Kangaroos Defeated

One of the more misunderstood human rights issues is Obama’s apparent failure to close Guantanamo Bay (aka the GOP Gulag) and try terror suspects there in US courts.  Obama tried in good faith to keep that promise, but Republicans in Congress proposed a law to make it illegal to bring a so-called detainee into the US.  Democrats were also complicit, because they left their balls in their other pants that day.  In the face of Republican accusations that they were weak on terrorism as an election approached, most went along.  With bringing them here illegal, Obama could not try them here.  No US court has jurisdiction there, so Obama was forced to either let them all go or try them using the military commissions established by GW ChickenHawk.  The DC Court of Appeals just threw a huge monkey wrench into that system.

A federal appeals court’s decision to toss the conviction of Osama bin Laden’s former driver could have implications for future prosecutions of terrorism suspects.

The driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, was detained by U.S. troops in Afghanistan in November 2001 and sent to Guantánamo. In the first U.S. military war crimes trial since World War II, a jury of six military officers found Hamdan guilty in 2008 of providing material support to terrorism and sentenced him to 5 1/2 years in prison.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Tuesday threw out that conviction, stating in a 3-0 decision that material support for terrorism was not proscribed as an international war crime until Congress passed the Military Commissions Act in 2006. Since Hamdan worked for bin Laden from 1996 to 2001, he cannot be punished retroactively, the court concluded.

“Indeed the Executive Branch acknowledges that the international law of war did not — and still does not — identify material support for terrorism as a war crime,” wrote Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

“If the government wanted to charge Hamdan with aiding and abetting terrorism or some other war crime that was sufficiently rooted in the international law of war at the time of Hamdan’s conduct, it should have done so,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Hamdan’s legal vindication is the latest challenge to the controversial war courts set up by President George W. Bush’s administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The Yemeni driver also was at the center of a landmark 2006 Supreme Court case that struck down the war courts as unconstitutional, forcing the Bush administration to revise the system and try again.

Tuesday’s decision dealt another blow to the war courts by upending material support for terrorism as an offense triable by military commission… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Miami Herald>

Photo credit: Human Rights Watch

The Court is right.  It’s a clear violation of ex post facto.  I am certainly not siding with terrorists or suggesting that they should be released.  I am suggesting that, by stripping them of their rights, under the US Constitution, Republicans have made it almost impossible to try them.  We would not be facing this problem now, had Obama not been blocked, when he was fulfilling his promise.