Actually, up until this post, you’ve been saying civilian trials.
Yes, of course the U.S. has that right, as does any nation under those circumstances. The German saboteurs had military trials, and and the right of appeals through the military command, and right up to requesting clemency of the President.
Your trick question completely ignores that we were at war with Germany, a sovereign nation, and that the convicted were citizens of that nation, and were dispatched by that nation, and the trials, convictions, and executions were completely legal by all the laws of war.
No Obama didn’t break the law killing Bin Laden. Bin Laden isn’t a US citizen.
I really think you’re confused. I’m the guy arguing that the government SHOULDN’T be allowed to kill US citizens without due process. How that makes you think I don’t fear governmental persecution is beyond me.
Are you under the impression those men were given “jury trials”?
They weren’t.
They were given military trials and executed. The US military simply declared them saboteurs, aand then gave them military trials and executed them.
You seem to feel that foreign nationals who belong to “a criminal organization”(to use your rather loaded term) are entitled to protections than people who are alleged to be citizens of a nation that the US is at war against.
Anyway, I trust that Hamlet and Jimmy disagree with your approval of the action and believe that the alleged saboteurs should have been granted civilian/jury trials.
Me? God no. I don’t want one man deciding that the entire world is a battlefield allowing him to kill anyone without oversight. That’s YOUR position.
And being Commander in Chief doesn’t give the President the power to ignore the Constitution. Once again, we went through all this with the illegal detentions. The President said what you said, that he gets to detain US citizens forever without trial, because he’s CinC and he has the AUMF. The Supreme Court didn’t agree then either.
Cool, so who gets to decide where our battlefields are? Do you have any evidence to support the hilarious proposition that the SCOTUS or any other court gets to decide where our military may or may not use military force? Especially after Congress has already authorized it.
You keep going back to that constitution, have you actually read it? What does the constitution have to do with the waging of war? It does not place these restrictions upon ordering the military to engage the enemy, and unless you can show court cases to support your position that it does I must conclude you are confused.
It’s not a side issue. Let’s go back to this exchange, where I was asked what would hypothetically happen if OBL had been an American citizen:
So to summarize, they didn’t give Awlaki due process, so hypothetical American OBL shouldn’t expect due process. Yet you recognize that KSM got due process, even though other detainees did not, for “publicity reasons.”
So are American citizens to be subject to political whims and public opinion, or might there be higher principles in operation?
I think I’m starting to understand your issue, Martin. You don’t want a government of laws with checks and balances, you want a benevolent dictatorship.
Yemen declared war on AQAP in January in 2010. We are there at their request and, arguably, helping them fight that war. (Even though we could be there at their request to fight our own US v. AQAP war).
I don’t think those cases stand for what you think they stand far. They are about due process* after *being captured.
Hamdi, was labeled an enemy combatant. That means he could have been killed, instead of detained. The case was about the process he was due as a US detainee. The plurality held he was entitled to more judicial overview (due process) than Bush offered US citizens. The dissent, Justice Scalia/Breyers said the only way to detain him, a US citizen, was to suspend the writ of habeas corpus or try him as a criminal.
Hamdan, a captured non-citizen, one of the first sentences in the decision is very telling and states: “He concedes that a court-martial constituted in accordance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), 10 U. S. C. §801 et seq. (2000 ed. and Supp. III), would have authority to try him.” A courts-marital can only be used to try him for war crimes. War crimes can only occur during war/armed conflict. Thus, Hamdan was an enemy combatant. Enemy Combatants can be killed as a measure of first resort (i.e., drones from the sky). The fact he was captured and detained, and thus subject to due process, is not relevant to that fact. His case was about the actual military commissions that tried him and that those commissions did not afford him GC Art. 3 due process.
Boumediane is about constitutional habeas corpus petitions for captured combatants/potential combatants.
None of those cases apply to killing during wartime. Maybe Hamdi, bin ladens/driver bodyguard gives insight, b/c he was the “core” combatant; it’s how far can you move away from Hamdi and still be considered a combatant (i.e., is a cook for AQ a combatant? yes, an army marches on its stomach - the cook can be killed…ect.). So is Awlaki, who played an operational role in AQAP a combatant? I say yes. Thus he can be killed legally under the laws of war, unless he surrenders first.
So, the lesson, kill them, don’t detain them and deal with all that baggage. That’ an observation, not my opinion on how to actually deal with the situation.
I’ve said this over and over. The Supreme Court has ruled that the President can’t detain indefinitely without judicial oversight, despite the President saying it was a military action done pursuant to the AUMF. Will it sink in this time I say it?
It’s the document that specifically lays out the authorization for the waging of war. This idea that “war”, “enemy”, and “military” are magic words that suddenly allow the President to do as he wishes no matter what the Constitution says is without support.
I’ll put that hypothetical conclusion the same weight I give all your others. None. If you need me to cite, for the fourth time, the cases that limit the Presidential Power as CinC, even with a AUMF, I fear I’m wasting my time.
And when will your recognize such a ruling has never had anything to do with military action? I keep asking for cites, all you have ever given is cites about how the government can treat people who are under the custody of police or the military, or whether or not the police can shoot someone fleeing from custody or whatever. Nothing to do with war on the battlefield, not a single cite, in this whole thread.
None of the cases you have cited have anything to do with the President’s CnC power as it relates to ordering military action on the battlefield. Guantanamo bay isn’t the battlefield, no one has ever argued that it was.
I find it shocking you don’t understand the difference between a military prison and the battlefield. I can assure you the SCOTUS has not ever ruled in any way limiting the President’s ability to order troops to engage the enemy. How many times must I ask you for cites to the contrary, that we both know do not exist in the history of American law?
Apparently, you think Yemen and Pakistan are battlefields, even though we’re not at war with either of those sovereign nations. And if Awlaki had gone into Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or France, those countries would have become battlefields as well.
And, again, we’re back to the proposition that somehow killing a man is less an intrusion into his rights than detaining a man. I find that kind of logic to be … well catastrophically silly. If the detainees were on the battlefield, yes they can be killed. But targeted killings of a US citizen without oversight and not on the battlefield, that’s something completely different.