"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Cutting Them Loose

by West Virginia Rebel

I think we can expect more of this in the future:

For the first time, a federal judge ordered the release yesterday of detainees from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay after evaluating and rejecting government allegations that five men were dangerous enemy combatants.

The government had alleged that the men planned to travel to Afghanistan to attack U.S. forces. But U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that in a series of closed hearings in recent weeks, the Justice Department had not proved that five of the six Algerian detainees at the Cuban facility were enemy combatants under the government’s own definition.

Leon ordered them released “forthwith” and said the government should engage in diplomatic efforts to find them new homes. In an unusual moment, he also pleaded with Justice Department lawyers not to appeal his order, noting that the men have been imprisoned since shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“Seven years of waiting for a legal system to give them an answer . . . in my judgment is more than enough,” he said. He urged the government “to end this process.”

As expected, Bush’s diehard defenders are up in arms over this. So who is this guy?

Legal scholars and lawyers representing detainees said the ruling is the latest setback for the Bush administration’s legal battle over the rights of the detainees. Leon, an appointee of President Bush, had been viewed by many as sympathetic to government arguments. He ruled in 2005 that the detainees did not have grounds to contest their detentions in his court. That was the decision the Supreme Court reversed in June.

“For a judge like Leon to order their release from detention is significant because the government has long maintained the evidence it had was more than sufficient to justify the detentions,” said Scott L. Silliman, a national security law professor at Duke University. “This is a clear warning shot to the government. . . . These are probably not the last detainees to be ordered released.”

That giant sucking sound you hear is the wind being taken out of the sails of the Bush administration’s legal defense of their behavior. Little things like lack of evidence do seem to matter, after all.

Comments

Posted by Sean Galbraith on 11/21/08 at 07:11 AM from

I’ve been given permission to travel to GITMO to photograph the abandoned Camp X-Ray.. maybe if I delay it long enough, I’ll have a whole lot more abandonments to shoot.

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