The Boumediene Decision

The Boumediene Decision
I haven't read the decision yet. Orin Kerr over at Volokh Conspiracy has excerpts of the important points. I won't claim to any great expertise on this subject, but I am horrified by the results, which are yet another reminder that the Bush Administration, in trying to make liberals happy, just opened up the door to more problems.

Unlawful enemy combatants, which is what the Bush Administration deemed those held at Gitmo, are those who took the field of battle without uniforms or other identifying marks, or who engaged in unlawful warfare (attacks intended primarily to kill non-combatants). In previous wars, such unlawful enemy combatants caught on the battlefield were subject to summary execution. There was no trial. There was no military commission. They were simply shot.

Many of those held at Gitmo were taken prisoner by allied forces in Afghanistan, and there has been some serious question as to whether our willingness to pay rewards for them may have encouraged some of these irregular forces to stretch the truth about who these people were. Many probably were Taliban forces; some almost certainly were not.

The net effect of the Bush Administration's creeping liberalism is now that the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, is likely to go free. The only alternative will be a trial in civilian courts, where the ACLU will doubtless work as hard as it can to get him off, and while attempting to expose the intelligence methods that were used to catch him.

The Court has sent a clear message to the Bush Administration and its successor: take no prisoners. That won't mean taking away their weapons and releasing them.

I expect that a few months into President Obama's administration, there will be another attack, and probably worse than 9/11. Our enemies see softness as weakness, and respond accordingly. That's how Osama bin Laden saw Clinton's withdrawal of forces from Somalia after the Blackhawk down disaster--a sign that America was too wimpy to defend itself. President Obama will make it very clear that the U.S. isn't going to let the almost thirty years of proxy war by Iran stand in the way of friendly relations with them. And we will pay a much higher price next time than we did on 9/11.