SCOTUS Grants Guantanamo Prisoners Habeas Corpus

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by deadbeater

I tell you this: if Britain declared the US revolutionaries in 1776 'illegal combatants', or the like, there would be no United States today.

More or less they did, and it was their downfall as they failed to recognize, initally and prior to 1776, that it was an organized event.

[flaja]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

More or less they did, and it was their downfall as they failed to recognize, initally and prior to 1776, that it was an organized event.

The combat at Lexington and Concord was pretty much not an organized event. Even if every American that was shooting at the Redcoats at Lexington and Concord were part of the Massachusetts militia, they were not under the command of the colonial governor. They did not have any legal sanction.

After the British made it back to Boston, armed men from other colonies went to Massachusetts to help with the siege. And even when these armed men were adopted as the colonial army by the Continental Congress in June of 1775 they were still illegal because the Continental Congress did not have any legal standing in the international community at that time.