Linda Greenhouse’s New York Times article on yesterday’s Boumediene ruling somehow fails to mention the fact that the Guantanamo detainees who supposedly have a constitutional right to challenge their detention are all aliens. To be sure, readers might figure that out themselves. But as that fact is critical to the division between the majority and the dissent—and to any intelligent consideration of the constitutional issue—a competent and unbiased reporter could be expected to have highlighted it. But, of course, Greenhouse, in defiantly persisting in reporting—without appropriate disclosure—on a case in which her husband and his institutional alter ego have been active participants (as I detail in point 3 here), has forfeited any claim to be regarded as unbiased.
Also, Greenhouse’s brief account of Chief Justice Roberts’s dissent—“The focus of the chief justice’s ire [ah, yes, “ire” rather than reasoned judgment] was the choice the majority made to go beyond simply ruling that the detainees were entitled to file habeas corpus petitions”—is either unintelligible or wildly inaccurate.