Toward A 'Homeland Security Court' for Captured Terrorists

WASHINGTON, DC, JULY 16, 2007—“The government’s system for detaining terrorists without charge or trial has harmed the reputation of the United States, disrupted alliances, hurt us in the war of ideas with the Islamic world and been viewed skeptically by our own courts,” wrote Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and assistant attorney general from 2003 to 2004, and Neal Katyal, a Georgetown law professor who represented the plaintiff in the 2006 Supreme Court case that struck down the Guantánamo tribunals, in a New York Times op-ed last Wednesday.

Goldsmith and Katyal’s observations pretty much sum up the plethora of problems the Bush administration has incurred in dealing with the enemy combatants captured on the battlefields of the war on terror, which the 9/11 attack inexorably forced us into. The principal problem of this war, though, is there has been no formal declaration of war by America, never mind that Al Qaeda declared war on us.

Compounding this glaring oversight is the hastily constructed judicial process to imprison, charge and try the terrorists who are fighting this war – it’s in disarray, and, by most accounts, insufficient for adjudicating the fate of this war’s captured enemy combatants.

Consequently, a bipartisan cadre in Congress has begun to push legislation to halt funding for the Guantanamo Bay (GITMO) detention center and to grant habeas corpus rights to detainees, the latter of which are not rights afforded to prisoners of war under universally accepted conduct of war. ...