Ok, so I've been lisenting to all the accounts of the two decisions yesterday on two Guantanmo prisoners. Mostly what I'm hearing is that the judges in the cases came to the same conclusion - that neither of the prisoners had been designated "Unlawful Combatants", so they couldn't be tried under current law. This is acknowledged to be a setback for the Bush Administration, but no one seems to be focusing on the real problem here. There is no definition for unlawful combatants because it is a term Geroge Bush, Karl Rove, and John Ashcroft created to remove prisoners of war from the protection of the "quaint" Geneva Conventions.
The remedy most often proposed in the reports I've been hearing is that they just have a bunch of pseudo hearings in which all Guantanomo inmates are declared "Unlawful Enemy combatants" instead of the "Enemy Combatants" they have already been determined to be. It's just a technichal problem because Congress was careless in its word choice. Many of these prisoners seem to have been captured as participants in the Afghan war. In particular, the Canadian citizen, 15 years old at the time, tossed a granade at advancing American troops and is now charged with murder. His was not a terrorist act, but an act of war. Why is he not, at most, a prisoner of war? Because if you start down that road, Guantanamo would have no reason to exist. I know there's alot going on right now. After alll, Natalie Holloways mother and JonBenet Ramsey's father are now dating, but I am dismayed that this is not getting more attention.