence had identified lead hijacker Mohammed Atta as a terrorist threat before the 9/11 attacks, now says that Osama bin Laden has died. Weldon made the stunning claim during an interview Wednesday with the Philadelphia Inquirer, which reported: "Weldon is making explosive new allegations. He says a high-level source has told him that terrorist leader Osama bin Laden has died in Iran, where he has been in hiding." Weldon cited as his source an Iranian exile code-named Ali, telling the paper: "Ali's told me that Osama...

There's an old Chinese theory according to which the best way to understand historical events is not to reconstruct the sequence of "causes" by which the events were "produced," but rather to look at the unique characteristics of the moment in which the events occurred. I know there's an old Chinese theory for most anything, but this one has stayed with me ever since I first read about it in an essay by Carl Gustav Jung, and back in the Eighties it occurred to me that Pope John Paul II had understood its wisdom. The pope once remarked that there...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13, 2005 – Coalition forces continue the hunt for Izzat Ibrihim al-Duri, long-time Saddam Hussein associate, in spite of the latest Baath party announcement of his death, Multinational Force Iraq officials in Baghdad, Iraq, said today. Coalition officials question the validity of the Baath party claim, officials said, and a reward of up to $10 million remains for information leading to his capture or gravesite. Conflicting reports have arisen regarding al-Duri. On Nov. 12, a Baathist Web site reported his death, but the site's author has made false claims in the past, officials noted. Another Web site, also...

As the Supreme Court embraced moderation, the conservative agenda stalled. Solicitor General Paul Clement says he's noticed a new trend in the wardrobe of Supreme Court advocates. More and more men who argue before the Court are wearing bow ties, a tribute to the trademark neckwear of Justice John Paul Stevens -- and to his power. Midway through the ninth decade of his life, Stevens reached the peak of his career in the Supreme Court term that ended Monday. With a strong assist from Justice Anthony Kennedy, Stevens, 85, was able to assemble majorities and write opinions that read like...

Tucked into federal immigration legislation that would create uniform driver's license requirements across the country and make it more difficult to claim political asylum is a little-known provision that opponents say would be the first suspension of habeas corpus since the Civil War.

In response to the GOP-led congressional action intended to restore Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, those Democrats in opposition have attacked Republican hypocrisy in the case. Why suddenly, they ask, is the party of federalism and hostility to an overweening federal judiciary interfering in a state matter and handing the Schiavo case to a federal judge? If it is disorienting to see Republicans scrambling for federal intervention, at least they are acting on their deepest pro-life convictions — life is to be treasured in whatever form it takes, and preserving it is a paramount value. The starkest inconsistencies are on the...

We'd have more sympathy for this argument if the same liberals who are complaining about the possibility of the federal courts reviewing Mrs. Schiavo's case felt as strongly about restraining the federal judiciary when it comes to abortion, homosexuality, and other social issues they don't want to trust to local communities. In any event, these critics betray their lack of understanding of the meaning of federalism. It is not simply about "states' rights." Conservatives support states' rights in areas that are not delegated to the federal government but they also support federal power in areas that are delegated. .... The...

The Washington Post editorial this morning regarding Terri Schiavo is shamefully disingenuous. It tut-tuts at the alleged inconsistency of conservatives, who have led the fight to limit federal courts from using habeas-corpus procedures to second-guess state court rulings involving even capital defendants, but who are nonetheless seeking to thrust federal judges onto to state courts of Florida for a review that might save Terri’s life. After blathering at some length in this vein, the paper winds up by declaiming that Congress’s “message to state courts is that they can do as they will with accused criminals and rely on federal...

Tampa, FL (LifeNews.com) -- The attorney for Terri Schiavo's parents Bob and Mary Schindler has filed a request with a federal judge to review the decisions made by state courts authorizing her estranged husband Michael to remove her feeding tube this afternoon. Such habeas corpus appeals are normally filed for prisoners on death row who have been convicted and sentenced to the death penalty. Federal law is unclear on whether a habeas corpus petition can be filed in Terri's situation, which prompted Congress to consider legislation specifically allowing it. However, the House and Senate approved different bills and could not...

I have been thinking and trying to figure out some things about why the Terri Schiavo situation is playing out the way it is. What are George Felos' motivations? What about Judge Greer (who just ordered Terri to death on March 18)? Something struck me. It's known that George Felos was on the board of the hospice that Terri is confined to. It is also know that it is ILLEGAL to put someone in a hospice who is not dying and Terri is not dying as long as she remains fed. However, being a lawyer is as much about managing...

It is the sort of stuff that one can read on a regular basis in the contemporary media. An impassioned crie de coeur against American presidential tyranny of the type that is voiced at protest rallies around the world. "The men in power are attempting to establish a despotism in this country, more cruel and more oppressive than ever existed before,” declared the speaker. But these harsh words of denunciation were not uttered against the USA Patriot Act or the national security policies of President George W. Bush. Nor were these sentiments expressed by supporters of Australian Guantanamo detainees David...

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, Nov. 8 - A federal judge ruled Monday that President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions in establishing military commissions to try detainees at the United States naval base here as war criminals. The ruling by Judge James Robertson of United States District Court in Washington brought an abrupt halt to the trial here of one detainee, one of hundreds being held at Guantánamo as enemy combatants. It threw into doubt the future of the first set of United States military commission trials since the end of World War...

The Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush that federal courts will conduct habeas corpus review of alien enemy combatants’ detentions outside the U.S. to ensure the detainee is really an enemy combatant. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Justices held that American citizens detained in the war have the right to a lawyer and a fair hearing before a neutral judge. The Court’s rulings – quite rational, legally defensible, and moderate at the philosophical level – are a disaster at the practical level. Well-respected conservative commentators stress these decisions are not a body-blow to the Bush Administration’s war against terrorism....

The Denver Postal knight Forget the silver lining By Al KnightFairplay Wednesday, June 30, 2004 - It is not often that the conservative editorial page editors at the Wall Street Journal play the role of Little Mary Sunshine. That's why it was something of a surprise when the Journal on Tuesday ran an editorial putting a smiley face on Monday's Supreme Court ruling that extended the right of habeas corpus to aliens now held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and perhaps every other U.S. military facility anywhere in the world. The Journal, keep in mind, often articulates a viewpoint...

Baghdad, Iraq — Meet Umar Baziyani. He is believed to be the mastermind behind Ansar al Islam, a terrorist organization in Iraq that provided safe haven and coordinated training for Abu Musab al Zarkawi and his al Qaeda operatives near the Iraq-Iran border. In his role in these respective terrorist organizations, Baziyani conspired to kill scores of Iraqis and numerous Americans, and joined in a scheme to destabilize an entire nation. Earlier this month, Baziyani was captured, and he is currently being detained in Iraq. In a recent conversation, a senior Coalition military official revealed that while in detention,...

Washington-Congress has no plans this year to give an early renewal of key parts of the controversial USA Patriot Act. But the lawmakers could be thrust into another battle over the boundaries of executive power in the war on terrorism depending on the outcome of three cases in the U.S. Supreme Court this month. The Patriot Act contains a sunset clause that would terminate new or expanded law enforcement/intelligence powers in 14 provisions of the law as of Dec. 31, 2005. Despite the Bush administration's call to make those provisions permanent and to do it quickly, lawmakers are unlikely to...

Surveillance and Wiretapping Under the Patriot II Act Some conservative groups are finding common ground with organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, expressing concerns about the effect that the USA Patriot Act and the follow-up law, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (a.k.a. “Patriot II”), could have on civil liberties. Liberal critics have directed much of their worry at what they saw as an attack on immigrants' rights in the Patriot Act, the massive measure that was passed as the country was reeling from the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Now, right-leaning...

The Anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address Gettysburg, Pennsylvania November 19, 1996 Remarks by Sandra Day O'Connor Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the Unites States I. Introduction I am honored to have the opportunity to speak with you today, on this anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. But I have to admit that my task is a bit daunting, even for a Supreme Court Justice. No speaker, I am afraid, can find the words to compete with those spoken here by Abraham Lincoln six score and thirteen years ago (that's 133 years, for those of you without calculators). That goes for...

I. The Suspension of Habeas Corpus:Less than two months after assuming office as President, Abraham Lincoln wrote to General Winfield Scott in a letter unilaterally authorizing him to make arrests in the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus for reason of "public safety" in locations " between the City of Philadelphia and the City of Washington." On May 10, 1861 Lincoln extended this suspension to the state of Florida, again by unilateral proclamation as chief executive. On July 2nd, he again unilaterally extended suspension authority to the military "between the City of New York and the City of Washington."...

What Will Stop It?Lesson #1 en Route to the Gulagby John Loeffler, Steel on Steel Radio Program Americans have enjoyed so much freedom for so long, they have forgotten that freedom is a fluke in the history of the world; not the norm. Our freedoms were hard-won over hundreds of years of human tears. The current view that freedoms are somehow self-sustaining and "obvious" ignores a primary rule of the political universe, well established in human history: governments and those in them always gravitate toward power, money and control; power for themselves, confiscating money and property from their people, who...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to hear challenges by Afghan war detainees at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the lawfulness of their custody, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly dismissed two lawsuits brought on behalf of 12 Kuwaiti nationals, two British citizens and an Australian. They all are being held at the base after their capture during the war in Afghanistan. "The court concludes that the military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is outside the sovereign territory of the United States," she ruled, adding that writs of habeas corpus...

Home More The Edge Features: Initiative for a New Cuba Lincoln: Tyrant or Champion? Resignation as Penance Redistributing Wealth The Choice of Liberty View Archives According to the Gospel of John, "Whosoever eats of my flesh and drinks of my blood has ________, and I will raise him up on the last day". eternal lifefood for the journeynothing to fear by David Quackenbush Other Articles by David Quackenbush Lincoln: Tyrant or Champion? 5/30/02 In a recent column entitled: Lincoln: Tyrant or champion … or both? talk show host and columnist Geoff Metcalf issued his verdict on this supposed great debate. Metcalf...

<!-- a{text-decoration:none} //--> CONTENT=""> dd   The American Anti-Civil Liberties Union by Thomas J. DiLorenzoIn his brilliant essay, "The Anatomy of the State," Murray Rothbard wrote that state power always relies on the manipulation of public opinion perhaps as much as its use of force and coercion (See his Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays). Since the class of people constituting the state always necessarily consists of only a small portion of the population, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that "their government is good, wise, and at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other...