100% WRONG

NO ONE HAS EVER BEEN one hundred percent right in this world, but in the case of fighting the war on terror the Bush administration takes the exceptional view that it cannot make mistakes. If it does, so what?  There is a war on.  Separation of powers?  Forget it. Not enough time. [NY Times]

"The position of the executive branch," said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University who has consulted with lawyers for several detainees, "is that it can be judge, jury and executioner."
The government says a secret and unilateral decision-making process is necessary because of the nature of the evidence it deals with. Officials described the approach as a practical one that weighs a mix of often-sensitive factors.
"Much thought goes into how and why various tools are used in these often complicated cases," Tasia Scolinos, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said on Friday. "The important thing is for someone not to come away thinking this whole process is arbitrary, which it is not."

MUCH THOUGHT goes into what the Bush Administration seeks to do.  Too much thought and not enough reading.  Did all the lawyers in this administration flunk constitutional law?  Or do they think they can make up law as they go?

IT IS ODD that an administration that says it looks for judges who will faithfully interpret the Constitution has such a hard time reading it for what it says.We have laws for a reason. No one is above them.  If any people in government think they are above the law of the land and the United States Constitution because of some new “theory,” they are wrong. One hundred percent wrong.

SOME BACKGROUND
EVEN AS THE GOVERNMENT asserts its unlimited power, it has back down, most recently in the case of alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla.  The casual, arbitrary quality of justice in the new age of terror reveals itself further in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi.  United States citizen Hamdi was held incommunicado without access to a lawyer for two years on the what the government said was an uncontestable declaration by a Defense Department official.

ONE BUREAUCRAT with an overactive pen and some imagination could put a citizen away without review.  So the government said.  The Supreme Court thought otherwise.  [WaPo]

What remains objectionable -- what looms as more objectionable than ever, now that the government has acknowledged Mr. Hamdi's unimportance -- is the unnecessary assault on civil liberties that the administration led in his case. For three years the administration insisted that Mr. Hamdi be held incommunicado and without any semblance of normal legal process or rights despite his citizenship. . . .
The government insisted that the courts authorize Mr. Hamdi's detention purely on the basis of a two-page affidavit from a mid-level Defense Department bureaucrat who claimed no personal knowledge of the case. An American citizen could be plucked out of all of the protections of the civilian justice system with no significant judicial review and no opportunity to rebut the facts behind the decision, the administration argued -- and it pushed this view all the way to the Supreme Court, where it received the rebuke it deserved.

THE GREAT THREAT HAMDI was released.  As Dahlia Lithwick says, Never mind.  Hamdi wasn’t so bad after all.

RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL READING
[Liberty Street] [T Chris/Talk Left] [Hamdi v Rumsfeld pdf] [Unlawful Combatants Executive Order]

Comments

[Neil Shakespeare]

Gosh, you know, I just get itchy all over whenever someone says, 'Trust me!' Almost as bad as when somebody prefaces a statement with, "I'll be honest with you here..." Ain't no honest fellow needs to say that.

[Fred]

"See here world, this how due process works. It works for me, not for you. That's how things run around here. In the do as I say--not as I do--Republic things run real smooth, see."- Dumb Dumb