Fox News Takes Sotomayor’s Remarks on Enemy Combatants Out of Context

As reporters scoured the latest batch of documents dumped on the Senate Judiciary Committee Monday night for clues to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s views on any matter that may potentially come before the Supreme Court, Fox News report on Tuesday that Sotomayor “appeared to justify the treatment of two men, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, who were held as ‘enemy combatants’ in connection with the 9/11 investigation.”

Fox’s Lee Ross reached that conclusion by apparently skimming her March 2003 lecture to a class at Indiana University Law School, where she said: “we have suspected enemy combatants detained in secret and given different process than criminals. One can certainly justify that type of detention under precedents and current law.”

But read in the context of the entire lecture — which Sotomayor provided to the committee, along with a mass of other materials — the statement appears to be simply an explanation to law students of where the courts had come down on the issue so far. The issues would eventually reach the Supreme Court, but at that time only the U.S. District Court in New York and the  Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals  had addressed the questions.

To Ross, though, “[h]er comments about the legal lessons from Sept. 11 could draw criticism from liberal groups.”

They could, but that would reading her comments completely out of context. Expect more such misleading statements and conclusions in the coming days.

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