Ruling in favor of the enemy
NRO has posted Andrew McCarthy's excellent column on the Insane Clown Posse's three detention decisions: "A mixed bag." Here's McCarthy on Rasul:
On September 11, 2001, the most atrocious foreign invasion in our history took place, killing 3000 of us. Far from the first attack, it was the copestone of eight years marked, roughly annually, by attempted or successful terrorist operations. Even after 9/11, the enemy has continued demonstrate stealth and prowess — although it has not succeeded in hitting the homeland, it has been responsible for spates of civilian slaughter throughout the world and killed a sizable number of our troops on the battlefield.McCarthy's column is a useful guide to the decisions in each of the three cases.That describes the mortal peril United States was up against when the United States courts were presented with an extraordinary claim: viz., that when our military fighting overseas, at the height of active hostilities, grants quarter by apprehending rather than destroying the forces arrayed against it, those forces, those alien enemies trying to kill Americans — alien enemies who secrete themselves among civilians; who use humanitarian infrastructure like ambulances, hospitals and schools to carry out their grisly business; who make a mockery of the laws and conventions of civilized warfare; who torture and kill their captives with a bestiality that defies description; whose only contact with America is to regard her with this savagery — have resort to the courts of the United States to protest their detention and to compel the executive branch, while it is conducting battle, to explain itself. Just to describe this breathtaking claim of entitlement should be to refute it. Yet, the United States Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the enemy...
