Legal Commentary

Mukasey 's Plan for Congress to Delay Gitmo Habeas Proceedings

By Jeralyn

In a speech today (text here), Attorney General Michael Mukasey called on Congress, rather than federal judges, to make the rules for detainees filing habeas challenges.

The Center for Constitutional Rights responds:

“What Mukasey is doing is a shocking attempt to drag us into years of further legal challenges and delays. The Supreme Court has definitively spoken, and there is no need for congressional intervention. The Supreme Court explicitly said in Boumediene that the two prior attempts by Congress to intervene to prevent detainees from having access to the courts were unconstitutional.

“For six and a half years, Congress and the Bush Administration have done their level best to prevent the courts from reviewing the legality of the detention of the men in Guantanamo. Congress should be a part of the solution this time by letting the courts do their job.

More...

Human Rights First takes issue with some of Mukasey's statements about classified information.

The LA Times points out Mukasey continues to carry the Bush Administration's water.

He wasn't saying the court decision should be ignored. His point was to find a way of keeping the prisoners at Guantanamo while their court cases proceed.

"Congress should make clear that a federal court may not order the government to bring enemy combatants into the United States" to attend court proceedings, he said. It is with just such issues that Mukasey's reputation as attorney general is likely to rest.

The Washington Post noted that he has "rejected requests to name a special prosecutor to examine whether Cabinet officials committed war crimes when they approved harsh interrogation tactics for terrorism suspects." And, it observed, he decided not to revisit the question of whether a public corruption case criticized by 52 bipartisan state attorneys general was a matter of "selective prosecution" -- meaning that politics played a role in the decision to prosecute.

Mukasey's speech comes in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush:

On June 12, 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in an historic decision in Boumediene v. Bush/Al Odah v. United States that the detainees at Guantánamo Bay have a constitutional right to habeas corpus, to challenge their detention before a neutral judge in a real court. The men at Guantánamo have been struggling for this basic right to be recognized since 2002, when the first prisoners were brought to Guantánamo Bay, and when the Center for Constitutional Rights’ first challenge to their detention was filed.

In 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court upheld the detainees' statutory right to habeas corpus, and in 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the high court rejected the Bush administration's framework for military commissions and upheld the rights of the detainees under the Geneva Conventions.

CCR has this factsheet on Boumediene.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 21, 2008 (boomark / email).