NY Times - Detention Camp Remains, but Not Its Legal Rationale

The Guantánamo Bay detention center will not close today or any day soon.

But the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday stripped away the legal premise for the remote prison camp that officials opened six years ago in the belief that American law would not reach across the Caribbean to a United States naval station in Cuba.

“To the extent that Guantánamo exists to hold detainees beyond the reach of U.S. courts, this blows a hole in its reason for being,” said Matthew Waxman, a former detainee affairs official at the Defense Department.

And without that, much will change.

The decision granted detainees the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts, meaning that federal judges will now have the power to check the government’s claims that the 270 men still held there are dangerous terrorists. That will force officials to answer questions about evidence that they have long deflected despite international criticism and expressions of support, from President Bush on down, for closing the camp.

Free the 270! Free Mumia! Let them go back to the battlefields to pick up right where they were caught fighting. Of course, it probably won’t be Afghanistan, where the vacationers were caught fighting with no uniforms on.

For the life of me, I will never understand why the Left is so upset by Club Gitmo, other then because they Hate Bush! That is pretty much all they have. They wrap habeaus corpus and giving these people Rights up in it, but, face it: were it President Gore, they would have zero problem with Guantanamo Bay detention center. And neither would the people on the Right.

The good news, though

The military trials against U.S.-held detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba will not be affected by a Supreme Court ruling that the detainees have the right to appeal in U.S. civilian courts, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Friday.

Mukasey, speaking at a Group of Eight meeting of justice and home affairs ministers in Tokyo, said he was disappointed with the decision because it would lead to “hundreds” of detention cases being referred to federal district court.

“I think it bears emphasis that the court’s decision does not concern military commission trials, which will continue to proceed,” he said. “Instead it addresses the procedures that the Congress and the president put in place to permit enemy combatants to challenge their detention.”

Of course, all sorts of terrorist loving groups and people, such as the ACLU (who forgot the A stands for American) will start appealing the al Qaeda members detention shortly.

And yes, I am aware that Senator McCain wants to close Gitmo. What he wants to do is move them all to Leavenworth and try their azzes quickly. It’s one of the issues I do not really agree with him on. If we are going to close it, let’s move them to one of the islands off the coast of Alaska.