By Ben Wizner, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project
It's been a riveting month at Guantánamo. First was the sad spectacle of the "arraignment" of alleged 9/11 conspirators — in a courtroom expressly designed to suppress their statements about brutal torture in CIA custody, and in a system expressly fashioned to permit their execution on the basis of evidence extracted through that torture. The embarrassing proceedings were rushed forward in a last-ditch Bush administration effort to turn Guantánamo to its political advantage, but, as usual, it was the administration that endured ridicule for the very public collapse of its "full and fair" military commission system.
And then, on Thursday, the hammer truly fell with the Supreme Court’s final rebuke to the legal and moral disaster of the Guantánamo detention regime. We shouldn’t need a Supreme Court decision to remind us that executive detention without judicial review violates our most fundamental constitutional values — but we did, and the Court delivered, and we should be proud of the Court and of our system and of all the lawyers who worked for six years to make yesterday’s landmark decision possible.
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