From Deseret News archives:
High court says 'war on terror' is no war
During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus trashing the Bill of Rights or exercising necessary emergency executive power, depending on your point of view. But he got the whole troublesome business done by 1865 and the Supreme Court stayed away.
During World War II, FDR interned Japanese-Americans. He, too, was left unmolested by the court. But Roosevelt also got his war wrapped up by 1945. Had the current war on terror followed course and ended in 2005, the sensational just-decided Hamdan case concerning military tribunals for Guantanamo prisoners would have either been rendered moot or drawn a yawn.
But, of course, the war on terror is different. The enemy is shadowy, scattered and therefore more likely to survive and keep the war going for years. What the Supreme Court essentially did in Hamdan was to say to the president: Time's up. We gave you the customary half-decade of emergency powers, but that's as far as we go. From now on, the emergency is over, at least judicially, and you're going to have to operate by peacetime rules.
All rise: The Supreme Court has decreed a return to normality. A lovely idea, except that al-Qaida has other ideas. The war does go on. One can sympathize with the court's desire for a Harding-like restoration to normalcy. But the robed eminences are premature. And even if they weren't, they really didn't have to issue a ruling this bad.
They declared illegal Bush's military tribunals for the likes of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver and bodyguard. First, because they were not established in accordance with congressional authority. And second, because they violated the Geneva Conventions.
The first rationale is an odd but fixable misreading of congressional intent. The second is a grotesque and unfixable misreading of the Geneva Conventions.
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