THIS KILLS BUSH'S ENTIRE LEGAL PARADIGM
Justices, 5-3, Broadly Reject Bush Plan to Try Detainees

From the New York Times courtesy of AlterNet:

The Supreme Court on Thursday repudiated the Bush administration's plan to put Guantánamo detainees on trial before military commissions, ruling broadly that the commissions were unauthorized by federal statute and violated international law.

"The executive is bound to comply with the rule of law that prevails in this jurisdiction," Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the 5-to-3 majority, said at the end of a 73-page opinion that in sober tones shredded each of the administration's arguments, including the assertion that Congress had stripped the court of jurisdiction to decide the case.

A principal flaw the court found in the commissions was that the president had established them without Congressional authorization.

Definitely a good ruling. But that last little bit, about Congressional authorization, leads to this fascinating little tidbit:

In ruling that the Congressional "authorization for the use of military force," passed in the days immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, cannot be interpreted to legitimize the military commissions, the ruling poses a direct challenge to the administration's legal justification for its secret wiretapping program.

Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who has also introduced a bill with procedures for trying the Guantánamo detainees, said the court's refusal to give an open-ended ruling to the force resolution meant that the resolution could not be viewed as authorizing the National Security Agency's domestic wiretapping.

Click here for the rest.

Let's just accept it. The Congressional resolution regarding the use of military force, a poor substite for the Constitutionally described "declaration of war" in my humble opinion, authorized only the use of military force. That is, Congress gave the White House permission to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and any other "Axis of Evil" country that Bush manages to link to terrorism, but nothing else. It's understood that the executive branch does, indeed, get to have some expanded powers during a war, but there are, as this Supreme Court ruling shows, limits to that expansion. But then, Bush aside, the people in the White House aren't stupid: they already knew that they couldn't just do whatever they wanted. That's why they were insisting that the Congressional force resolution gave them super-extra powers, even though the actual wording said no such thing. So domestic wiretapping, "enemy combatant" status, drumhead military tribunal trials, torture, all this shit is just plain illegal. Thank god some federal officials still take their jobs seriously, even if it's only five out of nine Supreme Court Justices.

Fuck you, Bush.

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