"Isn't the main issue," Justice John Paul Stevens plaintively asked, "the fact that it has taken six years" to resolve the question whether alien enemy combatants "have been unlawfully detained" at Guantánamo Bay?
For the Supreme Court hearing arguments last week in Boumediene v. Bush, that should not even be a relevant issue. (Lakmar Boumediene is an Algerian who emigrated to Bosnia in the 1990s. He was arrested for plotting to attack the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo and turned over to the U.S military.) If it is lawful to imprison captured enemy operatives without trial until the end of hostilities, as it has been for centuries under the laws of war, then it should not matter how long they've been held. Thus did Solicitor General Paul Clement gamely counter that emphasizing the six-year delay serves only to "cloud the basic constitutional question before this Court."
I don't get it. Why on Earth should the length of the war have any bearing on our ability to hold enemies while the war is going on? The assumption behind this suit is absurd. And in practice, we are constantly reviewing the detainees and releasing them. Sometimes to our regret as the released gentlemen resume their jihad.
Aren't we rewarding unreasonable enemies who continue to try and kill us more than six years after 9/11? I mean, as long as the enemy agrees a war is on, shouldn't we be free to hold these bloody thugs as long as their friends on the loose continue to kill? Just by fighting as long as they have, they have won a victory by convincing many Americans that it is unreasonable to hold enemies this long.
Amazingly enough, this idiocy has led our Supreme Court to take up the question! Whether or not the government wins this case, once again our enemies have won a victory just by fighting in the Supreme Court.
How is it possible for so many people to fail to recognize that jihadi scum are waging war against us?
