I believe the US traditionally sidesteps this legal thorn by detaining people without charge at gitmo for as long as they like. Non-US citizens have minimal to no rights under US law, so it's all just peachy
Some quick Googling tells me that the fifth amendment was ratified in 1791, 74 years before slavery was abolished. So apparently the US didn't really take that one seriously from the start.
More recently, I recall the case of David Hicks, an Australian citizen. He was declared an "enemy combatant", detained without charge and tortured in Guantanamo bay until he signed a confession to a law which did not exist at the time he was detained.
Regardless of the stupidity and provocativeness of Hicks' actions, he is a citizen of a nation that is supposedly a US ally, and one would think a person under the US constitution, but he received no protection. The US abused him while the AU government did nothing.
The US government ignores it's own constitution whenever it finds it inconvenient, and any objections are arm-waved away as being legal by the findings of a secret court no US citizen is allowed to know the inner workings of.
It doesn't matter what's written on some crusty paper in a museum somewhere if no one actually abides by it. The US constitution is dead, and I would certainly not trust my liberty to the tender mercies of those who have nailed it's corpse to their standard.
> Yes, but Guantanamo is outside the US and so the Constitution doesn't apply.
Nowhere in the Constitution is there any support for the idea that the Constitution only limits the actions of the US government that happen to be within the US rather than on territory leased from another country and subject to full control by the US government.
It doesn't say "any person in the USA" nor "any US citizen", when it wants to specify that then the amendment uses "the people". Would be interested in the actual caselaw for this?
such laws generally don't apply to war. they don't even apply to soldiers.
an officer can order hundreds of soldiers to charge into certain death without repercussions - as long as the military goal he's trying to achieve is justifiable.
Yes, it was; no special language is needed in a declaration of war; the "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" was plainly and unmistakeably a conditional declaration of war, the conditions for which were fulfilled.
If you declare war, you have to follow Geneva rules, so you can't do Guantanamo detentions; if you do Guantanamo detentions, you're not legally at war. Pick one.
> If you declare war, you have to follow Geneva rules,
The applicability of the Geneva Conventions is affected by the fact of war, but independent of whether there is a declaration. And even if it wasn't, violations of the Conventions would not reach back in time and change whether a declaration had occurred.
