Just a few hours ago, the Supreme Court made a very important ruling that the U.S. Constitution applies to Guantánamo Bay, and thus that detainees held at Guantánamo have a right to challenge their detention in federal court,through habeas corpus.
As the ACLU email release notes, this is a long-awaited assertion, as Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in today’s decision, that “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”
As opposed to powerful people using times of crises to grab power and abuse it, thank you very much.
The AP timeline shows quite clearly the extraordinary lengths to which the Bush administration has gone to try to find ways to abuse the presidential powers by keeping detainees, trials and of course, its dirty little secrets of all kinds, secret. Hopefully, this will be the final blow (although I daren’t hope) to Bush’s nasty little secret power grab. Not only should times of crisis not upend our safeguards, but someone should teach our current administration that it is indeed precisely for those times that the safeguards were written.
AP notes that, this decision also, “resurrected nearly 200 detainee cases that had been on hold in the Washington federal courthouse.”
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