5-3 against Bush. A surprising ruling from a Bush-leaning court, but one that might finally help put an end to the shame of Gitmo. That "shame" being the fact that the US long ago lost its moral high ground in the fight against terrorism. If these prisoners are POWs then let's treat them as such. If they aren't, what are they? Because if we don't answer that question, some other nation is going to do so with American prisoners, and we'll have not a leg to stand on to demand their release.
America is better than this. And that is not a bleeding heart liberal point of view. It's an American point of view. We're the good guys, so why are we running a camp like Gitmo? Like Iraq, how do we honorably extricate ourselves from this mess that we have created?
From the AP - The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees. The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and international Geneva conventions.
...The case focused on Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Hamdan, 36, has spent four years in the U.S. prison in Cuba. He faces a single count of conspiring against U.S. citizens from 1996 to November 2001. The ruling raises major questions about the legal status of about 450 men still being held at Guantanamo and exactly how, when and where the administration might pursue the charges against them.
It also seems likely to further fuel international criticism of the administration, including by many U.S. allies, for its handling of the terror war detainees at Guantanamo in Cuba, Abu Ghraib in Iraq and elsewhere.
Handled more humorously than I could muster this evening:
BobHarris
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