U.S. Supreme Court gets it right for the third time and George W. Bush continues to get it wrong about Guantanamo
June 15, 2008
Eugene Robinson's column in the Washinton Post on June 13, 2008 describes the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the Bush Administration's policy re: Guantanamo and depriving defendents of their civil and human rights. The really alarming thing is that McCain defends there illegal policies and wants to continue them.
It shouldn't be necessary for the Supreme Court to tell the president that he can't have people taken into custody, spirited to a remote prison camp and held indefinitely, with no legal right to argue that they've been unjustly imprisoned -- not even on grounds of mistaken identity. But the president in question is, sigh, George W. Bush, who has taken a chainsaw to the rule of law with the same manic gusto he displays while clearing brush at his Texas ranch. So yesterday, for the third time, the high court made clear that the Decider has no authority to trash the fundamental principles of American jurisprudence. In ruling 5 to 4 that foreigners held at Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their detentions in federal court, the court cited the Constitution and the centuries-old concept of habeas corpus. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's majority opinion seems broad and definitive enough to end the Kafkaesque farce at Guantanamo once and for all.
Eugene Robinson - A Victory for the Rule of the Law - washingtonpost.com.
Video lasts 2:25
McCain on Guantanamo and U.S.Supreme Court decision. Video lasts 3:48
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