Since the indictment is not does not address the accusations that led to him being classified as an enemy combatant, isn’t he still an enemy combatant? Or does an indictment, even on a different charge, override the enemy combatant status?
First of all, I believe you may be laboring under an incorrect assumption that the Administration’s designation of someone as an enemy combatant has some valid force. Maybe it does (I think it’s extraordinarily limited), but it certainly doesn’t have the force the Administration claims it does. First, the president lost last year’s Hamdi case, which required that people purportedly classified as enemy combatants require some process, and that presidential fiat isn’t enough to deprive someone of their liberty. (Not a hard case if you’re willing to read the Fifth Amendment.) In Padilla’s case, they changed his status from putative “enemy combatant” to indictee because they knew that if a judge was allowed to review his case (as was imminent), the judge would tell them the enemy combatant category is bullshit. at least when it’s used to completely cut off a prisoner from any sort of process as the Administration has done with Padilla, and continues to do with the hundreds of other putative “enemy combatants” it’s currently holding without trial despite the clear repudiation they suffered in Hamdi. So they chickened out – as well they should have, as they would have lost otherwise. The enemy combatant stuff has disappeared, because the Adminsitration knew it was ineffective.
I hope I’ve managed to keep a reasonably sober tone in this response, but I don’t know that I’ll be participting further in this thread, because I find it very difficult to discuss the President’s behavior without completely losing my shit.
It is difficult to conclude that the enemy combatant classification is no longer operative because of the Supreme Court decision in Hamdi’s case, simply because it appears that there are still a bunch of people being held incommunicado under that characterization. It may be that this is so because those people are not US citizens – although I don’t see the Fifth Amendment making that distinction. None-the-less, the Padilla matter was carried right up to the line before it was decided to slap him with charges of considerable less gravity than the former Atty Gen was touting as the basis for the EC classification.
I’m no really sure what a person must do, or be thought to have done, or suspect to perhaps do in the near of remote future, in order to be a EC. I’m not sure who has the authority to make that determination. Since these people are thrown in jail with out trial or probable cause hearing and without judicial review on the say so of someone in the executive department acting as the President’s designee maybe we ought to call them what they are and what our government calls them when a government it doesn’t much like does this: political prisoners.
In times of crisis I expect some amount of hysteria from elderly ladies and government official who want to keep their job. If it’s not dirty bombs then it’s meteors, or asteroids wiping out life as we know it, or earthquakes that will dump Oregon into the ocean, or volcanoes in downtown Cleveland, or run-away balloons at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. You would think that the enemy combatant hysteria would have dissipated by now.
This news piece from the New York Times looks like a fair characterization of the many difficulties with the whole enemy combatant thing. Essentially the Administrative is claiming plenary powers in the area, the right and privilege to do what ever it wants whenever it wants free of oversight by anyone or any institution. It is hard to make that idea work without accepting that the President and the Executive Department has despotic authority whenever it sees fit, in the exercise of some sort of self proclaimed authority, to claim it. So far as I know no US government has previously asserted this authority. So far as I know no source for this power in a government of limited authority and ordered liberty has been cited. In many ways this is the most anti-republican, lawless and ruthless and ill advised stance taken by the any American government.
I think you did really well in holding down the “foaming at the mouth” over this administration’s unbelievable position regarding its assumed preeminent role in dispensing “justice.”
Really, now, what purpose is served by having three branches of government, with the potential for confusion and mutual interferece (previously referred to as the quaint notion of “checks and balances.”)? Granted, if one of those branches should be in the grip of ill-intended or incompetent poltroons, such would be desireable, even crucial. But when the Republic is firmly grasped by God-fearing and patriotic men, as it is now, such “branches” become redundant and more likely than not to interfere with correct governance, as it was and ever shall be, war without end, amen.
Aside: what if Padilla was scamming them? What if his sole intent was to grab off a pile of their money and whip back to Detroit to party? What, if any, positive steps had he made to further this alleged dread conspiracy, besides cashing their check?
The elderly women I know are more inclined to respond like Ann Richards and Helen Thomas. Your comment was beneath you and distracted from the more important issue that is of concern to defenders of human and Constitutional rights – regardless of the defender’s age and gender.
In the matter of enemy combatants, the current administration might as well be in the role of dictator. How is he not in violation of his Oath of Office in which he swore to uphold the Constitution? Any legal comments on this?
I am quite certain you have misinterpreted the remarks of our esteemed SG. I have it on good authority that he is an unstinting admirer of ladies of all ages, races and persuasions.
I am a admirer of Spavined Gelding. I can’t remember another time when he has said anything which has been in the least appealing to a wrongful and condescending stereotype. It is because he is a hero that his comment was particularly cutting.
Maya Angelou…Eleanor Roosevelt…Sandra Day O’Connor
I’m wondering how many hysterical elderly ladies he has actually seen in times of crisis in comparison to stoic, dignified older women.
The US’s position that it can invent “special categories” that fall between the cracks is disingenuous, at best. The recent change in position underscores the US’s lack of belief in the tenability of it’s own argument.
Here is a thread in which I analyzed *Hamdi * and *Padilla *.
Is there any case law in an international court, or the courts of any other nation on this article?
I would think that letting such a suspect out on bail might be prejudicial to US security but I’m not so sure that allowing representation by counsel or visits by representatives of the International Red Cross to insure proper treatment would be.
The section you quoted only says that certain provisions don’t apply to some categories of civilians (those who are “definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State.”) It doesn’t say that the Convention does not apply. And how would giving him a hearing be “prejudicial to the security of such State”?