SCOTUS Smacks Down Imperial Presidency
Jun 29th, 2006 at 10:33 am by Susie
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that the Bush administration does not have the legal authority to go forward with military tribunals for detainees at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba. The case is a major test of President Bush’s authority as commander in chief during wartime. At the center of the dispute is a man accused of being a former driver for Osama bin Laden.
SCOTUS reversed a decision that the government can try Osama bin Laden’s driver via military tribunals. (Basically, the ruling says Gitmo prisoners must be tried in federal court, not miliary tribunals.) Jeff Greenfield is calling the decision “quite unusual”, that SCOTUS is challenging the notion that the president has unlimited power in wartime.
More later.
UPDATE: Lionel, one of our legal-eagle readers, says this means some administration officials are in violation of the War Crimes Act. And Glenn Greenwald parses:
Nonetheless, opponents of monarchical power should celebrate this decision. It has been some time since real limits were placed on the Bush administration in the area of national security. The rejection of the President’s claims to unlimited authority with regard to how Al Qaeda prisoners are treated is extraordinary and encouraging by any measure. The decision is an important step towards re-establishing the principle that there are three co-equal branches of government and that the threat of terrorism does not justify radical departures from the principles of government on which our country was founded.
Supreme Court Blocks Bush, Gitmo War Trials…
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military …
[...] The Supreme’s new song: Bush can’t get no satisfaction. A cynical thought: Maybe he will pull out a paper with a signing statement and say he understands fully, but won’t comply. How unusual is this? Or he will comply to the extent there is latitude: “To the extent there is latitude to work with the Congress to determine whether or not the military tribunals will be an avenue in which to give people their day in court, we will do so,” Bush said. [...]
This is a *major* decision. I haven’t made my way entirely through the opinion yet (it’s 185 pages) but the holding that Al Qaeda prisoners are subject to the Geneva Conventions means that a lot of high level administration personnel are in violation of the War Crimes Act of 1996 (18 USC 2441), which, in the case of the Al Qaedas tortured to death, is a capital crime.