Justice!

Thanks, Christie. Great news.

They maybe a narrow minded bunch when it comes to things like workers rights and the ability of states to legislate hurdles on abortion, but they do seem to get it right about habeus and torture.

God!
Bravo!
Enough of these kinds of rulings and I might feel clean again someday.
Thank you Christy.
s

This is a huge smack at the DC Circuit on this case, because they were so blunt about the non-person business. The Bush Administration was banking on them not taking this case up after Boumidiene, I think, but the SCOTUS remanded on the grounds of that decision — highlighting their smackdown of Bush administration reasoning all over again. Gotta love that…

Good for the Supremes! Fantastic. I wonder if Bush has any clue why someone would want to throw shoes at him?

Bushco 0 – detainees 100%

I’m always surprised when anyone takes the time and effort and guts to stand up to Bush vs. saying there is so much other more important work to do.

thanks for the good news.

a commenter at UK Telegraph asks, if the person does not feel insulted, is it still an insult?

Isn’t the DC Court of Appeals supposed to be next to the SCOTUS in prestige and where all the supposed leading lights of Conservatism get their judicial training?

Oops.

Well, at least some of them get it: Boumediene v Bush was a five to four ruling.

You’d think they’d eventually realize that they are just plain wrong, wouldn’t you?

They will never admit they were wrong. In their minds the means justify the ends and they believe their ends were good. Good vs evil. No gray areas. Any person beneath that rarefied social/wealth status may be considered non-persons if it suits their purpose.

If the king is naked and everyone applauds his clothes is he still naked?

dugg

Christy, a question of legal procedure for you . . .

How common is it for SCOTUS to grant cert and summarily dispose of the case in the same set of orders, with no oral arguments from the parties, and no written description of the justices’ vote and/or reasoning?

That they base the ruling on the precedent set by Boumediene makes it all the more intriguing. Looks like there is a pattern building of the Court not buying the Bush Administration’s tap dancing on human rights.

in a court of roberts scalia and alito, I am dumbfounded

This is the SCOTUS way of saying, “no, you don’t.”

my first guess is the fact that now we have a democratic president, but these decisions have been comming down before we elected obama

I wonder what gives

Heh, heh. Over on Glennzilla’s thread we are also talking about torture. One of the facilities he discussed where some of the worst abuses have occurred is Camp Cropper at the airport in Baghdad.

Bush’s abuse policies have come a cropper and, as you note, they have lost every single court case.

OT: Per Glenzilla:

The policies which the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously concludes were authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and several other top Bush officials did not merely lead to “abuse” and humiliating treatment, but are directly — and unquestionably — responsible for numerous detainee murders.

Per the Republican-sponsored War Crimes Act of 1996:

(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.
(b) Circumstances.— The circumstances referred to in subsection (a) are that the person committing such war crime or the victim of such war crime is a member of the Armed Forces of the United States or a national of the United States (as defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act).

Emphasis added.

The detainees aren’t out yet, so I think the score real score is exactly the opposite.

Great news! Who woulda thunk it, this court as conservative as it is with two hand picked guys by Bush, that they would not let some of this slide.

Dis Scalia or another SCOTUS troll write a dissent? We have to keep track of just what the GOP party line is in case they return to power.

Great Catch this should be a Diary! Next Question will Bush throw the switch on himself? Will he Cry?

if the person does not feel insulted, is it still an insult?

Yes. Doubly so, since the insulted compounds the insult by revealing his ignorance of it, which is plainly apparent to everyone else.

Greetings, all.

I think here is the huge gorilla;

Judge Janice Rogers Brown issued a concurrence noting that the ruling left the Court of Appeals “with the unfortunate and quite dubious distinction of being the only court to declare those held at Guantanamo are not ‘persons.’ This is a most regrettable holding in a case where plaintiffs have alleged high-level U.S. government officials treated them as less than human.”

how depraved, how much like hitler himself who thought jews and blacks were less then human

how like prescott the claims of this president

perhaps I missed it but do we have who joined this scotus decision and who opposed?

Certiori…”Shoe, Shoe, Shoe ya”.
This could be the start of something big… and shows the courts are subject to political pressure?

You have everything the court has released on the decision at this point. I quoted the full extent of the opinion order on the remand above — it was a summary order.

Haven’t seen anything but if you found a vote for Boumediene, I’d say you probably would have the likely vote distribution

(((Center for Constitutional Rights))) Thank you

maybe not;

the supreme court, including roberts, alito and scalia think highly of themselves and I think they would be insulted that their previous decision is ignored, even if they did not join in said decision.

this is very vewry intriguing

I wonder how Bush’s post-Presidency Secret Service detail would respond to Federal Marshals showing up and attempting to take him into custody on War Crimes charges. Per wigwam’s limk above, there is plainly cause for an indictment…?

A good decision to celebrate Bill of Rights Day

while we’re dreaming of an arrest of a former potus that is a great question, do they take orders from the ss or the president?

and what orders would the ss give the detail?

and what if the ss had no orders regarding the arrest, what then?

Where does this ruling and the related revelations concerning the coordination between Rumsfeld and the generals (I would imagine Abazaid, Miller, and Sanchez) on the issue of torture leave them with regard to a lying to Congress charge? Is there a statute of limitations for that crime?

I’m not a lawyer but I don’t see why someone can’t bring charges against these people under our own war crimes laws right here in the US. Could CCR do something like that or ACLU or do you think that SCOTUS would fall back on justiciability or standing to sidestep the issue?

Breaking: NY Times reporting Caroline Kennedy will seek NY senate seat.

Maybe it’s because I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t see these decisions by the Supreme Court as victories for justice – in any way. What is at stake here and in other similarly fundamental cases are formerly established legal rights and precedents that have been determined years, if not centuries ago. Yet repeatedly we see the Supreme Court playing “Lucy football,” not making a definitive decision, but instead passing the proceedings back to a lower court to further examine the issues.

Torture, kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment, murder – by government – all are tried and re-tried ad nauseam, with no definitive clarifying affirmation of what had long been considered established protections from governmental abuse. Some precedents approaching a millennium in age.

From my view the only thing the Supreme Court has been doing is avoiding ruling against the Bush abuses and instead insuring that it still has a say. While the Lucy football continues people continue to suffer from the legal abuses that should be ended – or affirmed if that be the will of our corrupt courts. But if the Supremes rule that Bush can do as he pleases, as Commander-in-Chief and defender of all things good and grand that are America, then they won’t be invited on the duck hunt trips anymore, not being needed.

These Bush abuse cases are such basics to a healthy free nation that all of them should have been “fast tracked” to definitive judgments. Instead they’re slow tracked and fruity looped.

It’s sick. But then it’s just another example of what a mess America has become.

Christy, if you missed it, I don’t expect you to up on all things personal at FDL, but at least share this with Ms. Jane.
Back on Lisa’s last thread, read #32, 35, 36 … Some sad stuff.

Breaking: NY Times reporting Caroline Kennedy will seek NY senate seat.

Which goes to show that you can’t keep a narcissistic Kennedy down.

People in this country are free to be in politics if they choose. Is she different from the other Kennedys?

People in this country are free to be in politics if they choose. Is she different from the other Kennedys?

No and that’s the problem.

I agree. I think this more about Marbury than concern about torture.

You don’t like any of the Kennedys?

Thank you, Christy. I consider myself a student of all you brighter folks here at the lake. I appreciate all your (plural) work and your generosity in sharing it with us.

Never did I dream that in my life-time it would be necessary for the supreme court to determine that a human being was a person !!!

Why are these Nazi pimps calling themselves judges still judges?
Have they been disbarred or is action pending?

I am tired of dynasties. They do more harm to our country than good. If Caroline Kennedy didn’t have Kennedy in her name, she wouldn’t even be mentioned in passing as a possible replacement for Clinton.

Whatever ones biases against the Kennedy family as a class, Caroline Kennedy deserves to be judged as an individual. Do we know anything specifically negative about her?

Whatever ones biases against the Kennedy family as a class, Caroline Kennedy deserves to be judged as an individual. Do we know anything specifically negative about her?

Why is a distaste for something so anti-democratic as dynasties reflective of a bias? I would think that favoring them shows a far greater bias and abdication of democratic principles.

As for Caroline Kennedy being judged as an individual, get real. The mere fact that her name has come up is the result of her not being taken as an individual but as a Kennedy. If this were being done on the basis of the merits, her name would not have come up at all.

Just a sidelight – Rasul was a part of the “Tipton Three” who were released from GITMO to Britain in 2004. The Tipton Three had reportedly been some of the many detainees who were crammed into shipping containers by the northern alliance, under the observation and possible direction of the US.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/goldstein

…were picked up by bounty hunters of the Afghan warlord Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.

With some 200 other suspected terrorists, the men were packed in shipping containers in the presence of US forces, according to a report issued by the Center for Constitutional Rights. They were shipped to Sherbegan prison, a former Taliban fortress, before being placed formally in US custody. Near suffocation, Iqbal passed out and awoke gasping for air at the small holes Dostum’s guards had created by firing machine guns at the containers. One of the bullets had hit Iqbal in the arm, giving him a wound that soon became infected for lack of medical care. Ahmed says that all three men suffered “cold, dehydration, hunger…uncertainty,” as well as dysentery and other injuries. During the brutal eighteen-hour transport, only twenty of the 200 captives survived.

If that reference to Dostum, shipping containers, dead detainees, etc. rings a bell, it may be bc of this very recent (12/11) McClatchy story:

As possible Afghan war-crimes evidence removed, U.S. silent

Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who’d surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime.

When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum’s headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum’s militiamen had fired into the metal containers.

Dostum’s men hauled the bodies into the nearby desert and buried them in mass graves …
Earlier this year, bulldozers returned to the scene, reportedly exhumed the bones of many of the dead men and removed evidence of the atrocity to sites unknown. In the area where the mass graves once were, there now are gaping pits in the sands of the Dasht-e-Leili desert.

I don’t think that the Tipton Three are great guys by any means, but while one or more of them may have attended training camps in Afghanistan, they don’t seem to have been any kind of big wheels in al-Qaeda or the Taliban and they don’t seem to have been involved in any planning or scheming with Bin Laden to conduct attacks on America.

Unless, that is, you believe the information solicted under torture – where all three confessed to being the three previously unidentified faces in a video that allegedly showed a meeting between Bin Laden and Mohammed Atta.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/goldstein

they were held at a US-operated detention center in Kandahar, where they were repeatedly beaten, interrogated at gunpoint and told that their families back in England had been thrown out on the street.

In Kandahar the men were subjected to cavity searches, which they say were meant to “degrade and humiliate” them. In various interviews after their release, Rasul said, “I could hear dogs barking nearby and soldiers shouting, ‘Get ‘em, boy’…. I was taken…for a so-called cavity search…told to bend over and then felt something shoved up my anus. I don’t know what it was, but it was very painful.” After being held in Kandahar for two weeks, Iqbal and Ahmed were masked, goggled and shackled, and led onto a large cargo plane with other detainees, where they were told they would be taking a short journey (Rasul would follow one month later). Twenty-two hours later they arrived in Cuba.

The kind of humiliation Rasul describes in Kandahar was only an introduction to what the men would come to experience regularly over the course of their two-and-a-half year detention at Guantánamo Bay. They lived in constant fear of being killed and said that the guards told them “nobody knows you’re here, all they know is that you’re missing, and we could kill you at any moment and no one would know.” In the report Iqbal recalls one guard screaming, “You killed my family in the towers, and now it’s time to get you back.” Almost immediately after they arrived, interrogators began hounding them to admit to being in a videotape with Osama bin Laden that was made in Afghanistan in 2000. The men describe interrogation sessions that went on for fourteen hours during which they were forced to sit in a chair with their hands and feet shackled to a bolt in the floor, while strobe lights and loud music played in a room frigid from air-conditioning. The men were routinely beaten, deprived of sleep, kept in isolation for months at a time and told that the others had confessed. After existing under such conditions for months, all three men finally admitted that they had, in fact, been in the video with bin Laden.

Hold the !!!!!!!!!!!!!! though.

As stunningly incredible as it might seem that the three of the very few who survived the Afghan shipping container transport Just So Happen To Be the 3 unidentified faces —- turns out that despite the torture confessions, umm, they weren’t.

The confessions extracted from all three detainees were false. At the time the video was made they were in Tipton–Rasul was working at an electronics store, and Ahmed and Iqbal were employed at the factory. When the men were released from Guantánamo into British custody in March 2004, the MI5 held the men, as it did not, understandably, want to release potential terrorists who had just confessed to a connection to Osama bin Laden. It was while in British custody that investigators were able to determine the impossibility of the Tipton Three’s guilt simply by examining the tape’s tracking date and matching it to police, employment and passport records. The MI5 disproved in days the false story that had taken interrogators at Guantánamo nearly three years to obtain.

I’m not sure exactly what is being referred back now, but I think the context – that these were survivors of Dostum’s container killings and it was just reported that the US (who may have been fairly active in those killings and/or who may have paid bounties for the bodies after the killings) was insuring that Dostum could destroy the evidence of those who died on the trip that these three survived.

fwiw

She and Ted helped elect Obama. Has everybody forgotten that?

We have no idea what her positions on anything else are. She chose to hide away for years and now we don’t know her. Pretty simple.

Mary,
Thanks for another one of your comments that should be a full-blown Oxdown diary, at least!

Bob in HI

If the DC Circuit is so incompetent then I have to wonder if there’s any way to move the worst of them to some other district.