Should certiorari be granted in al-Bahlul?

Supreme Court of the
United States, 2017

Global Military Justice Reform contributor Prof. Steve Vladeck writes in the New York Times about the reasons for granting certiorari in the District of Columbia Circuit's al-Bahlul case. Excerpt:

The principal innovation (and one of the central controversies) of the post-Sept. 11 military trials at Guantánamo has been to extend the reach of military commissions to purely domestic criminal offenses, especially conspiracy and “providing material support to terrorism.” The government has been unable to tie almost any of the Guantánamo detainees — most of whom were, at most, low-level Qaeda fighters — to specific international war crimes. But rather than simply hold the detainees in military detention or try them in civilian court, the government has used the secrecy-laden criminal proceedings at Guantánamo to push the constitutional envelope.

Each of the eight convictions obtained by the commissions to date has included at least one purely domestic criminal charge, and five turned exclusively on such offenses. And each of the three cases pending at Guantánamo, including the trial of five men accused of being the masterminds of the Sept. 11 attacks, includes charges unsupported by the Supreme Court’s pre-Sept. 11 precedents.

The entire op-ed repays reading.