Supreme Court and the Terrorists Suspected terrorists from other countries should not have the same constitutional rights as American citizens.  It is outrageous that the Supreme Court granted terrorists the very rights they seek to destroy.  That is why I have signed on as a co-sponsor to the Boumediene Jurisdiction Correction Act.  It would provide military courts with exclusive original jurisdiction to hear cases of detained foreign enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay.  Civilian judges have no business handling these cases.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia offered a chilling observation after this ruling.  Here is an excerpt from his dissenting opinion:

In the long term, then, the Court’s decision today accomplishes little, except perhaps to reduce the well-being of enemy combatants that the Court ostensibly seeks to protect. In the short term, however, the decision is devastating. At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield. Some have been captured or killed. But others have succeeded in carrying on their atrocities against innocent civilians. In one case, a detainee released from Guantanamo Bay masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese dam workers, one of whom was later shot to death when used as a human shield against Pakistani commandoes. Another former detainee promptly resumed his post as a senior Taliban commander and murdered a United Nations engineer and three Afghan soldiers. Still another murdered an Afghan judge. It was reported only last month that a released detainee carried out a suicide bombing against Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq. These, mind you, were detainees whom the military had concluded were not enemy combatants. Their return to the kill illustrates the incredible difficulty of assessing who is and who is not an enemy combatant in a foreign theater of operations where the environment does not lend itself to rigorous evidence collection. Astoundingly, the Court today raises the bar, requiring military officials to appear before civilian courts and defend their decisions under procedural and evidentiary rules that go beyond what Congress has specified.

The nature of war has shifted since September 11th. In order to keep Americans safe, we need to give the military the tools it needs to deal with enemy combatants.