Recently in Gulaggate/Torturegate Category

"You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it 'simulates' the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning -- or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure." By way of Dangerous Meta, Hitch gets waterboarded. [Video.]

"Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia...[I]f waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."

"The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of 'coercive management techniques' for possible use on prisoners, including 'sleep deprivation,' 'prolonged constraint,' and 'exposure.' What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners...The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: 'Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.'"

How low have we sunk under Dubya? Apparently, under this administration, we've actually been plagiarizing Maoist torture techniques for use in the Gitmo gulag. "'What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,' Levin said. 'People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don't need false intelligence.'"

"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for a five-member majority clearly impatient that some prisoners have been held for six years without a hearing." In a setback for the Dubya administration and a victory for the American way of life, the Supreme Court grants habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees. (The decision in Boumediene v. Bush is now the fourth time the Court has reaffirmed the rule of law over Dubya's monarchial anti-terror policies.)

In vicious dissent, the conservative bloc: Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, with Scalia in particular scowling and ranting like a Batman villain. "'America is at war with radical Islamists,' he wrote, adding that the decision 'will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.' He went on to say: 'The Nation will live to regret what the court has done today.'" To which I say, "Get over it." I highly doubt we'll regret it as much as your being put on the Court in the first place, Justice Scalia.

"Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion," said the memo written by John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel." (Nor, apparently, does the Fourth Amendment apply.) An unsettling memorandum by Dubya stooge John Yoo which advocates both dictatorial rule and the legality of torture is released to the public, five years later. "'The whole point of the memo is obviously to nullify every possible legal restraint on the president's wartime authority,' Jaffer said. 'The memo was meant to allow torture, and that's exactly what it did.'"

More than anything, I'm reminded of Lincoln's remarks to the Indiana fourteenth: "'Whenever I hear anyone arguing over slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.'"

And, just in case anyone was under the impression that this sort of thing only happened in the dark days of 2003, witness Attorney General Mukasey last week getting publicly verklempt and making up 9/11 tales as he goes along, all to help preserve the NSA's warrantless wiretaps. At this point, Chuck Schumer has a lot to answer for.

We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're waterboarded. Uh...As part of a "team-building exercise," a Provo-based motivational speaker apparently held a waterboarding "in front of his sales team to demonstrate that they should work as hard on sales as the employee had worked to breathe." We just took a big step closer to Brazil. (Via TPM.)

"The situational forces that were going on in [Abu Ghraib] -- the dehumanization, the lack of personal accountability, the lack of surveillance, the permission to get away with anti-social actions -- it was like the Stanford prison study, but in spades." New scenes of vileness and depravity emerge from Abu Ghraib. NSFW, and, in any case, no way to start your day.

The Senate bans waterboarding by a vote of 51-45 and, surprisingly enough, straight-talker John McCain votes against the bill. "McCain sided with the Bush administration yesterday on the waterboarding ban passed by the Senate, saying in a statement that the measure goes too far by applying military standards to intelligence agencies. He also said current laws already forbid waterboarding, and he urged the administration to declare it illegal." God forbid we take too strong a stance against torture, eh, Senator? For shame.

"I think what I said was that we could not investigate or prosecute somebody for acting in reliance on a Justice Department opinion." The honeymoon is way over. In congressional testimony yesterday, Attorney General and theoretical straight-shooter Michael Mukasey announces he won't look into waterboarding, won't look into the warrantless wiretaps, and won't enforce the persecuted prosecutor contempt citations. His rationale for all this? If the Justice Department says it's ok, it's not illegal. "That would mean that the same department that authorized the program would now consider prosecuting somebody who followed that advice." Sigh...it's enough to make one miss Alberto Gonzales. Ok, not really.

"Hayden said Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002 and 2003. Hayden banned the technique in 2006, but National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell told senators during the same hearing Tuesday that waterboarding remains in the CIA arsenal -- so long as it as the specific consent of the president and legal approval of the attorney general."

Not to be lost in the Super Tuesday shuffle (as intended): CIA Director Michael Hayden admits that we've waterboarded at least three high-level detainees. "Human Rights Watch, which has been calling on the government to outlaw waterboarding as a form of illegal torture, called Hayden's testimony 'an explicit admission of criminal activity.'"

"'I think he represents the kind of leader that we need for the future of the country,' Sebelius told The Associated Press. 'I think he brings the hope and optimism that we really need to restore our place in the world, as well as to bring this country together and really tackle the challenges that we have.'" Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius endorses Barack Obama for president. (Sebelius also gave the Democratic SOTU response last night, and her upcoming endorsement was one of DC's worst-kept secrets last week.)

And another intriguing endorsement via the Daily Dish: Obama gets the support of 80 volunteer lawyers of Gitmo detainees: "Some politicians are all talk and no action. But we know from first-hand experience that Senator Obama has demonstrated extraordinary leadership on this critical and controversial issue." (Their full statement is here.)

"Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly 'high crimes and misdemeanors,' to use the constitutional standard." Not to be lost in the New Hampshire shuffle: Former Senator and presidential candidate George McGovern makes the case anew for Dubya's impeachment.

"There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the C.I.A. -- or the White House -- of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot. Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations." From a few days ago, 9/11 Commission Chairs Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton angrily accuse the CIA and Dubya White House of stonewalling their investigation. "As a legal matter, it is not up to us to examine the C.I.A.’s failure to disclose the existence of these tapes. That is for others. What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction."

"Following a preliminary inquiry into the destruction by CIA personnel of videotapes of detainee interrogations, the Department's National Security Division has recommended, and I have concluded, that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter." Gee, you think? Attorney General Michael Mukasey announces a federal criminal probe into the matter of the destroyed CIA torture tapes. It will be headed by John H. Durham, currently "the second-in-command at the U.S. attorney's office in Connecticut."

"The grim truth is, not much has changed. The Bush administration continues to limit our basic freedoms, conceal its own worst behavior, and insist that it does all this in order to make us more free." As a follow-up to her 2006 list of civil liberties violations, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick surveys The Bush Administration's Top 10 Stupidest Legal Arguments of 2007.

"In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus for apprehensions made pursuant to it." Taking a page from his earlier mentor, A. Mitchell Palmer, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, recently declassified documents reveal, floated the idea of interning 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty in 1950, during the Korean War. [Hoover's letter.] "Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to 'protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.' The F.B.I would 'apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous' to national security, Hoover’s proposal said." Thank goodness our intelligence community is past such retrograde thinking and kneejerk trampling on civil liberties today...uh, right?

"'I believe we will keep the White House,' he said twice at a pre-holiday news conference in the White House briefing room. 'I believe ours is the party that understands the nature of the world in which we live and that the government's primary responsibility is to protect the American citizens from harm...I'm confident we can pick up seats in both the Senate and the Congress.'" Hey, Mr. President, how is the weather on Mars? At a news conference today, Dubya predicted a GOP presidential victory and GOP congressional gains come next November. (He also refused to comment on the CIA tapes debacle.) The good news here for the rest of us is that this man has been wrong about pretty much everything for the past seven years. Why stop now?

So much for those early, hopeful signs of independence...Attorney General Michael Mukasey tries to stonewall both a Congressional investigation and a Judicial investigation into the destroyed CIA tapes, arguing it would impede the Justice Department's own inquiry into the matter. "'We are stunned that the Justice Department would move to block our investigation,' Reps. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.) and Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) said in the [responding] statement. 'Parallel investigations occur all of the time, and there is no basis upon which the Attorney General can stand in the way of our work.'"

And, in somewhat related news, conservative judge Royce Lamberth, who earlier butted heads with the administration over FISA, rules that -- despite what Dick Cheney thinks on the matter -- White House visitor logs are public records, meaning visits from "Casino Jack" Abramoff and/or religious conservatives can no longer be kept secret on account of (dubious appeals to) "national security." Looks like it's win-some, lose-some for Dubya's imperial pretensions this week.

"[H]ere's a different thought experiment: How would the national debate over torture have changed if we'd known about the CIA tapes all along? How would our big terror trials and Supreme Court cases have played out? Yes, this is also a speculative enterprise, but it's critical to understanding the extent of the CIA's wrongdoing here." In light of the recent revelation that the CIA destroyed video evidence of their abusive interogation procedures in 2005, well after they'd become relevant both in many different legal cases and in the national discussion about torture, Slate's Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick survey the wreckage the CIA has made of our legal process. "Video of hours of repetitive torture could have had a similarly significant impact -- the truism about the power of images holds. If we are right about that -- and we think we are -- this evidence that has been destroyed would have fundamentally changed the legal and policy backdrop for the war on terror in ways we've only begun to figure out." If nothing else, an independent counsel should be named immediately. Even given the criminality and contempt for the rule of law we've come to expect from this administration, this sort of thuggish, gangland behavior is shocking news.

"'I hear you're looking for me,' he said. 'You wanna go mano a mano right here?'" In excerpts from his new book, Fall of the House of Bush, published in Salon, Craig Unger examines the ideological divide between Bush father and son and tells the true story of Dubya's coming to Jesus. "One way of examining the growing crisis could be found in the prism of the elder Bush's relationship with his son, a relationship fraught with ancient conflicts, ideological differences, and their profound failure to communicate with each other...According to the Bushes' conservative biographers, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, family members could see [Bush 41's] torment. When his sister, Nancy Ellis, asked him what he thought about his son's plan for the war, Bush 41 replied, 'But do they have an exit strategy?'" This goes a long way toward explaining the elder Bush's recent spate of (really depressing and hard to watch) public crying jags. (See also Joan Walsh.)

"Will we join that gloomy historical line leading from the Inquisition, through the prisons of tyrant regimes, through gulags and dark cells, and through Saddam Hussein's torture chambers? Will that be the path we choose?" As a result of his continued inability to define waterboarding as torture, Michael Mukasey's chances of becoming AG grow murkier. "'If we are going to restore the image of the United States of America, the highest law enforcement officer should be clear, firm, unequivocal: that waterboarding and torture are unacceptable, un-American, illegal and unconstitutional,' Durbin said." Update: But, of course, key Dems capitulate, namely Senators Schumer and Feinstein. Good God, our party is pathetic at times.

"All other considerations aside, any person who cannot say, plainly and unambiguously, that water-boarding is torture and is both immoral and illegal should not be the attorney general of the United States. Period." After the nominee's hemming and hawing about waterboarding, Slate's Frank Bowman makes the case against Michael Mukasey's confirmation as AG. "If the Senate is foolish enough to ratify the replacement of a bumbling toady with an accomplished apostle of the gospel of executive supremacy, it will deserve every snub this and future presidents inflict. But the rest of us deserve better."

"'The administration can't have it both ways,' Rockefeller said in a statement. 'I'm tired of these games. They can't say that Congress has been fully briefed while refusing to turn over key documents used to justify the legality of the program." Claiming only that the US "does not torture people," the White House refuses to turn over Justice Department documents on torture policy, "contending that their disclosure would give terrorist groups too much information about U.S. interrogation tactics." Those documents, announced by the NYT on Thursday, "provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures, and "show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics."

“'I don’t think of myself as a liberal at all,' he told me during a recent interview in his chambers, laughing and shaking his head. 'I think as part of my general politics, I’m pretty darn conservative." A holdover link from last weekend (and a follow-up of sorts to this 2006 post): Jeffrey Rosen profiles Justice John Paul Stevens in the NYT Magazine. "In criminal-law and death-penalty cases, Stevens has voted against the government and in favor of the individual more frequently than any other sitting justice. He files more dissents and separate opinions than any of his colleagues. He is the court’s most outspoken defender of the need for judicial oversight of executive power. And in recent years, he has written majority opinions in two of the most important cases ruling against the Bush administration’s treatment of suspected enemy combatants in the war on terror."

"We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop," Addington said at one point." The Terror Presidency, a new book by disgusted conservative and former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith, further details the role played by Cheney henchman David Addington in this administration's rolling back of the rule of law."'We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,' Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004."

In the big news this past week, the wheels continue to come off over at Team Dubya. First Karl Rove jumped ship. Then Tony Snow told us he'll be off soon to make some money. And now, at long last, Alberto Gonzales has announced his resignation as Attorney General. "[W]ithin the past week, Justice aides and other officials said, Gonzales concluded that his credibility with Congress, his employees and the public was so shattered that he could not promise to remain through the end of Bush's term, as the White House chief of staff had demanded of Cabinet officers." Well, that, and there's the matter of continuing investigations into Gonzales, which the Dems say will continue (and should, since there's solid evidence he's perjured himself.) At any rate, good riddance, Gonzales. Like too many Dubya appointments, you've embarrassed the nation, with your justifications for torture and illegal wiretapping as much as with your tortured evasions and denials. Frankly, this should've happened months ago.

"In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III...As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify." Former Reagan Assistant Attorney General Bruce Fein makes the conservative case for Dick Cheney's impeachment in Slate.

"'Here...comes...that famous General Taguba -- of the Taguba report!' Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice." Well, the agency and the time may have changed, but it's increasingly clear we still have a lot to answer for, thanks to the actions of those who would claim to protect our way of life. The inimitable Sy Hersh of The New Yorker (who also played a role in 1974 in getting the CIA docs released -- take that, Woodward) reports in with the tale of General Antonio Taguba, the head of the Army's original investigation into Abu Ghraib who, like so many other truth-tellers in the administration, was eventually hung out to dry for his candor. Hersh's frightening and sadly plausible piece not only makes clear that Rumsfeld, Dubya, et al had more knowledge of the nightmare of Abu Ghraib than they've publicly let on, but also suggests that those repellent images we've all seen from the prison may only be the tip of the iceberg of the horrors that occurred in our country's name. "Taguba said that he saw 'a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.' The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it."

"He's saying he's above the law...It just seems to me this is arrogant and shows bad judgment." Also in related news, historians probably shouldn't expect a similar classified document dump a quarter-century from now: Word leaks from a congressional committee that Cheney has refused to comply with the National Archives in preserving classified documents over the past four years and even tried to abolish the office responsible for enforcing the law. "Cheney's office declined to discuss what it called internal matters...The Justice Department confirmed yesterday that it is looking into the issue." Another day, another imperial prerogative attempted by these lawless yokels in the White House.

Think I'm being shrill? Ok, here's another: After listening to former Attorney General John Ashcroft discuss internal differences over Dubya's illegal surveillance program yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 13-3 to issue subpoenas for White House and Justice Department documents regarding the eavesdropping system. "The White House made no move to comply."

It's not just Karl. Newly released information finds that as many as 88 officials in the Dubya White House have been (illegally) using RNC e-mail addresses as a back-door way to discuss official business off the record. "'As a result of these policies, potentially hundreds of thousands of White House e-mails have been destroyed, many of which may be presidential records,' the report said."

"The President cannot eliminate constitutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention...To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians...would have disastrous consequences for the constitution -- and the country." In what should have been a no-brainer, a federal appeals court rules 2-1 in the case of al-Marri v. Wright that Dubya can't hold US residents indefinitely on suspicion alone. [Full opinion, and the dissent by a Bush appointee.] "The panel tailored its opinion to Marri's circumstances; it does not directly apply to the more than 300 foreign nationals held as enemy combatants in the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But lawyers for some captives noted that the same flaws the court found in the administration's classification of Marri were true for Guantanamo detainees."

"Renzi -- now, was that the guy with the skeezy land deal? Or the woman Paul Wolfowitz promoted?" To help keep track of them all, Slate offers a handy illustrated guide to GOP scandals.

"Gilliam came nearest to inventing his own country with Brazil (1985), one of the key political films of the late 20th century. Brazil is one of the great political films, an extraordinary mixture of Fellini and Kafka, with a complex force of synthesized images, which belongs to Gilliam alone." In Slate, critic Clive James assesses Brazil's take on torture, and what Michael Palin's Jack Lint does and doesn't tell us about the men usually holding the implements.

"In some sense, the president is now as much a prisoner of Guantanamo as the detainees...The endgame in the war on terror isn't holding the line against terrorists. It's holding the line on hard-fought claims to absolutely limitless presidential authority." Slate's Dahlia Lithwick discerns the method in Dubya's madness on the civil liberties front: "expanding executive power, for its own sake."

Good riddance to the do-nothing 109th Congress, which wheedled its way into the history books last weekend. (And sayonara also to Donald Rumsfeld, who closed up shop yesterday.) A word of warning to the Dubya White House: Don't expect the 110th to play as nice...

"It's something that's been bothering me for quite some time, the direction in which the party has been going more and more toward big government and disregard toward privacy and civil liberties." Staunch conservative, defender of civil liberties, and Borat cameo Bob Barr leaves the Republican Party (for the Libertarians.) Now if only Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe would follow his example...

Wasting no time after signing the godawful terrorism bill into law, Dubya tells the US District Court that it has lost jurisdiction over habeas corpus petitions filed by Gitmo detainees. "What's being blocked and what the government is opposing tooth and nail is the most simple thing of all: a hearing before a district court judge,' said Jonathan Hafetz, who handles many detainee cases for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. 'The government will do anything to prevent Guantanamo detainees from being able to present evidence in court.'"

"We don't blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they'll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won't remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration. They'll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation's version of the Alien and Sedition Acts." Abu Ghraib becomes standard operating procedure as Dubya's terror bill -- horrifying as it is -- passes the House 253-168 (roll call) and the Senate 65-34 (roll call.) Twelve Senate Dems (well, eleven Senate Dems and Lieberman) voted for the bill: Carper, Johnson, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Menendez, Nelson, Nelson, Pryor, Rockefeller, Salazar, Stabenow. Chafee was the only Republican to vote against it, Snowe abstained.

Shameful, pitiful, demoralizing, pathetic. What else is there to say? As Rebecca Blood sums it up (via Medley): "We have lost the war on torture. It's devastating."

"The Nuremberg trials presupposed something about the human conscience: that moral choice doesn't take its cues solely from narrow legalisms and technicalities. The new detainee bill takes precisely the opposite stance: Technicality now triumphs over conscience, and even over common sense. The bill introduces the possibility for a new cottage industry: the jurisprudence of pain." Also at Slate, David J. Luban argues that Dubya's recent torture bill spells the end of the Nuremberg era, a period when the US worked hard at "codifying genuinely international humanitarian law," to say nothing of the Great Writ.

"Eliminating habeas is tantamount to letting hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners rot in jail." After striking a somewhat nonsensical compromise with the McCain-Graham faction, Dubya gets most of his desired detention and torture bill, one which gives him the authority to interpret the Geneva Conventions by fiat and disallows detainees from either invoking the Conventions or challenging their treatment in any court. "'It replaces the old broken' military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court with 'a new broken commission system,' said Marine Corps Col. Dwight Sullivan, the chief defense counsel for the Defense Department's Office of Military Commissions. He said 'it methodically strips rights' guaranteed by laws and treaties and appears to be unconstitutional." Update: The House GOP get gleeful about the torture bill.

"Purely from a strategic point of view, this is another mess...Every time Republicans think they have an issue to unite them and divide the Democrats, the Republicans end up spending most of the time fighting among themselves." As fear-mongering and falling oil prices perhaps help the GOP get back in the race this November, the WP surveys the political implications of the recent stand of principle by Senators Warner, McCain, Graham, and Snowe against Dubya's grotesque tribunal plan. Politics or no, Dubya's proposed gutting of the Geneva Conventions must be stopped: "'What is being billed as "clarifying" our treaty obligations will be seen as "withdrawing" from the treaty obligations,' Graham said. 'It will set precedent which could come back to haunt us.'"

After fierce debate among the neocons, Dubya comes clean about the CIA's secret prisons (outed by the Post last November) and moves the detainees held therein to Gitmo. But don't think this moment of clarity means King George is playing it straight just yet: He's also asking Congress to sidestep recent court decisions and grant him power to continue wiretapping without warrants and to torture alleged evildoers with impunity. And even moderate Republicans and military lawyers have issues with his recent attempts to deny suspected terrorists due process.

Update: Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has more: "The speech teemed with all the rhetorical wizardry you might expect of a do-over. Bush justified torture and extraordinary rendition while denying that they exist. He stuck a fork in the eye of the Supreme Court while agreeing to be bound by the majority's decision. He conceded that Congress should play a role in creating military tribunals while demanding that it greenlight his plan."

"This report raises serious concerns crucial to the survival of our democracy...If left unchecked, the president's practice does grave harm to the separation of powers doctrine, and the system of checks and balances that have sustained our democracy for more than two centuries." Then, again, I could be sold on the merits of bar associations...if they continue to call out Dubya for trampling on our Constitution.

"If another nation's leader adopted such positions, the United States would be quick to condemn him or her for violating fundamental tenets of the rule of law, human rights, and the separation of powers. But President Bush has largely gotten away with it, at least at home, for at least three reasons. His party holds a decisive majority in Congress, making effective political checks by that branch highly unlikely. The Democratic Party has shied away from directly challenging the president for fear that it will be viewed as soft on terrorism. And the American public has for the most part offered only muted objections. These realities make the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, issued on the last day of its 2005-2006 term, in equal parts stunning and crucial." In related news, as seen at both Salon and Mother Jones (as well as the New York Review of Books), author and law professor David Cole underlines the importance of the Hamdan decision in preserving the rule of law and throttling Dubya's unchecked power grabs of late.

As the legislative and judicial branches struggle to rein in Dubya's excesses, recent Senate testimony on the treatment of Gitmo detainees reveals fissues within the administration's approach to the Hamdan ruling: "The testimony has shown that the Justice Department -- which had insisted on the legality of the existing policy -- is eager to sharply limit the impact of the Supreme Court's decision, while military lawyers and some other Pentagon officials are celebrating it as a vindication of their long-held concerns about U.S. detainee policy." Update: "The President is always right?" (Via Looka.)

In a happy day for the rule of law, and following the Supreme Court's recent decision in Hamdan, the Dubya White House and Pentagon reverse themselves and announce that the Geneva Conventions will now apply to Guantanamo detainees. Yes, good news indeed...Still, given that this administration can so rarely be taken at its word, vigilance will be required to see if the treatment of detainees actually changes at all: "Neither the White House nor the Pentagon provided any immediate details as to what would be done differently or how the decision would effect the controversial policies on interrogation, which have provoked an international outcry as well as considerable domestic controversy."

In a blow to the monarchial presidency that may also affect future rulings on warrantless wiretaps and torture policy, the Supreme Court strongly rebukes Dubya for his Gitmo tribunals, declaring they "were not authorized by any act of Congress and that their structure and procedures violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949." As Justice Stephen Breyer summed it up in a concurring opinion: "The Court's conclusion ultimately rests upon a single ground: Congress has not issued the Executive a 'blank check.'"