SCOTUS decision applauded by Obama prompts federal judge to order release into our national capital of 17 Chinese Muslims captured in terrorist training camps in Afghanistan

We catch them in terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, where they'd gone to be taught with the cooperation and under the protection of the Taliban. Now, as laid out in my latest guest-post at HughHewitt.com, a federal court has said that because their home country, China, will imprison them if we return them there, we have to let them run loose in Washington, D.C., starting this Friday.

Barack Obama approves of the SCOTUS case which is compelling this result, Boumediene v. Bush.

This makes me heartsick. This makes me fear for America. The inexorable consequences of your vote on November 4 will either save or cost American lives, and not just of soldiers, but of innocent civilians.

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[Copied here for archival purposes on November 5, 2008, from the post linked above at HughHewitt.com.]

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

Immediately after it was released this summer, Barack Obama applauded the U.S. Supreme Court's 5/4 decision in Boumediene v. Bush, which for the first time extended rights under the U.S. Constitution to foreigners captured and held abroad based on their activities abroad. To reach that result, the Supreme Court had to declare unconstitutional a statute passed by Congress with bipartisan support and signed into law by the president which gave these individuals substantive and procedural rights comparable or superior to those we give to our own sons and daughters in uniform. It also had to ignore and/or mischaracterize decades of prior federal precedents holding that such foreigners had no right to claim the U.S. Constitution's protections through a writ of habeas corpus — essentially extending the protections of the U.S. Constitution to the entire world.

Now as the inevitable consequence of that ruling, seventeen hard-core Islamic jihadists who'd come from their homes in China to train at terrorist camps in Afghanistan — captured there by our armed forces, and held since at Guantanamo Bay — are on the brink of being released this week, not for return to China, but into the general population of our nation's capital, Washington, D.C.:

A federal judge ordered the Bush administration Tuesday to immediately free 17 Chinese Muslims from Guantanamo Bay into the United States, rebuking the government in a landmark decision that could set the stage for the release of dozens other prisoners in Cuba.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina said it would be wrong for the government to continue holding the detainees, known as Uighurs (WEE'-gurz), who have been jailed for nearly seven years, since they are no longer considered enemy combatants. Over the objections of government lawyers who called them a security risk, Urbina ordered their release in Washington D.C. by Friday.

"Because the Constitution prohibits indefinite detentions without cause, the continued detention is unlawful," Urbina said in a ruling that brought cheers and applause from a standing-room only courtroom filled with dozens of Uighurs and human rights activists.

One need not be a constitutional scholar to see the nonsensical premise to Judge Urbina's quoted sentence. He's talking about the United States Constitution. And he's extending its protections to foreigners. That is indeed the appalling logic of Boumediene, and that's why (as I've written often on my own blog) I'm convinced that decision easily ranks among the top five worst decisions in the history of the United States Supreme Court.

These are not "innocent civilians" swept up at random. Rather, they are hard men, Islamic fanatics who left China so they could train in the ways of terror under the approving eyes and example of the Taliban in training camps in Afghanistan. It may well be that these men's main intention once was to become terrorists against the Chinese government, and the Chinese government is indeed eager to "re-patriate" them, meaning to put them into Chinese prisons. But that they may be a danger to China does not mean that they're not also a danger to the United States!

Former federal anti-terrorist prosecutor Andrew McCarthy put this latest national peril into exactly the right context yesterday, apportioning blame appropriately between the courts and the lawyer-driven position of the Administration:

This is the very nightmare scenario I warned about. The courts' steps are outrageous, but predictable and inevitable. A lot of the blame here, however, goes to the administration and the military. They have long taken the position that radical Islamic ideology is not the problem, and that we need only worry about actively those taking up arms against the United States. They don't want us to talk about jihad — the better to keep us in the dark about jihadist ideology. Thus, the government rationalizes, the Uighurs are not a threat to us, only to the Chinese. That was all the daylight the judges need to say: OK, then release them in the U.S., since no other country — except China, where they'd be persecuted — will take them. The government's self-defeating argument is preposterous. Jihadists — and there is not question that the Uighurs are jihadists — do not recognize distinctions based on the Westphalia world of nation-states. In their view, it is Dar al Islam or Dar al Harb: i.e., you are either part of the realm of the Muslims or the realm of war, and the goal is to turn Dar al Harb into Dar al Islam by any means necessary. Releasing trained jihadists into the United States on the theory that their beef is with the Chinese and they have no problem with us would be a delusional act of suicide.

I agree with Mr. McCarthy that to some extent the Bush-43 Administration is to blame for caving in to the Hard Left's viewpoints. But you can guarantee that an Obama Administration will be (a) even more naive in the positions it takes in the courts and (b) absolutely certain to appoint even more expansionist judicial activists eager to extend new rights to our enemies at home and abroad.

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UPDATE (Tue Oct 7 @ 7:35 p.m. CST): The White House has issued a statement deploring the decision, announcing that it will be appealed, and advising that "[c]onsistent with the safety of our citizens and the safety of the Uighurs themselves, the United States will continue working to find a country to which these men could be transferred."

Andrew McCarthy has more about the ruling here. Among other things, he notes that John McCain should point out that he — and the judges and prosecutors he would appoint — will refuse to go along with treating the global struggle against Islamic fanaticism as a mere law enforcement matter, whereas Barack Obama would be perfectly happy to just let the federal courts handle all this and return to that Clintonista-type 9/10/01-mentality.

— Beldar