TheAgitator.com
Bush Administration Loses Guantanamo Claim
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008A panel from the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit looks at the evidence from the first "secret" case out of Guantánamo, and finds it lacking.
In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.
With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.
The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem "The Hunting of the Snark": "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
"This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true," said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.
The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.
More "judicial activism" like this would be welcome. Only about eight percent of the prisoners in Gitmo are suspected to be actual al-Qaeda fighters. Thus far, just one of the 680 held at the facility at the height of its capacity in May 2003 has been convicted. The Bush administration’s approach to actual evidence against the people it has been detaning has thus far amounted to little more than "just trust us." It’s a good thing the courts are asking for a bit more than that.
Ever notice how “judicial activism” is only claimed by the party that doesn’t support a judge’s opinion? The same people that claim “judicial activism” when allowing gay marriage will not make the same call about the Supreme Court striking the DC gun ban.
Anywho, I’m glad this decision was unanimous.
Well, finally getting around to it…
Ever notice how “judicial activism” is only claimed by the party that doesn’t support a judge’s opinion?
My definition of “judicial activism” has always been whenever the court made a decision based on its desired outcome rather than the actual law and/or its previous rulings. This is pretty much consistent with the definition in Black’s Law Dictionary (”a philosophy of judicial decision-making whereby judges allow their personal views about public policy, among other factors, to guide their decisions, usu. with the suggestion that adherents of this philosophy tend to find constitutional violations and are willing to ignore precedent”). I’m very much against this.
That being said, David Strauss at the U of Chicago defines judicial activism as overturning laws as unconstitutional, overturning judicial precedent or ruling against a preferred interpretation of the constitution. That’s a completely different definition, and one that I don’t find objectionable. I suspect that part of the reason that the term “judicial activist” is thrown around so loosely is precisely because people have different ideas of what it means.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but in Black’s def.:
“with the suggestion that the adherents of this philosophy tend to find constitutional violations and are willing to ignore precedent”
I’m reading this as Judges, having found grounds for a thing to be unconstitutional, ignore the incorrect precedent. If a law is unconstitutional, the precedent that bolsters said law is irrelevant. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land even if lawmakers don’t think so. In that light, the “Activism” is merely a correction.
I’m open to other interpretations.
[...] acceptable. We now know that a huge percentage of Guantanamo detainees were innocent. And in the first case in which a detainee did manage to get a federal court to weigh the government’s evidence [...]