Maybe they just didn’t have the stomach to explain why Kennedy spent the fist half of the opinion lecturing the executive on the limitations of his power.

What reason could there be? Why get a message out if it can’t be gotten out after it’s said? Why even bother?

Terse statement makes it clear the fallback position is the already underway trials.
KSM is toast.

“While we disagree with the ruling, it is important to note that the Boumediene case did not concern military commission trials. Boumediene involved a challenge to the procedures that Congress and the Executive have established to permit enemy combatants at Guantanamo to challenge their detention during ongoing hostilities. Those enemy combatants who have been charged by a military commission with war crimes are afforded numerous additional protections in connection with those trials. Military commission trials will therefore continue to go forward”

as if they’d developed convoluted rationales to support their desired results

That’s just how Thomas would do it. Whatever decision Scalia wants him to reach, he’ll do his best to come up with a rationale for it.

The only real victory from Thursday was the Celtics coming back from 24 points down to kick the Lakers’ ass. While they deserve tremendous praise for tireless high quality work CCR attorney Gitanjali Gutierrez and her gang didn’t win a huge victory today. They won, but the components in the equation at the Court carefully avoided killing these fucking crazy Millitary commissions and refuting their mockery of trials and evidence. What still stands like granit is the ability to torture and gain evidence via torture, to use heresay evidence, to hold these insipid “trials,” to arms lengthlawyers like Gitanjali fromaccesing their clients, and to record every communication with the client, after medicating the clientheavily with neurileptic (antipsychotic meds) even rapid tranquing them say withhaldol 1-2 mg. IM every few minutes so they are zombatized when they meet their lawyers.

These are all tactics that are up and running that the pricks and prickesses from DOJ are fond of using and unless you’re brain dead and comatose, this isn’t just at Gitmo, it’s in the BOP facilities throughout the bannana republic USA.

What needs to happen in a just world is that someone bundles up that arrogant little aristocratic prick Mukasey and renders him to a prison out of the country, where he can experience the quality of life of incarceration that happens to thousands of DOJ prisoners every day in American prisons routinely let alone at Gitmo, on boats or in renditioned environments.

I know we have spin here from the media. I know that even Eric Lichtblau has been lately cowed and compromised like the judiciary he sometimes covers and is now Judy Millering his articles in the NYT. One more reporter trying to hawk a book that has sold out, and one less book I have to pay to read.

We are supposed to have a free press. If the press can’t make the attempt to cover events, then we continue to morph into the Bannana Republic that we have become during this 8 years.

DOJ can simply revert to having their conference calls and lying to the members of the press or pushing their deceptive spin as is SOP for them.

They want to go off the record because they’re flustered. It’s early on and the millions of dollars in salary you pay for in units at Main Justice that most people have never heard of including attorneys hasn’t had the chance to gather with their homies on the hill like Chambliss, Corynyn, Graham, and Sessions to figure out the next bill to leapfrog or neutralize Boumediene. It should be clear so I’ll say it again. Bomediene did not solve a host of problems. It’s not a yipee yippee decision for liberal blogs, for ACLU, for CCR attorney Gitanjali Gutierrez, who represents numerous Guantánamo prisoners, including former U.S. resident Majid Khan. Granted we all love these people. They are superlative lawyers and they do fantastic work along with EFF, Melanie Sloan, ACLU and a number of other organizations.

But behind the scenes at the Court you have Kennedy trying to throw boquets to that arrogant prick Scalia who wouldn’t know the Constitution if it bit him in his cavernous fat ass–so you have concessions.

Here is a long list of commentary on Boumediene.

There were actually two habeas opinions out of the S. Ct. yesterday morning, and some of the best analysis of them is by the three analysts at The Volokh Conspiracy.

From Jonathan Adler:

The Suspension Clause provides that “[t]he Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” This language seems to impose two separate conditions on the use of the clause: 1) “Rebellion or Invasion” and 2) “public Safety.” Assuming, for the sake of argument, that these requirements are justiciable (an assumption I don’t necessarily accept) what showing would the government have to make?

Munaf v. Geren was the other habeas decsion yesterday.

Overshadowed by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Boumediene was the Court’s unanimous opinion in Munaf v. Geren, another habeas case arising out of the war on terror. In Munaf, the Court considered whether U.S. courts have jurisdiction over habeas corpus petitions filed on behalf of U.S. citizens challenging their detention in Iraq by the U.S. military and, if so, whether a U.S. district court may issue an injunction prohibiting the military from transferring such individuals to Iraqi authorities.

In an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court first concluded that U.S. courts may entertain habeas petitions brought by U.S. citizens in military custody overseas. The Court rested its decision on 28 U.S.C. 2241(c), which explicitly extends such jurisdiction to habeas petitions brought by individuals held “in custody under or by color of the authority of the United States,” or “in custody in violation of the Constitution or laws or treaties of the United States.” The government had sought to argue that this provision does not apply here because U.S. forces in Iraq are participating in a multi-national force, but the Court readily dispatched this argument noting that the petitioners “are American citizens held overseas in the immediate ‘physical custody’ of American soldiers who answer only to an American chain of command.”

While the Court upheld federal jurisdiction, it nonetheless rejected the petitioners’ ultimate claims, concluding that district courts could not issue the injunctions sought. The traditional remedy for a habeas violation is release. Yet that would not do the petitioners much good here, as to be released by U.S. troops would place the petitioners in danger of being apprehended by Iraqi authorities, producing the precise result they sought to avoid — potential detention and trial by the Iraqi government. As Roberts concluded, “Habeas corpus does not require the United States to shelter such fugitives from the criminal justice of the sovereign with authority to prosecute them.” That the petitioners alleged they could be subject to torture or other inhumane treatment may make them more sympathetic, but the Court rejected any suggestion such fears strengthened their legal claim. Thus, in the end, the Court concluded that the petitioners “state no claim in their habeas petitions for which relief can be granted,” and ordered their petitions dismissed.

Inductive and deductive logic easily hide bias.

We would be better served in this nation if we stopped being so damn arrogant about thinking. There are other forms of “logic” or “rational” thought. Thinking Korzybski here. Every now and then, when my eyes seek the horizon I wonder if the human species is just too flawed for mother earth to allow our survival.

I have lost visual contact with the solution to our “problems in thinking”. This administration has brought many of these cognitive distortions front and center and there seems to be no effective way to confront the lack of validity in these legal arguments.

Dahlia Lithwick’s take on it is up: http://www.slate.com/id/2193468/

I think it’s worth re-iterating that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have now won not one, not two, but THREE Supreme Court cases, and they STILL have nothing to show for it.

I really don’t understand this. I get that we have a long-standing legal tradition in this country of the courts only dealing with actual cases, as opposed to hypothetical scenarios. But there’s nothing hypothetical about the fact that there are prisoners who have been trapped at Guantanamo for years and have no way out.

And I don’t want to hear any crap about how there are some really bad people in there. I get that. I just don’t understand why we can try them. Fly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to Manhattan and put him on trial. Put the whole thing on television, warts and all. If he’s convicted, he can rot in jail for the rest of his life. If he’s acquitted, the judge can just say, “Congratulations, Mr Mohammed! You’re free to leave through the front door! Welcome to New York!”

“Shouldn’t somebody have already thought out what would happen if they lost?”

Allow false flag attack on US homeland before November, steal elections, seat McCain, appoint a new Justice, live free on bail awaiting appeal for rest of life??

Thank you Matt!

Does the expression “perfectly ambiguous” have a meaning in law? (Excuse me, but I’m reading Scalia, who is a hoot in many ways, but it occurred to me that that might be some law-talkin’ mystery.)