Supreme Court Gives Al Qaeda Geneva Convention Protections

I have to come out of my blogging hiatus specifically for today's Supreme Court Hamdan decision. In essence, the Court said that U.S. military tribunals are unlawful, unconstitutional and un-Geneva Convention. Basically, Al Qaeda members are now free to dismember, decapitate and disembowel American soldiers, civilians or even Supreme Court justices - and we are forced to grant them every Geneva Convention protection. Heck, we taxpayers will even pick up the tab for a high-priced lawyer to defend them.

The outcome, 5-3, is ridiculous. (John Roberts recused himself because he agreed with Bush in the decision while serving on the Appeals Court.) Andrew McCarthy says the following:

Make no mistake: if this happens, the Supreme Court will have dictated that we now have a treaty with al Qaeda — which no President, no Senate, and no vote of the American people would ever countenance. The Constitution consigns treaty-making to the political branches, not the courts, but a conclusion that Geneva protects Hamdan (and, by extension, his fellow savages) would ominously mean that the courts, under the conveniently malleable guise of "customary international law" can rewrite treaties to mean whatever they like them to mean.

Meanwhile, it's helpful to review Mark Levin's column from 2004, where he questions why the Court should be given war-making powers, which Constitutionally, are assigned to the President. He also wonders why, after so many disastrous Court decisions, people view the Supreme Court as the final moral authority on all matters.

The Court does not deserve this kind of deference, certainly not from originalists. From Dred Scott (upholding slavery) and Plessy (upholding segregation) to Korematsu (upholding the imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese Americans and Americans of Japanese ancestry), the judiciary has a record of hostility to individual liberty and the rule of law that does not justify, as a policy or political matter, the kind of reputation for moral superiority over the other branches some confer on it. Judicial review is a separation-of-powers issue, and here the power to manage a war rests with the president.

The sad thing is that all the Court really had to do to justify its ruling is to say that based on foreign attitudes (which the liberal Justices seem to think is as important as the Constitution in interpreting cases), Gitmo prisoners should get civilian trials in the U.S.

*Update*
The full opinions can be found here. In it, Scalia, Thomas and Alito blast the majority's opinion, with Thomas stating:

Those Justices who todaydisregard the commander-in-chief’s wartime decisions, only 10 days ago deferred to the judgment of the Corps ofEngineers with regard to a matter much more within the competence of lawyers, upholding that agency’s wildlyimplausible conclusion that a storm drain is a tributary of the waters of the United States. See Rapanos v. United States, 547 U. S. ___(2006). It goes without saying thatthere is much more at stake here than storm drains. The plurality’s willingness to second-guess the determinationof the political branches that these conspirators must bebrought to justice is both unprecedented and dangerous.

Finally, some moonbats claim that this proves that the U.S. is the one that really has committed "war crimes." Alternet says,

This almost certainly means that the CIA's interrogation regime is unlawful, and indeed, that many techniques the Administation has been using, such as waterboarding and hypothermia (and others) violate the War Crimes Act (because violations of Common Article 3 are deemed war crimes).

Thank you Anthony Kennedy - for validating the liberal viewpoint that the U.S is the evil force in the world and these innocent Al Qaeda members are merely victims.