Land of the Free. Home of the Cowardly

Despite the fact that many of the 385 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay have been there for five years, only 10 have been formally charged and only one -- the aforementioned David Hicks -- has been tried.

That outrage is setting up another likely showdown between lawyers for many of these so-called enemy combatants and the Bush administration in the Supreme Court, and it is my belief that the White House is in line for a rebuke such as that it received in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case.

At issue again is the constitutionality of a new law passed as a result of the Hamdan decision that stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear challenges to the validity of the detainees’ confinement. The law is central to the Bush administration's cowardly strategy of holding prisoners captured in the wake of the 9/11 attacks outside the U.S. and the scrutiny of the federal courts -- and public that it claims it is so vigorously defending.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that the War on Terror is being fought to protect the very values that the Bush administration has sought to destroy, in this instance including bypassing the federal court system.

More here.