There's been a rash of meanness lately, inhuman decisions by our courts paralleling the inhumanity and meanness of the Bush administration.
But today a judge dismissed the charges against a Canadian, captured when he was 15, being held in Guantanamo. The decision "could spell the end of the war-crimes trial system set up last year by Congress and President Bush after the Supreme Court threw out the previous system."
A military judge on Monday dismissed terrorism-related charges against a prisoner charged with killing an American soldier in Afghanistan, in a stunning reversal for the Bush administration's attempts to try Guantanamo detainees in military court.
The chief of military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay, Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, said the ruling in the case of Canadian detainee Omar Khadr could spell the end of the war-crimes trial system set up last year by Congress and President Bush after the Supreme Court threw out the previous system.
But Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured after a deadly firefight in Afghanistan and who is now 20, will remain at the remote U.S. military base along with some 380 other men suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.
The judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, said he had no choice but to throw the Khadr case out because he had been classified as an ''enemy combatant'' by a military panel years earlier -- and not as an ''alien unlawful enemy combatant.''
The Military Commissions Act, signed by Bush last year, specifically says that only those classified as ''unlawful'' enemy combatants can face war trials here, Brownback noted during the arraignment in a hilltop courtroom on this U.S. military base.
Sullivan said the dismissal of Khadr case has ''huge'' impact because none of the detainees held at this isolated military base in southeast Cuba has been found to be an ''unlawful'' enemy combatant.
If the charges have been dismissed, what grounds do they have for holding a prisoner? I'm hoping Glenn Greenwald and Balkanization weigh in on this...
Update: Alex Koppelman writes that the outcome of this decision remains unclear but "Military prosecutors are considering an appeal -- they're hampered by the fact that there is as yet no structure set up to handle appeals from these courts -- but even if they were to lose, there are still hundreds of detainees at Guantánamo who have not been charged at all. Charges could also probably be refiled if the government chose to go that route. "
In the meantime, Koppelman reports in an earlier post that the White House is drawing up a list, but not a fresh list, of appointees to the Supreme Court. No retirements are expected, but... I hope Justice Ginsburg isn't in the habit of crossing the street on a yellow light.
