(Update for 12/5/07: here’s a post with links to the oral arguments that happened today)
Lyle Denniston has a post up at SCOTUSblog reviwing the government’s brief in Boumediene. This is the leading case that challenges the constitutionality of the Military Commissions Act, informally known as the John McCain Torture Enabling Law. The MCA grants power to the Executive branch to set up a system of courts that is designed to parallel the Article III courts we all know and love. Except the new Executive branch courts are intended only to convict (let’s be honest here- they won’t be acquitting anyone) the miserable bastards we’ve been torturing since 2003 at Guantanamo Bay. And those courts are in total disarray: the lead prosecutor quit last week, complaining about direct political interference in the way he was doing his job. From Lyle’s post:
In a 74-page brief on the merits, filed jointly in Boumediene v. Bush (06-1195) and Al Odah v. U.S. , U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement argued that Congress has given the prisoners “a constitutionally adequate substitute for challenging their detention,” so they have no need for traditional habeas remedies even if those were found to exist.
Now, I may be just a simple-minded second year law student, but I fail to see how this argument does anything other than ask the Court to affirm a Plessy v. Fergusen “Separate, but equal” standard for the entire American system of justice.
Actually, 38 detainees were “acquitted” by the CSRT process.
not race per se. Plessy was about separation of schools, which violated equal protection becuse of the inequity it created in education. The MCA creates an inequity in the courts, based on an arbitrary classification by an unaccountable political appointee.
There is an indelible stigma that attaches to the “enemy combatant” designation, whether or not the detainee is eventually cleared of wrongdoing.