9/11, al Qaeda, al-Ajmi, Boumediene v. Bush, Debra Burlingame, Guantanamo, Lawfare

Debra Burlingame: Boumediene v. Bush a Strategic Victory for al Qaeda

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Today’s Supreme Court decision, Boumediene v. Bush, is a huge victory for terrorists and a step backward in the war against radical Islamists. If 9/11 taught us anything, it is that the criminal justice system is not capable of preventing catastrophic terrorists attacks — nor is it designed to be. Never in the history of American jurisprudence have we given full Constitutional rights to terrorists captured anywhere in the world who commit atrocities on civilians.

The lawyers who are championing the rights of terrorists should tell the public what this decision really means. It means that terrorists will be entitled to Miranda rights, to legal representation and the right to remain silent. And they will. When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, was handed over to the U.S. after his capture in Karachi in 2003, he taunted his interrogators with this, “I’ll talk to you guys in New York when I see my lawyer.” But they won’t tell the public, they will continue to talk about preserving the rights of people who would behead journalists, blow up children and fly commercial airliners into buildings, as if those acts are an abstraction. What this decision ultimately means is that the vital intelligence we need to prevent future attacks — the kind of intelligence we didn’t have on September 10, 2001 — will dry up. We will be left reacting to these attacks after the fact — just as we did in the ten years prior to the murder of 3,000 of our fellow human beings.

Something else the lawyers won’t tell the public. Dealing with terrorists in the criminal justice system means that only the most clear-cut cases will result in convictions. Terrorists like Mohammed Atta, Hani Hanjour, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi, the men who piloted those planes into the WTC, the Pentagon and the ground on 9/11 would have stood a very good chance of acquittal if they were captured in an Al Qaeda training camp in the summer of 2001. The burden of proof in the civil criminal system — beyond a reasonable doubt — is extraordinarily high. Their lawyers back then would have argued that that they have no criminal history, had committed no hostile acts against the U.S. governmnent and in fact were simply religious Muslims doing charity work on holiday, the very claims Gitmo lawyers made about Abdullah Al-Ajmi and hundreds of other detainees. Al-Ajmi was released from Guantanamo in 2005. In April, he blew himself up in Iraq, killing 7 Iraqi security forces and maiming 28 others.

Justice Scalia is right that today’s opinion will result in the death of Americans. His words remind me of the beleaguered FBI agent, Harry Sammit, who pleaded with his superiors at FBI headquarters to be allowed to launch a nationwide manhunt for Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, two of the hijackers on my brother’s plane, 3 weeks before 9/11. He was turned down by the lawyers in the National Security Law Unit of the FBI, who cited the FISA law that prevented this intelligence information from being used by the criminal division. The point of that law — known as “the wall” — was CIVIL LIBERTIES protection for the terrorists who were the object of that never-launched manhunt, should they ever be caught and brought to trial. Sammit wrote in an email, on Aug. 31, 2001:

“Someday someone will die…and the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing everything we had at certain problems. Let’s hope [the lawyers] will stand behind their decisions then, expecially since the biggest threat to us now, [bin laden], is getting the most protection.”

The media can call this a “defeat for the Bush administration,” but it is not. It is a defeat for the American people. And, God help us, when the next catastrophic attack occurs under the next American president’s watch, who will the media blame then? They won’t be thinking about President Bush. The families of those who are dead will be able to draw a straight, clear line right to the steps of their own U.S. Supreme Court.

[Editor — View and save a copy of the entire decision by clicking here (pdf).]

Boumediene v. Bush, Guantanamo, Lawfare

Justice Scalia: Hamdan SCOTUS majority ‘were just kidding’ both political branches

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The following is Part I of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia’s dissenting opinion to today’s ruling in Boumediene v. Bush [and joined by Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito]. It turns out that the majority of the Supreme Court that decided Hamdan v. Rumsfeld “were just kidding” when they ruled the political branches should set up the review process for determining what detainees to hold or release:

Today, 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. THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s dissent, which I join, shows that the procedures prescribed by Congress in the Detainee Treatment Act provide the essential protections that habeas corpus guarantees; there has thus been no suspension of the writ, and no basis exists for judicial intervention beyond what the Act allows.

My problem with today’s opinion is more fundamental still: The writ of habeas corpus does not, and never has, run in favor of aliens abroad; the Suspension Clause thus has no application, and the Court’s intervention in this military matter is entirely ultra vires.

I shall devote most of what will be a lengthy opinion to the legal errors contained in the opinion of the Court. Contrary to my usual practice, however, I think it appropriate to begin with a description of the disastrous consequences of what the Court has done today.

America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 60–61, 70, 190 (2004). On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., and 40 in Pennsylvania. See id., at 552, n. 9. It has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our countrymen in arms were killed.

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court’s blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today. The President relied on our settled precedent in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U. S. 763 (1950), when he established the prison at Guantanamo Bay for enemy aliens. Citing that case, the President’s Office of Legal Counsel advised him “that the great weight of legal authority indicates that a federal district court could not properly exercise habeas jurisdiction over an alien detained at [Guantanamo Bay].” … Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners there, but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention. Those other facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves.

In the long term, then, the Court’s decision today accomplishes little, except perhaps to reduce the well-being of enemy combatants that the Court ostensibly seeks to protect. In the short term, however, the decision is devastating. At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield. See S. Rep. No. 110–90, pt. 7, p. 13 (2007) (Minority Views of Sens. Kyl, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, and Coburn) (hereinafter Minority Report). Some have been captured or killed. See ibid.; see also Mintz, Released Detainees Rejoining the Fight, Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2004, pp. A1, A12. But others have succeeded in carrying on their atrocities against innocent civilians. In one case, a detainee released from Guantanamo Bay masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese dam workers, one of whom was later shot to death when used as a human shield against Pakistani commandoes. See Khan & Lancaster, Pakistanis Rescue Hostage; 2nd Dies, Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2004, p. A18. Another former detainee promptly resumed his post as a senior Taliban commander and murdered a United Nations engineer and three Afghan soldiers. Mintz, supra. Still another murdered an Afghan judge. See Minority Report 13. It was reported only last month that a released detainee carried out a suicide bombing against Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq. See White, Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack, Washington Post, May 8, 2008, p. A18.