Posted by
Defend America on Friday, November 20, 2009 5:07:52 PM
Justice Delayed
Holder’s friends in the al-Qaeda bar caused the trial delays he now criticizes.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Of
all the infuriating aspects of the decision to transfer five 9/11 war
criminals to civilian federal court, the one that grates most is the
contention that the Obama administration is finally moving forward
after “eight years of delay” — as
Attorney General Eric Holder
put it
at his Friday press conference — during which the Bush administration
managed to complete only three military-commission trials.
This is chutzpah writ large. The principal reason there were so few
military trials is the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers
to derail military tribunals by challenging them in the courts. Many of
those lawyers are now working for the Obama Justice Department.
That includes Holder, whose firm, Covington & Burling, volunteered
its services to at least 18 of America’s enemies in lawsuits they
brought against the American people. (During 2007 alone, Covington
contributed more than 3,000 hours of free, top-flight legal assistance
to our enemy detainees.)
Almost from the
moment President Bush authorized military commissions in 2001, this
legion of litigators flooded the courts with habeas corpus petitions,
contending that military detention and trials violated the
Constitution, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the Geneva Conventions. In 2004, the al-Qaeda bar induced the Supreme Court, in Rasul v. Bush,
to grant enemies a statutory habeas corpus right to challenge their
military detention in civilian court. Congress tried to stop them by
amending the habeas statute to divest the lower federal courts of
jurisdiction in these lawsuits, but the al-Qaeda bar later persuaded
the liberal bloc on the Court to ignore that amendment.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjJjYTIxNGFlZjRiNzFmYzFiM2ZhMGI4NTRmMWNhMzg=