Bushite Barbarism Held Back--Maybe

Update: Here are a bunch more links to delve deeper into the legal aspects courtesy Firedoglake.

Though Bushites try to minimize it, the Supreme Court decision on Guantanamo is widely seen as significant far beyond the case at issue. It may be the first roadblock to the Bushite attempt to steamroller the Constitution, as well as the long sought return to sanity from the barbarism that has become Republican policy.

Both proponents and opponents of Bushite policy yesterday, and the Shields and Brooks point/counterpoint team today, admitted on the PBS News Hour that the Supreme Court decision on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld issued a sweeping renunciation of Bush's rationale and practice in violating the rights of accused prisoners in his so-called war on terrorists.


Yesterday's New York Times added :It was also the most significant rebuff to date to President Bush's effort to expand presidential power in the course of waging that struggle. And the reasoning adopted by the majority called into question the justification Mr. Bush has used for other programs that have come under Congressional scrutiny, like the warrantless wiretapping conducted by the National Security Agency.

Today's Washington Post analysis : Now the Supreme Court has struck at the core of his presidency and dismissed the notion that the president alone can determine how to defend the country. In rejecting Bush's military tribunals for terrorism suspects, the high court ruled that even a wartime commander in chief must govern within constitutional confines significantly tighter than this president has believed appropriate.

Bruce Shapiro in the Nation concludes The only surviving World War II veteran on the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens, appointed three decades ago by a President as Republican as W., delivered the plain and airtight message: President Bush violated every standard of the military code, the US Constitution and international law with its order for military tribunals at Guantánamo. In its implications if not always its direct findings, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld is to Bush what the Pentagon Papers case was to Richard Nixon: a devastating rebuke to a President who thought he had a blank check; a clear reaffirmation of the rule of law even-or especially-in times of national crisis.

On Guantanamo itself, the Washington Post quotes novelist Dan Fesperman, former Baltimore Sun reporter and author of the new novel, "Prisoner of Guantanamo:

:"For the military, the idea is that this is the necessary dumping station for the worst of the worst terrorists, which not even all of them believe anymore. The idea in the larger world is that this is one of the greatest marks of shame in American history. . . . It's going to be spoken of in the same way that Devil's Island is in France."

The Post also quotes Michael Winterbottom, director of "The Road to Guantanamo": "The Bush administration created the entire myth of Guantanamo by saying these [inmates] were almost super-human, or sub-human, in their ability to destroy the world," Winterbottom said over a beer last week. "It justified things for them. It was useful to say. . . . But the fact has turned out to be that these are simply not the worst people in the world. Most of them should have never been there at all."

According to Reuters reporter Patricia Wilson, the Rovians are spinning the Court decision to their favor in the upcoming campaign, claiming that it translates into Bush is tough on terrorists. Playing the fear and terrorism card has worked for the Bushites before. Whether it works for them again is an important test of the ability of American voters to avoid having their buttons pushed falsely and cynically once again, which may turn out to be a test of our Constitutional democracy as well as the ability of the electorate to get beyond simplistic response. Nothing hinges on that but the future.