Saturday Bolitics: For Discussion

Posted by Bossip Staff

The issue to follow is only one of the many issues the Obama administration will soon have to resolve:

The Supreme Court said yesterday it will decide whether the president may order the indefinite detention of suspects living lawfully in the United States, one of the broadest claims of executive power the Bush administration has asserted in the nation’s anti-terrorism efforts. The court said it will review the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari national studying in Illinois when he was seized in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and held in a Navy brig for more than five years without formal charges. The case will present President-elect Barack Obama with an immediate decision on whether to endorse President Bush’s aggressive use of executive power or to strike a new path in how the country confronts those suspected of planning additional al-Qaeda attacks. The Supreme Court has ruled against the Bush administration four times on cases that involve the assertion of executive power with limited judicial review. Most recently, the court ruled 5 to 4 that terrorism suspects held at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to challenge their detention in federal court.

While Marri is the only person seized on U.S. soil and currently held as an enemy combatant — the administration says he was part of a sleeper al-Qaeda cell intent on mass murder and disrupting the banking system — the larger question of the president’s powers might be the most significant the court has yet considered. “The constitutional scope of the administration’s unilateral detention powers,” said Robert Chesney, a national security expert at the Wake Forest University law school, “is the question we’ve all been waiting for an answer to.” In a splintered decision this summer, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond ruled that the president had the power to detain Marri under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force enacted by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks. But a separate majority also said Marri had the right to challenge his designation as an enemy combatant before a district court in South Carolina, where he is currently being held.

This makes for a hell of a scenario and opposing sides both have valid arguments. What do Bossipers think of this???

Discuss…

Here’s a pic of the detainee.

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