The parts I especially liked:
"The final argument of the day was the rebuttal from former Solicitor General Waxman. The writ of habeas corpus, he contended, has always allowed prisoners to challenge their detention if they claim they are not warriors and are being wrongly held. The current system, he argued, does not allow for such an argument.
To illustrate his point, Waxman pointed to a case in which he said a detainee was finally released after four years in detention because the detainee, a German man, had "what other detainees have not had — a lawyer." And when the lawyer filed a habeas petition in the federal courts, and the government filed a reply with its evidence, the lawyer saw that the government claimed the detainee had associated with a named terrorist who had blown himself up.
"Within 24 hours, his counsel had affidavits not only from the German prosecuter, but from the supposedly deceased Mr. Bilgen, who is a resident of Dresden, never involved in terrorism, and fully getting on with his life," Waxman said."
FOUR YEARS we held an innocent man and he is only free because he is German...!?! Not exactly winning hearts and minds or demonstrating the US as a shining beacon of democracy, is it?
Then there is there is Scalia, proving himself ever the blowhard, pedantic douchebag:
"Do you have a single case in the 220 years of our country, or for that matter, in the five centuries of the English empire, in which habeas was granted to an alien in a territory that was not under the sovereign control of either the United States or England?" Scalia asked.
"The answer to that is a resounding yes," Waxman said."
Listen to the full exchange on C-SPAN, if fully interested, but Waxman had a hard time convincing Scalia. Waxman is obviously extremely capable, but I wish it was just a bit more of a barroom argument.
One should think that it is astonishingly palpable that the US controls the Guantanamo Bay Marine Base since we've been there for decades. If the Constitution and US law is inapplicable to detainees there in our custody because we don't include Guantanamo Bay within the borders of the United States, is it fully legal to take people out of their homes--to include US citizens--from anywhere in the world, take them out on a boat and slit their throats? Could we put them on a raft in international waters, but guarded by US military personnel, and forget about Habeus Corpus? As Waxman finally stated later, the British Parliament suspended the writ of Habeus Corpus on the High Seas for US Seamen in 1777. If it wasn't applicable, why did it have to be lifted?
Besides which, and what should seem most obvious most of all is, just how in the fuck does someone being denied the writ of Habeus Corpus, held against their will, in strict confinement, appeal to the court system?!?! Especially a seaman in shackles and the bottom of a boat. Just how in the hell is he supposed to pick up his cell phone and call his attorney? OF COURSE there aren't going to be numerous examples of Habeus extended! How are the prisoners supposed to appeal to the court system to get it extended? It's plain phuking bizarre. We're going to forgo 700 years of legal history because of a particular part of a particular war because of a, very arguably, lack of a particular precedent. I hope Kennedy does get in line and help overturn this. What a humiliation otherwise.
