Supreme Court: Bush Violates U.S. Law and Geneva Conventions on Guantanamo Military Tribunals 
The Court said that the procedures adopted to try Guantanamo prisoner Hamdan violated the Geneva Conventions.
Once Again, the Bush Administration has overstepped its legal authority:
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President George W. Bush overstepped his authority in creating military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed tribunals were illegal under U.S. law and the Geneva Convention.
The case focused on Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden. Hamdan, 36, has spent four years in the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He faces a single count of conspiring against U.S. citizens from 1996 to November 2001.Two years ago, the court rejected Bush's claim to have the authority to seize and detain terrorism suspects and indefinitely deny them access to courts or lawyers.
In this followup case, the justices focused solely on the issue of trials for some of the men, among them 19-year-old Canadian Omar Khadr, captured in Afghanistan in 2002 during the U.S.-led invasion.
Khadr, then 15, allegedly killed a U.S. army medic during a firefight in which Khadr himself was wounded. He faces murder and other charges by virtue of having been declared an illegal combatant by the Americans.
He had been scheduled to appear at a military tribunal June 26 in Guantanamo Bay, but the hearing was postponed while officials awaited legal clarification from the high court. Hearings were also postponed amid an outcry over a reported triple suicide at the camp.
[...]
Thursday's vote by the court was split 5-3, with moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy joining the court's liberal members in ruling against the Bush administration. Chief Justice John Roberts, named to the lead the court last September by Bush, was sidelined in the case because as an appeals court judge he had backed the government over Hamdan.
[...]
[Today's] ruling overturned that decision.
KEYWORDS: Supreme Court, Bush Administration, Geneva Conventions, Guantanamo, Military Tribunals
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