McCain Slams The Supreme Court’s Habeas Decision

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PEMBERTON, N.J.–I am still sitting in a John McCain town hall, so have not had time to transcribe the full quotes, but wanted to post this quick. After a day of consideration, the McCain Campaign has decided to come out hard against yesterday’s 5 to 4 decision to grant more rights to court review for enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country,” McCain said. He went on to quote from Justice Roberts dissent in the case, rail against “unaccountable judges,” and say that the courts are about to be clogged with cases from detainees.

Yesterday, it was not clear if McCain would make the court decision an election year issue. Today, there is no doubt it will be. Will update this later.

UPDATE: Here is the McCain statement at length:

The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country. Sen. Graham and Sen. Lieberman and I had worked very hard to make sure that we didn’t torture any prisoners, that we didn’t mistreat them, that we abided by the Geneva Conventions, which applies to all prisoners. But we also made it perfectly clear, and I won’t go through all the legislation we passed, and the prohibition against torture, but we made it very clear that these are enemy combatants, these are people who are not citizens, they do not and never have been given the rights that citizens of this country have. And my friends there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people. So now what are we going to do. We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate, because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases. By the way, 30 of the people who have already been released from Guantanamo Bay have already tried to attack America again, one of them just a couple weeks ago, a suicide bomber in Iraq. Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation, and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.

Then he went on to quote from Justice Roberts’ dissent, a passage that included the phrase “unaccountable judges.”