Once again, the U.S. Supreme Court has bitingly castigated the White House for disregarding U.S. and international law with its ill-conceived plans to put Guantánamo detainees on trial before military commissions.
In a 5-3 decision, the court ruled that military commissions President Bush created by executive order to try terror suspects captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere violate U.S. law (including the Uniform Code of Military Justice) and the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of war prisoners.
It’s not the first of Bush’s slapdash attempts to deny so-called illegal combatants fundamental legal safeguards to be overturned: In 2003, the Supreme Court rejected the contention that detainees couldn’t seek relief in federal courts.
The opinion was written by Justice John Paul Stevens in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 36-year-old Yemeni with alleged links to al-Qaeda who was to have been tried before a military commission on a charge of conspiracy to commit terrorism and war crimes.
The Supreme Court held that the military commission itself couldn’t proceed because as constituted it violated both the UCMJ and the Geneva Conventions. The court said the UCMJ’s requirement that the procedural rules for courts-martial and military commissions be as much alike as possible weren’t met. The military commissions don’t qualify as a “regularly constituted court” under the Geneva Conventions. Also, the majority held that conspiracy – the offense the one-time bodyguard and driver for al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was accused of – isn’t covered by the laws of war.
Hamdan was captured by Afghan militia in November 2001 and turned over to U.S. authorities and then taken to Guantánamo.He now must be tried either in a civilian federal court or before a conventional military court-martial, his military lawyer told The Washington Post.
The inescapable problem with the military commissions created by Executive Order No. 1 was that the blatant circumvention of traditional protections for the accused and heavy-handed claims that defendants had no recourse to the civilian judicial system reeked of kangaroo court. Said Ved Nanda, international law professor at the University of Denver, “The United States has a tradition … of providing due process, equal protection and all those wonderful concepts and principles. Guantánamo and the process there did not meet minimal international standards.”
Even murderous thugs are entitled to justice, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan’s case is a pointed reminder to the White House that the standards of civilization can’t be set aside just because the enemy acts in an uncivilized manner.
