My op-Ee on Boumediene appears in this week’s U.S. News and World Report online . My starting point is John Ashcroft’s abortive proposal to suspend habeas corpus shortly after 9/11 . The idea was quickly scuttled by Congress, but if we connect the dots between the treatment of Yasser Hamdi, Jose Padilla, and the detainees at Guantanamo, Bagram, and the CIA black sites, we’ll see that the spirit of the proposal lived on: The Bush administration sought to get rid of habeas by other means.
