We know what you’ve been thinking: Whatever does that vaunted legal scholar John Yoo make of the Supreme Court’s Boumediene ruling that granted Guantanamo detainees the right to an independent judicial review? He’s ag’in it, of course. Yoo wrote in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “The 5-4 ruling is judicial imperialism of the highest order,” adding that “until Boumediene, the Supreme Court had never allowed an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention.” Salon’s Glenn Greenwald replied that dozens of detainees had been snatched while going about the ordinary business of their lives, or had been petty criminals at best: the Al-Jazeera cameraman imprisoned for years and interrogated about the TV station’s politics; the Bradley University computer science graduate student who spent years in custody without charges; the Canadian citizens abducted at JFK airport and sent to be tortured in Syria, only to be finally released when officials realized they had the wrong guy. “The whole point of the habeas corpus right is that without a meaningful hearing, we don’t know if the individuals our Government is imprisoning are really ‘al Qaeda terrorists’ or something else,” Greenwald concludes “That ought to be too basic even to require pointing out.”
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