Here's the lead of an excellent editorial over at the National Review:
Last June, five Supreme Court justices dreamed up a constitutional right for aliens held as enemy combatants to challenge their wartime detention in court. Now the bitter fruits of the Boumediene decision are plain to see: In Washington, a federal judge has ordered the release — into the United States — of 17 men captured near Tora Bora after the American invasion of Afghanistan.
The men are Uighur Muslims from China. And therein lies the key to this convoluted tale. The outpouring of media sympathy for the Uighurs suggests that they were on holiday when they were mistakenly swept up by invading Americans. In point of fact, they had trained at jihadist paramilitary camps, where they were schooled in bomb construction, close combat, assassinations, and the like. Specifically, the Uighurs are tied to an al-Qaeda affiliate, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a designated terrorist organization. As terrorism researcher Thomas Joscelyn has documented, several of them were fighting against our troops. Their capture was entirely proper. And predictably, many of them have joined forces with other jihadists held in Guantánamo Bay to riot and assault American guards.
This is a wonderfully clear example of the consequences of a court that has no problem distorting the Constitution into something it was never meant to be. It is impossible for any rational thinker even to imagine that the Founding Fathers would have agreed with this Supreme Court decision – much less the consequences of it in this case.
In recent years my view of the Supreme Court has completely flip-flopped. I used to think of them as sort of the safety net – the restraint that would keep the elected politicians from doing something really outrageous or stupid. Now I think of them as the enablers, and in some cases the leaders, of this country's stampede toward socialism. If The One is elected, and manages to pack the court with more justices of the Ruth Ginsberg ilk, this is only going to get much worse...
