SCOTUS and Guantanamo Bay, Friday Noon

[This is only a tiny victory from our side, because we're on the side of truth and justice. It is a major rebuke to the administration, because they are doing a bad thing, and when when someone is in the wrong, they cannot afford even the slightest derivation from their party line. We question ourselves as a matter of steering our course. They do not dare to question themselves about anything, because once they do, their intellectual conceit crumbles like a house of cards.]

everything below copyright the AP

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In Loss for Bush, Supreme Court Blocks War-Crimes Trials at Guantanamo
The Associated Press

Thursday 29 June 2006

Washington - 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 Geneva conventions.
The case focused on Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden. 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.
Two years ago, the court rejected Bush's claim to have the authority to seize and detain terrorism suspects and indefinitely deny them access to courts or lawyers. In this followup case, the justices focused solely on the issue of trials for some of the men.
The vote was split 5-3, with moderate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joining the court's liberal members in ruling against the Bush administration. Chief Justice John Roberts, named to the lead the court last September by Bush, was sidelined in the case because as an appeals court judge he had backed the government over Hamdan.