Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Monday, September 25, 2006 11:25:32 PM
In
Hamdan and the Sunset of Sovereignty, Andrew C. McCarthy produces a heavy article on the impact not of Hamdan itself, but of the discussion in legal circles it is generating. It is pretty scary stuff:
"The cacophony over wartime interrogation tactics and military-commission trials obscures a more profound issue: the sunset of national sovereignty itself.
The cause of the ruckus, the Supreme Court’s decision in
Hamdan v.
Rumsfeld, is a cataclysm. Increasingly, the ruling is championed as holding that treaties like the 1949 Geneva Conventions are not really compacts between nation states; violations of them are not, as they have been understood from time immemorial, merely grist for diplomatic protest. Instead,
Hamdan is being taken to mean that treaties inure to the benefit of
individual persons — even if they are jihadists pledged to the annihilation of the West and its human-rights values.
. . . But if treaties were now to be understood as creating universal individual rights, the sovereign nation state, the foundation of the security on which our liberty depends, will be gravely imperiled.
The first grievous casualty is
our own judiciary. The Framers conceived American courts as a core component of our system, the bulwark ensuring that Americans were protected from oppressive action by their own government.
Yet, now they are morphing before our eyes into a supra-tribunal: a forum standing above our system, enabling all the world — including those energetically seeking to kill Americans — to press its case against the United States. It’s a suicidal trend, and the
Hamdan debate has pushed us further down its path than
Hamdan itself did."
------
This is the mischief that a lawless decision by a lawless court generates. And still the Republican Party is silent.