28 June 2004

SCOTUS ruling

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MSNBC Breaking News
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Supreme Court gives Bush partial victory on terror detainee rights -
The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a partial victory to the Bush
administration, ruling that Congress gave the president the power to hold an
American citizen without charges or trial, but that the detainee can
challenge his treatment in court.

Being that I'm no legal weenie, I've been going through the blogosphere to find someone who can 'splain this. By way of Eschaton, SCOTUSBlog does.

The plurality goes on to emphasize, however, that the detention must be "to prevent a combatant's return to the battlefield," which the plurality views as "a fundamental incident of waging war." This means that Hamdi can be held, the plurality concludes, not until the end of the "war on terror," which the plurality acknowledges may not come in Hamdi's lifetime, but only until the end of the "active combat operations in Afghanistan." And here's the key sentence: "Certainly, we agree that indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized."


I'm not even gonna try. Read the whole thing at SCOTUSBlog.

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