John McCain, Legal Historian

Here's John McCain's initial reaction to the Supreme Court's decision in the Guantánamo detainees case, Boumediene v. Bush, on Thursday, the day of the decision:

"It obviously concerns me . . . but it is a decision the Supreme Court has made. Now we need to move forward. As you know, I always favored closing of Guantánamo Bay and I still think that we ought to do that."

Here's his reaction on Friday:

"The Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shayana-kadi...i_b_107097.html

Follow-up ...


Boumediene v. Bush
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Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. ___ (2008), was a writ of habeas corpus submission made in a civilian court of the United States on behalf of Lakhdar Boumediene, a naturalized citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina, held in military detention by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detention camps.^[1][2][3] The case was consolidated with habeas petition Al Odah v. United States. The case challenged the legality of Boumediene’s detention at the Guantanamo Bay military base as well as the constitutionality of the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006. Oral arguments on the combined case were heard by the Supreme Court on December 5, 2007. On June 12, 2008, Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion for the 5-4 majority holding that the prisoners had a right to the habeas corpus under the United States Constitution and that the MCA was an unconstitutional suspension of that right.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boumediene_v._Bush

MCA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Comm...ons_Act_of_2006


John McCain and Bush's torture powers
by Glenn Greenwald April 27, 2008

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After parading around as the righteous opponent of torture, McCain nonetheless endorsed and voted for the MCA, almost single-handedly ensuring its passage. That law pretends to compel compliance with the Conventions, while simultaneously vesting the President with the power to violate them -- precisely the power that the President is invoking here to proclaim that we have the right to use these methods.
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That's John McCain -- and his Principled Maverickism and alleged torture opposition -- in a nutshell. He continuously preens as some sort of independent moralizer only to use that status to endorse and enable that which he claims to oppose.
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Thus, once again, McCain created a self-image as a principled torture opponent with one hand, and with the other, ensured a legal framework that would not merely fail to ban, but would actively enable, the President’s ability to continue using interrogation methods widely considered to be torture. Indeed, by casting himself as the Supreme Arbiter of torture morality, McCain's support for this torture-enabling law became Bush and Cheney's most potent instrument for legalizing the very interrogation methods that McCain, for so long, flamboyantly claimed to oppose.
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... And despite his media-sustained reputation as a righteous, principled opponent of torture, much of these disgraces are the direct by-product of John McCain's work.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/27/mccain/

Still feel he was never tortured .... using it for an ego game!
Getting over on everybody !