Supreme Court Hears Arguments RE: Legitimacy Of Military Tribunals

Court Case Challenges Power of President: Military Tribunals' Legitimacy at Issue

The real question in this case will be whether or not SCOTUS will recognize that there are principles that are inherent, inviolate and inalienable that are, according to our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, above the whims of men. While we may all feel that putting anyone who raises force against the US government is inherently wrong, we must remember that this same argument was raised by King George III, the British Parliament and the Tory supporters of the British during the Revolutionary War. Our forefathers--the very patriots we all hold in the highest regard for fighting and working so hard to establish our nation--recognized that any government that denied due process, fair treatment, and hid behind tyrannical use of power as a sovereign right was inherently evil, guilty of crimes against humanity and should be overthrown. It says so in our Declaration of Independence.

Have we forgotten the very reason for the birth of our nation? That is the question that the nine justices of SCOTUS will be deciding in this case. Does a person have a right to bear arms against a nation that is exercising tyrannical use of force against a people... any people? Do citizens have the right to oppose their own government in cases where the principles of law--natural, civil and criminal law--are being violated. Do citizens of a nation have the right to raise arms against a
foreign force invading their nation? This is what is at stake in this case.

So I ask you to conisder the following scenario:

Just as you go to bed tonight, a foreign nation (let's call it Utopia) invades our shores. Some of our people are happy to see the invaders and embrace their presence on our shores as "heroes of a revolution" but most of us feel our sovereignty is being undermined and dissolved. We see this country as usurpers of our basic rights and beliefs. Would we surrender peacefully? Or would we form our own militias, geurilla forces and underground cells to fight, undermine and oust the invading forces?

As for me, I would find a weapon and get involved. But wouldn't that invading force call me an enemy combatant? Wouldn't they want to hold me without due process, access to legal representation and proceed with my sentencing without appearance before a judge? And wouldn't any citizen of that foreign nation that aided the resistance--even out of conscience and principle of law--be seen as an enemy combatant as well? We must really ask ourselves what we would do if the shoe was on our foot.

As for those folks being held at Gitmo, suffering rendition elsewhere, or being held in Iraq or Afghanistan, we have already seen how they have been mistreated and denied basic rights. We have offered more humanity to animals placed in our animal shleters than we have to some of these folks... not to mention that most of these detainees have been proven to be held without just cause or reasonable association with the charges against them (aka probable cause). In most of the cases, the US government cannot prove its case that these folks are enemy combatants... which is why the Bush administration does not want these cases to go to a legitimate court.

Seized by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Osama bin Laden's former chauffeur is now seeking victory over President Bush in a new arena: the Supreme Court.

In oral arguments Tuesday, an attorney for Salim Ahmed Hamdan will ask the justices to declare unconstitutional the U.S. military commission that plans to try him for conspiring with his former boss to carry out terrorist attacks.

Significant as that demand is, its potential impact is much wider, making Hamdan's case one of the most important of Bush's presidency. It is a challenge to the broad vision of presidential power that Bush has asserted since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In blunt terms, Hamdan's brief calls on the court to stop "this unprecedented arrogation of power." Just as urgently, the administration's brief urges the court not to second-guess the decisions of the commander in chief while "the armed conflict against al Qaeda remains ongoing."

The case may not produce a frontal clash between the judiciary and the executive -- if the court decides that a recently enacted federal law on military commissions deprives it of jurisdiction to rule on Hamdan's case. Yet another possibility is that the court could reach an inconclusive 4 to 4 tie because Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had ruled on the case while he was on a federal appeals court and must sit out now.

But if the court fears to tread on such difficult ground, it has given no sign of that. It has refused the administration's invitation to dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction before hearing arguments, and, perhaps more important, it has already refused to defer completely to the president in two previous terrorism-related cases.

"There are so many issues in the case -- whether the president was authorized by the Constitution, or a statute, to set up the commissions -- right down to exactly how to fit this kind of a war into the existing laws of war," said Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Georgetown University who specializes in Supreme Court litigation. "Most cases have two or three or four issues. This one has 10 or 12, which makes it very hard to handicap."

Whether designating an American citizen as an "enemy combatant" subject to military confinement, denying coverage under the Geneva Conventions to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, or using the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on domestic communications, Bush has said that the Constitution and a broadly worded congressional resolution passed three days after Sept. 11, 2001, empower him to wage war against terrorists all but unencumbered by judicial review, congressional oversight or international law.