Katyal on Guantanamo
There is an excellent piece in Slate today by a law professor here at Georgetown, Neal Katyal, who was the defense counsel in the landmark Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Katyal discusses the case currently being heard in the Supreme Court regarding the Constitutional rights of aliens held in Guantanamo. Here’s a taste to get your attention:
Wednesday, the Supreme Court will consider, for the third time in three years, whether the hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo have any legal rights whatsoever. In another courtroom, many hundreds of miles away and across an ocean, a criminal trial will begin against my client Salim Hamdan, who is accused of being Osama Bin Laden’s driver. It will be a makeshift, not marble, courtroom—little more than a portable tent. If the hearing in Washington represents the grand American tradition of justice, the trial at Guantanamo represents its undoing. Only the first proceeding reflects the strength necessary to win the war on terror.
The magnificent Supreme Court building, designed by Cass Gilbert, is flanked by 16 Corinthean columns. Above them lies the profound inscription, “Equal Justice Under Law.” But it is in the rickety courtroom at Guantanamo where our nation’s most important trials will eventually be held. The twin hearings this morning for Hamdan and at the Supreme Court aren’t really a coincidence, because the Pentagon seems to choose trial dates when the justices get involved. The trial in Guantanamo is explicitly proceeding based on the administration’s belief that a detainee has no constitutional rights, even though the government wants to impose its most awesome punishments.
…
Yet, since the president announced his Guantanamo trial scheme in November 2001, and even as he has spent dozens of millions of dollars on it, his plan has not produced a single conviction at trial, and the administration has managed to lose three times in three years.
Moments after the Supreme Court sided with Hamdan in that third decision, which rejected the radical claim that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the war on terror, I rejected the predictable conclusion that “Bush lost.” Instead, I stood on the steps of Gilbert’s courthouse and said America had prevailed. A fourth-grade-educated Yemeni, accused of conspiring with one of the world’s most evil men, brought his case against the world’s most powerful man. He took his claim all the way to the Supreme Court. And he won. In few other countries could such a thing even be possible.
Read the whole thing.
Comment by Hanno on 6 December 2007 at 5:41 pm:
These cases are fascinating. A number of us I’m sure have read most of the Gitmo cases and their habeus pleadings. What’s always interesting to me is that even the most conservative people I know can’t defend this stuff with a straight face or without really jumping through hoops.