Does a State of War Give Bush a Right to Commit War Crimes?
By DAVE LINDORFF Right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer has weighed in against the Supreme Court’s latest ruling in Hamdan, claiming that the Court erred in barring President Bush from denying Guantanamo detainees the protections of the Third Geneva Convention. The basis for his argument is that the U.S. is at war, and that traditionally “supreme courts have been loath to intervene against presidential war powers in the midst of conflict.” Let’s look at this assertion for a minute. First of all, the fact that in the past, presidents have grievously abused their power during wartime, and damaged the Constitution in the process, is hardly grounds for letting this president do so again. Krauthammer cites, for example, President Lincoln’s famous revocation of the age-old common law right of habeas corpus–the right to have one’s imprisonment brought before a judge–to justify Bush’s current denial of habeas corpus to captives in Guantanamo Bay. Well, what Krauthammer fails to mention is
