Guantanamo Bay

1) "A federal judge yesterday ruled that Guantanamo Bay detainees must be allowed to challenge their imprisonment in court with a defense lawyer, delivering a major blow to the Bush administration's bid to hold suspected fighters in the war on terrorism without judicial oversight."

I've written about this subject before, and that I thought that there was never an excuse for imprisoning someone without due process of law, and how this showed that Bush had no respect for human rights. However, I want to soften that somewhat. In this article, the Bush Administration is claiming that:

"The petitioners are asking this court to do something no federal court has done before: evaluate the legality of the commander in chief's capture and detention of nonresident aliens, outside the United States, during a time of armed conflict," Leon wrote.

First of all, it shouldn't matter whether the prisoners are held inside or outside of the U.S., except that in some cases, prisoners held outside the U.S. might also be subject to the laws of the country in which they are imprisoned. It also shouldn't matter if the prisoners are U.S. citizens or not. They're still people and still deserving of human rights.

However, the part about during a time of armed conflict is valid. The problem is that there are different degrees of armed conflict. On one extreme is the case where we are being attacked by another country and are in grave danger of losing and being overrun by the enemy, in which case extreme measures are more justified. On the other extreme is the case where we've invaded another country that poses little or no threat to us, and we've already won.

In the present case we were attacked, but there is hardly a danger, at this point, of us being conquered. The group that attacked us, Al Qaeda, is still out there, but is greatly weakened. They would probably be a lot weaker if we hadn't diverted our attention from the war on terrorism to attack Iraq, but that's another issue.

The point is that allowing a president to imprison people with minimal process of law during wartime is an expedient measure to allow the nation to focus on defending itself. At this point, we have plenty of time and resources to spend on insuring that we're not imprisoning innocent people, and that those we do imprison are treated fairly.