Rob Grace, writer for FPA’s Law and Security Strategy blog (one of my favorites), has covered the recent Maqaleh v. Gates ruling regarding Afghan detainee rights. Grace provides a historical angle to the ruling and tackles further questions in the comments. Here is a piece:
Last week the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Maqaleh v. Gates that detainees held by the U.S. in Afghanistan cannot challenge their detention in U.S. courts. There are many jurisdictional issues at play, some of which stem from the Supreme Court’s Eisentrager decision in 1950, in which the court ruled that German nationals held in a U.S.-administered German prison did not have habeus rights. The Eisentrager court offered an additional rationale, which the D.C. court quoted in its decision:
Such trials would hamper the war effort and bring aid and comfort to the enemy. They would diminish the prestige of our commanders, not only with enemies but with wavering neutrals. It would be difficult to devise more effective fettering of a field commander than to allow the very enemies he is ordered to reduce to submission to call him to account in his own civil courts and divert his efforts and attention from the military offensive abroad to the legal defensive at home. Nor is it unlikely that the result of such enemy litigiousness would be a conflict between judicial and military opinion highly comforting to enemies of the United States.
Tantalized? Read the whole thing here.
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