perfidy

The Supremes, fresh off a tour of Japan, are going back in the recording studio, this time to hear an appeal on behalf of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.

The issue at stake is whether US law extends to that foreign soil. The Military and Executive claim that Gitmo is and always has been under Cuban sovereignty. The appellates argue that they are being held in violation of international laws that the US is bound to uphold under treaty.

Here's what I think. The whole Gitmo/military tribunal thing is a cheap dodge of our judicial system, and one that the Administration ought to be ashamed of. So far there have been exactly Zero military tribunals, and very little other movement towards processing, prosecuting, and/or releasing any person held there. In a time when the US is attempting to assert the primacy of democracy in the world, it's both dangerous and two-faced to circumvent those very laws at home.

I'm not going to argue that the people being held at Guantanamo Bay are heroes, much less all good folks. That's vanishingly unlikely. But indefinite detentions coupled with no examination of whether these are the guys to detain is a scary precedent, as is the doublethink that allows the government to assert US domain over Guantanamo Bay when necessary, and deny the same when convenient. As the Washington Post puts it, "The administration effectively asks Americans to tolerate the indefinite detention of large numbers of people with no charge, no accountability and no seeming urgency about making the rule of law into a reality."

The Post article linked above does a good job of articulating the issues at hand. Go read!