Why Do the Editors of the National Review Hate America?

The editors of the National Review penned a piece of &#$%! Friday regarding Thursday’s Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. It’s not worth reading. I’ll save you the trouble: the Supreme Court Justices are lucky their not up for election because they illegally applied a mere treaty (the Geneva Convention) to the rule of law and they didn’t have jurisdiction in the case anyway because of the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) passed last December.

What the editors of the National Review fail to understand or worse deliberately mislead their readers about is that Article VI of the US Constitution makes all treaties ratified by the United States (and the Geneva Accords are treaties ratified by the US) equal in stature with the Constitution itself as the “supreme law of the land” in the words of Article VI itself.

Furthermore the War Crimes Act of 1996 passed by a Republican Congress declares violating the Geneva Conventions and in particular Common Article 3 which the Supreme Court declared the Bush policy to violate to be a war crime. “The law applies if either the victim or the perpetrator is a national of the United States or a member of the U.S. armed forces. The penalty may be life imprisonment or death. The death penalty is only invoked if the conduct resulted in the death of one or more victims.” And the general in charge of Abu Ghraib has stated that Rumsfeld and other top administration officials ordered that inhuman treatment and torture be conducted as part of a deliberate strategy. Treatment that led to the deaths of several of those detainees thus fulfilling the requirement for the death penalty for those responsible for the war crimes. So the Supreme Court was correctly ruling on existing law.

As to the claim that the Detainee Treatment Act took Hamdan out of the federal courts hands, discussions before the law was passed mentioned that that specifically, because the Hamdan case was already in the courts prior to the DTA’S passage. Those discussions stated that DTA did not take Hamdan out of the federal courts for this reason.

Senators Lindsay Graham and John Kyl inserted into the Congressional Record a phony debate after the law was voted on to make it seem as if it was Congress’ intention that Hamdan would not be in the federal courts jurisdiction. The senators submitted an amicus brief including this faux debate. The Bush Administration’s lawyers used this in their arguments before the bench. But Hamdan’s lawyers were able to prove to the Supreme Court that Graham-Kyle Colloquy was inserted after the fact by showing the video of the debate in which Graham and Kyl’s comments are missing. In the brief Graham and Kyle indicate other material that was not discussed before the vote, but do not indicate their colloquy was also inserted after the fact giving the impression that it was part of the deliberation leading up to passage of the DTA. The amicus brief was to convince the Supreme Court that Congress had intended Hamdan to be out of judicial hands in the lead up to the vote.

So Senators Graham and Kyl and the Bush Administration lawyers are a party to an attempt to sway the Supreme Court using false testimony. In a true republic this would be deemed as perjury, and one of the justices writing in the majority decision mentioned this as a warning shot across Graham and Kyle’s bows not to try anything as unconscionable as that again. I hope they and the rest of the GOP get the hint that lying to the Supreme Court in an attempt to get your way will not be tolerated.

This ruling was a victory for the Rule of Law, not for the terrorists. If we surrender our legal system the terrorists will have won. Thursday the terrorists lost and the American people won regardless of whether the National Review chooses to recognize the victory.