 Lawyers for a Guantanamo detainee asked the Supreme Court on Monday to consider blocking military tribunals for terror suspects, and overturn what they called an extreme ruling by high-court nominee John Roberts and two other judges on the panel. Roberts was on a three-judge federal appeals court panel that last month ruled against Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who once was al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden's driver. Hamdan's attorneys told justices that the appeals court gave the White House authority ``to circumvent the federal courts and time-tested limits on the executive.'' ``No decision, by any court, in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has gone this far,'' wrote Hamdan attorney Neal Katyal, a law professor at Georgetown University.
| Gee, the Court of Appeals didn't think so. |
The Pentagon maintains it has the authority to hold military commissions, or tribunals, for terror suspects like Hamdan who were captured overseas and are now being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A lower-court judge ruled against the government, but Roberts and two other judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit disagreed. The appeals court said last month that the 1949 Geneva Conventions governing prisoners of war does not apply to the al-Qaida network and its members. Katyal maintained that the decision ``radically extended legal precedents set during conventional wars.''
| Seeing as the Geneva Convention applied to conventional wars, it's not much of a stretch to say that it applies only to conventional wars, now does it? |
The court ``held that the president has the power to decide how a detainee is classified, ... how he is treated, what criminal process he will face, what rights he will have, who will judge him, how he will be judged, upon what crimes he will be sentenced, and how the sentence will be carried out,'' Katyal wrote. Hamdan ``asks simply for a trial that comports with this nation's traditions, Constitution, and commitment to the laws of war, such as a court-martial,'' Katyal said in the appeal.
| Not that he'd ever comply with the Geneva Conventions, even as he begs for its protection. |
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