Topic > President Bush Declares Terrorism and Its Effects

President Bush and his administration made use of congressional authorization granted to the president a week after the September 11, 2001 attacks to “use all necessary force and appropriate against those nations, organizations or persons who, in his opinion, have planned, authorized, committed or aided terrorist attacks…” He regarded this authorization as permission to activate his unilateral emergency and war powers in order to wage war against terrorism in Afghanistan, fighting Al Qaeda, Taliban and their allied fighters and holding thousands of people in custody for interrogation in several locations, some of which are still classified. The Bush administration has claimed that these militants are not military combatants; therefore they are not covered either by the Geneva Conventions or by criminal justice procedural protections. In other words, the administration has allowed both its intelligence and defense apparatuses to hold prisoners indefinitely in secret locations, subject them to harsh interrogations, and even try them before military commissions in the absence of adequate representation and fair. I will not discuss the constitutionality of the war in Afghanistan which was waged without congressional declaration of war for the following reasons. First, we simply view the above-mentioned Military Force Authorization as the consent of Congressional support for President Bush to activate his wartime and emergency powers as Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, as granted by Constitution. Second, the authorization literally allowed the President to use “the Armed Forces of the United States against those responsible for recent attacks launched against the United States… middle of paper……pus petition on behalf of British citizen Shafiq Rasul who was detained at Guantanamo Bay naval base, challenging the U.S. government's practice of detaining foreign citizens indefinitely. Rasul said that before he was captured and arrested during the American incursion into Afghanistan he was taken prisoner by the Taliban and detained in their camps. The District Court found that the judiciary had no jurisdiction and could not grant habeas corpus to Rasul and his fellow inmates. Rasul appealed to the Supreme Court, and the Court accepted the case in November 2003. The main distinction between Rasul's case and Hamdi's case is that Hamdi was concerned with the rights of a small group of US citizens detained by the regime, while the case of Rasul concerned the detention of foreigners, who make up the majority of people detained at Guantanamo Bay.