05-17-2009, 08:52 PM
Quote:The Bill of Rights does apply to everyone on US soil, but I would argue that some constitutional rights only apply to citizens of the US, or those in the process of becoming citizens. Since immigration is an administrative action, the Supreme Court has ruled in the past that Congress has nearly full authority to regulate immigration without interference from the courts. So, indefinite incarceration, or deportation to the nation/prison of US choice is also an option for illegal aliens on US soil.The supreme court has explicitly rejected the argument that the US does not have to grant Habeas Corpus rights to detainees. If they're being held, they get their day in court, at least to the extent guaranteed by the third Geneva convention. If they are US citizens, which some are, then they are entitled to their full constitutional rights, regardless of whether they're in Guantanamo or not. Indefinite incarceration is *not* legal.
Extraordinary rendition, on the other hand, appears to just be common practice. (Thanks, Bill Clinton! Thanks a million.) Whether it is moral or legal does not seem to have been a very important question for the CIA. So, maybe you can ship people off to wherever you like, where they will have no rights, so long as you're sure they won't be tortured there, which would violate the Geneva Conventions. I'm sure a wink and a nod is more than enough, I mean, who ever heard of someone being tortured in a human rights paradise like Uzbekistan?
Obama has made some moves to correct this, but not enough. Panetta has been fairly strong in claiming that the CIA no longer runs secret prisons at black sites in dubious locations, and hopefully, that means a broad rejection of torture-by-rendition. We'll see, these things have a way of continuing.
Quote:The Justice Department memo I referred to was a discussion between them and the DOD on the limits of presidential power in the event of a National Security threat. By precedence, the president has in the past suspended individuals constitutional rights, and has set aside sections of USC in the interests of national security. In fact, I believe one intention of the memo was to warn the DOD on the exact boundaries of the law to prevent them from straying over the line.That seems a rather naive interpretation. If they were so concerned about where the line might actually be, why'd they bother to seek out a sycophant like John Yoo? The memo has been widely trashed from all sides as an almost comical stretch of the president's authority. It didn't even mention the relevant precedent, Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, which just happens to restrain presidential authority. Funny how he just plum forgot about that one. A more realistic conclusion would be that the memo was to give ground cover for methods that the administration wanted to use, but which would very likely be seen as "over the line": waterboarding, walling, sleep deprivation, and so on. They knew perfectly well where the line used to be, and knew they wanted to cross it. So they blurred it with a dubious legal opinion, and knew that by the day of reckoning, they'd have already done what they wanted to do. Iraq needed invading, and that meant stepping up the interrogations.
-Jester