The editors at National Review find the Supreme Court's decision in Hamden v. Rumsfeld to be an outrage and they build an excellent case in support of that conclusion. Here are a couple of paragraphs from an essay that would repay being read in its entirety:
To begin with, the Court had no business deciding this case at all. Not only did it target the president's commander-in-chief authority to determine what is militarily necessary in wartime, it also imperiously slapped down the U.S. Congress. In last December's Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), Congress - acting on its constitutional prerogative - rescinded the unprecedented jurisdiction that the Supreme Court, in the 2004 Rasul case, had claimed over alien enemy combatants captured in wartime and held outside the U.S. (that is, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts). This Court, however, acknowledges no limits on its powers - whether imposed by Congress or by the English language, which it had to torture in order to construe the DTA's unambiguous limitation of its jurisdiction as an invitation to meddle.
[T]he Geneva Conventions were irrelevant to Hamdan's case. He is a terrorist combatant who fails to meet the conventions' definition of a prisoner of war; consequently, he is not entitled to the conventions' POW protections. In order to get around this inconvenient fact, the Court had to invoke (and distort) "Common Article 3" of the conventions, which applies only to civil wars taking place within the territory of a single country, as opposed to international conflicts.
The Court argued, absurdly, that because al Qaeda is not a nation, it cannot be in an international conflict: so the global War on Terror is not "international," despite having been fought in the United States, Somalia, Yemen, Kenya, Tanzania, Afghanistan, and Iraq. As for Article 3's requirement that the conflicts to which it applies be confined to a single country, the Court's majority found an easy way to get around it: by ignoring it.
Read the rest at the link.
