Category Archives: Guantanamo

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, the military lawyers representing detainees are true heroes. And it hasn’t been without personal cost — see Whiskey Bar: Men of Honor on how Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, victorious in the Hamdan case, may be forced out of the Navy.

In the extended I post the syllabus (summary) of the case, pending publication of the full text somewhere.

Three key points (I think) on a quick reading:

• 5-3 for most of it, with Kennedy writing separately from the majority, avoiding decision on some of the finer points of what the Geneva Convention requires

• Five votes for the proposition — rejected by a majority in the DC Circuit, with prescient concurrence on this point by Judge Williams — that common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention applies to the people held in Guantanamo Bay, whatever label the administration tries to stick on them (e.g. “enemy combatant”)

• The majority makes it clear that the Authorization for Use of Military Force is not a blank check for the President.

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Via Talkleft, an eyewitness report from Guantanamo.

Horrible stuff.

The Supreme Court put off deciding the jurisdictional challenge to the Hamdan case today. (This case is the challenge to Guantanamo’s so-called military tribunals, bodies that threaten to give kangaroo courts a bad name.) But rather than reject the government’s claim that Congress removed federal jurisdiction in the recent “Detainee Treatment Act” (AKA the Graham Amendment AKA a Really Bad Move), the Court punted the jurisdictional issue to the hearing on the merits.

This is cautiously good.

Opinio Juris, not a blog given to limp liberalism, finds that the Guantanamo Military Commissions are off to an inauspicious beginning for a”Full and Fair ” Process.