Legal questions about "enemy combatant"

-- Maher "Mike" Hawash, Enemy Combatant

An interesting article by Timothy Furnish about the legalities surrounding the various efforts (mostly focusing on the Bush era) of the American government to defend itself from Muslim terrorists (which is not really a "war" from our perspective by any reasonable interpretation, although it most certainly should be).

The article is titled "Supreme Ignorance: America's Highest Court Disregards the Law of Land Warfare".  One isn't entirely sure where the author is coming from, and it's likely his mind is unremarkably deformed to one degree or another by PC MC (as are the hearts and minds of most Westerners, still), notwithstanding that he adduces his web cred by noting that "while in the Army, I was trained as an Arabic interrogator" and that "then in post-enlisted military service I obtained a doctorate in Islamic history".  After all, we all know that academic doctorates in Islamic history aren't worth a hill of beans, necessarily, in terms of disabusing otherwise intelligent Westerners of mountains of nonsense about Islam.

Anywho, his article has some points of interest, especially concerning the legal status of Muslim terrorists as "enemy combatants" (why on God's green earth should enemy combatants even have a "legal status" at all...?).  Here's a brief excerpt:

On June 12, 2008, the Supreme Court decided, 5-4, in Boumediene et al. v. Bush 1  that non-citizen “enemy combatants” held at Guantanamo “have the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus.” 2  This was the latest in a triad of Court rulings expanding the rights of "enemy combatants" captured in the global war on Islamic terrorism and constitutionally whacking the Bush Administration.  In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) 3, our highest court determined that an American citizen (born in  the U.S. but moved to Saudi Arabia as a child) captured in Afghanistan and held at the naval brig in Charleston, S.C., was entitled to the privilege of habeas corpus. Two years later, in Hamdan v. Rumseld, 4 the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 (Roberts taking no part, having been on the Circuit Court involved) in a case brought by Usama Bin Ladin’s driver and accomplice, a Yemeni citizen, that “the military commission at issue lacks the power to proceed because its structure and procedures violate both the UCMJ 5 and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949.”                   

In Boumediene Justice Kennedy, writing for the others in the majority (Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer), admits that “before today the Court has never held that noncitizens detained by our government in territory over which another country maintains de jure sovereignty have any rights under our Constitution”...