The Des Moines Register has this op ed piece on the Supreme Court decision on the Guantanamo detainees case. Eugene Volokh poses an interesting hypothetical - litigation as a new war tactic:



Say that we're fighting a World War II-like war, but against insurgent forces in various allied countries, and not against national governments. (You'll see in a moment why this proviso is important). We capture 50,000 alleged enemy soldiers, partly because some of the enemy forces have surrendered en masse; apparently we had captured millions that way towards the end of World War II. The allied countries don't have strong enough militaries to effectively detain these people themselves (think France in early 1945), so we detain them instead. This is actually quite normal for large-scale wars, consider again World War II, except that the war is a modern war against insurgents and not a traditional war against governments.



Now, the detainees file 50,000 petitions for habeas corpus, all claiming that they aren't actually enemy soldiers. This means civilian courts would have to process all those cases, and the military would have to respond to all the petitions, and get affidavits or even live testimony from various soldiers in the field whose testimony is relevant for this purpose. . . .



Litigation will become a tactic of warfare. As I understand it, soldiers generally think they have an obligation to continue trying to harass their captors — for instance, by trying to escape — even once they're captured. Here we'd be giving them a cheap (for them) and safe way of doing that. If I were the other side's general, I'd actually teach my soldiers how to file habeas petitions (not everyone would have to know how to do that — there'd just have to end up being some soldiers in every prison camp who can write the petition on their comrades' behalf). This would be a very substantial burden, and one that to my knowledge we've never had to labor under.



Read the whole debate here and here.