PUBLIC REJECTS ADMINISTRATION'S POSITION ON DETAINEES

American Samizdat points to this article outlining recent evidence of the unpopularity of the Bush administration's approach to detainees.

The Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland recently conducted a detailed poll on the Bush administration, detainees, and the war on terrorism. The poll findings themselves are here (PDF file). The PIPA website reports:

Eighty-eight percent favored having international laws governing detention. Large majorities endorsed requiring registration of all detainees (92%), providing access by the Red Cross (93%), allowing communication with family members (77%) and the right to a hearing (81%).

Told that recently there has been a debate about whether the international treaties governing detainee treatment should apply to combatants who are not conventional soldiers, “such as members of the al Qaeda terrorist group,” 60% took the position that the US should still give them the rights provided by the treaties.

Respondents were also told that the Bush administration has taken the position that if the President determines it is necessary for the war on terrorism, the US has the right to refuse to give a detainee a hearing in front of a neutral judge, but that the Supreme Court had ruled otherwise. Asked for their position, 68% said the President should not have the authority to deny a detainee the right to a hearing.

PIPA notes that the Bush administration has suffered only modest political damage from the public's apparent disagreement with its view on how to fight the war on terrorism. According to the report, two public misperceptions contribute to the public's apparent unwillingness to punish the administration for this disagreement: 1) the public mistakenly thinks that Secretary Rumsfeld did not authorize specific kinds of disfavored treatment of detainees ("going naked" and using dogs to intimidate detainees), and 2) the public overestimates the proportion of "terrorists or insurgents" at Abu Ghraib.

PIPA's findings may help explain why the administration hasn't spent a lot of time criticizing the Supreme Court's rulings in Hamdi, Padilla, and Rasul. To be sure, the administration's response has been muted partly because the Court didn't require very much from the administration. According to O'Connor's majority opinion in Hamdi, the process afforded to detainees (at least to citizens) must be "meaningful," and for more on what this fuzzy term may mean in practice, see Michael Froomkin here. (Froomkin is more optimistic, but also more knowledgeable, than I am.) It may be that the administration will get most of what it wants out of the Supreme Court decision, as Scott McClellan seemed to indicate here:

But we want to make sure that we put a process in place that respects the concerns that the Supreme Court raised and does so in a way that is consistent with the authority of the President to exercise his constitutional responsibility during at time of war. And the court recognized that authority, as well.

So the administration -- not loath to criticize the Court on abortion, child pornography, or sodomy laws -- has less of a reason to criticize the Court in the context of the detention decisions. And if public opinion isn't on the administration's side, why press the point?

It's also interesting to note that PIPA's data highlights the congruence between the Supreme Court's detainees decisions and public opinion. Coincidence?