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.
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SOLDIERS CANNOT BE MADE COPSThe questions now press urgently: Are we are serious about achieving victory over our jihadist enemies? Are we serious about safeguarding the lives of our young men and women in uniform? Those lives of our best and bravest have now been seriously jeopardized, and not just by the legal and political pressure to release enemies who should be detained during the fighting — at least 37 of whom are known to have returned to the jihad according to information released by the Pentagon (in his Boumediene dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia put the number at 30).
The Boumediene challenge is even more basic. The justices want to see our enemies as mere defendants, but our soldiers cannot be seen as cops. Police duties — Miranda warnings, evidence collection, forensic analysis, report-writing — are inimical to and cannot safely be performed in combat. Cops and FBI agents carry out these investigative tasks meticulously because they enjoy the relative safety of peacetime America. If those tasks are imposed on our troops in the deadly crossfire of the foreign battlefield, Americans will die.
If you doubt this, just consult any of the many dedicated men and women in law enforcement who, in their earlier years, served in the military during wartime. They will tell you, based on hard experience, that only a panel of elite lawyers — unburdened by the need to explain themselves to voters — could look at a battlefield and see a crime scene.
We plainly need a legal system for detaining enemy combatants, trying war criminals, and conducting intelligence collection for a novel kind of war against a ruthless, non-state enemy that defies convention. Congress should have devised such a system already. But the fact that Congress has been derelict does not mean it is suddenly appropriate for the devising to be done by judges.
His is a plea for returning sanity to the debate over what rights to afford the enemy.
Like millions of others, I hung up my uniform before September 11, 2001. While I lost both family and friends that day and will have my say, this is not my private war.
Yet I believe all those who wore a military uniform in the past can provide important perspectives. Even though this is not “our war,” we owe it to all those who carry on in our stead. Let us tell our Nation of what we know and believe.
These troops — all those who have fought this war and who will fight on — know full well of what they speak. We trust them with our lives and liberty; we must not now demand their silence.
I respectfully ask every troop and old soldier to please sound off.