Common Sense

The president may have done something unconstitutional!

The US Supreme Court dealt a serious blow to the Bush administration on Thursday by ruling that military commissions created to try prisoners at Guantanamo Bay violate both US law and the Geneva conventions on the treatment of prisoners.

In a far-reaching decision that has implications for all 450 prisoners at the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the court ruled 5-3 that the military trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, was illegal because he was not given basic legal rights such as hearing all the evidence.

I’m not sure, but haven’t we been saying that none of what he was doing complied with Geneva or the basics of the Constitution. Oh wait, yes we did.

The thing that still bowls me over is that most of the guys we have locked up in Gitmo have spent years there, but, they are innocent and the Pentagon knows it. Still, they aren’t released, they aren’t even charged under this unconstitutional tribunal system. They just sit there in Cuba. If the allegations of torture are true (and almos no one disputes that anymore) then we are literally torturing people we know to be innocent.

That’s not what American is supposed to be about.

But John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, managed to write a limited opinion that had broad implications. Most of the arguments made by the White House in their conduct on the war on terror have been that the Executive has all the powers when there is a war. In no uncertain terms today, he was told if he wants power, Congress has to give it to him. In the NSA spying issue, he made the same sort of argument which I think requires the same opinion. If he wants to tap people’s phone or track calls, he has to obey the current law and he has to get warrants. If he doesn’t like that, he must ask Congress to change the law. He doesn’t have the inherant authority to change the law because of some abstract war.