James Taranto delineates the significance of the 5-3 Supreme Court ruling regarding the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay (Hamden v. Rumself). Not surprisingly, it is not as “significant a blow to the President” as the media has purported.
Media coverage:
* “The Supreme Court on Thursday repudiated the Bush administration’s plan to put Guantanamo detainees on trial before military commissions, ruling broadly that the commissions were unauthorized by federal statute and violated international law. . . . The decision was . . . a sweeping and categorical defeat for the administration.”–New York Times
* “The Supreme Court yesterday struck down the military commissions President Bush established to try suspected members of al-Qaeda, emphatically rejecting a signature Bush anti-terrorism measure and the broad assertion of executive power upon which the president had based it.”–Washington Post
* “In a sharp rebuke of President George W. Bush’s tactics in the war on terrorism, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down as unlawful the military tribunal system set up to try Guantanamo prisoners.”–Reuters
* “The Supreme Court rebuked President Bush and his anti-terror policies Thursday, ruling that his plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violates U.S. and international law.”–Associated Press
* “The Supreme Court on Thursday sharply rejected the Bush administration’s use of military commissions to try suspected terrorists, eliminating a central pillar of the president’s anti-terrorism strategy. In a blunt dismissal of President Bush’s claim that he had unfettered authority to try enemy combatants captured in the war on terror, the court ruled 5-3 that military trials of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba violated domestic and international laws.”–Chicago Tribune
See Taranto’s piece for more details, but here is the bottom line:
“The court did not decide that unlawful combatants at Guantanamo are entitled to Geneva Convention protections as either civilians or prisoners of war, only that Common Article 3, which governs “conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the [signatories],” applies–though because of Kennedy’s demurral, precisely how it applies is an open question.”
“For now at least, the court has not mandated that terrorist detainees be granted the rights of either ordinary criminal defendants (who cannot be held indefinitely unless charged and convicted) or prisoners of war (who, among other things, cannot be interrogated)……The chief result of this ruling will be to delay the trials of Guantanamo detainees until Congress or the Pentagon establishes a regime of military commissions that meets the court’s approval. For those concerned with the duration of terrorists’ captivity–a perverse thing to worry about anyway–there’s little to cheer here.”
From: http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/ (James Taranto, July 3, 2006)
Also see Charles Krauthammer’s rebuttal to the Supreme Court’s ruling.