Liberty Maven

As reported by The Future of Freedom Foundation, the SCOTUS has narrowly ruled that the Bush administration’s policy of holding detainees indefinitely without judicial review is unconstitutional:

Once in a while the fading embers of freedom flare with defiant vigor. That happened in June when the U.S. Supreme Court sternly informed the Bush administration that it may not hold people suspected of being terrorists indefinitely without charge and without judicial review at its prison at Guantanámo Bay, Cuba.

In a too-close-for-comfort 5-4 ruling, the Court reminded the American people — indeed, the world — that arbitrary power destroys individual liberty. Where government can lock people up and throw away the key — answerable to no one at all — there liberty does not dwell. That is what the Bush administration has aspired to, but in June the Court drew a line.

In invoking the cherished principle of habeas corpus, the Court was emphatic:

[Protection] for the privilege of habeas corpus was one of the few safeguards of liberty specified in a Constitution that, at the outset, had no Bill of Rights….

The Framers viewed freedom from unlawful restraint as a fundamental precept of liberty, and they understood the writ of habeas corpus as a vital instrument to secure that freedom.

The Constitution does not distinguish between citizens and noncitizens when it talks about “privileges.” To be sure, the Constitution permits Congress to suspend the writ of habeas corpus “when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” But the Court said that the Suspension Clause was not satisfied by the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), Section 7, which forbade any court from considering a petition for a writ of habeas corpus for “an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States [i.e., the Bush administration] to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.”

Continue reading the article, written by Sheldon Richman, here.