Saturday - July 01, 2006

Orgasmic Delight

Yesterday I quoted an article from The Register, a British newspaper that is extremely Liberal, as they examined the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld. In the introduction to the piece I described The Register thusly: “The Record makes the NY Times sound like Rush Limbaugh.”

I was wrong and I wish to offer a retraction and my apology for the description (and to Mr. Limbaugh). The following excerpt from an editorial yesterday in the New York Times is offered as evidence of my wrongful assumption.

As you can plainly see in this report entitled ”Justices, 5-3, Broadly Reject Bush Plan to Try Detainees”, the NY Times is literally ecstatic with almost orgasmic delight over the ruling. In fact, I bet there wasn’t a single piece of dry underwear in the entire Times editorial offices yesterday.

The Supreme Court on Thursday repudiated the Bush administration’s plan to put Guantánamo detainees on trial before military commissions, ruling broadly that the commissions were unauthorized by federal statute and violated international law.

The decision was such a sweeping and categorical defeat for the administration that it left human rights lawyers who have pressed this and other cases on behalf of Guantánamo detainees almost speechless with surprise and delight, using words like “fantastic,” “amazing” and “remarkable.” Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a public interest law firm in New York that represents hundreds of detainees, said, ”It doesn’t get any better.”

The courtroom was, surprisingly, not full, but among those in attendance there was no doubt they were witnessing a historic event, a defining moment in the ever-shifting balance of power among branches of government that ranked with the court’s order to President Richard M. Nixon in 1974 to turn over the Watergate tapes, or with the court’s rejection of President Harry S. Truman’s seizing of the nation’s steel mills, a 1952 landmark decision from which Justice Anthony M. Kennedy quoted at length.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. did not take part in the case. Last July, four days before Mr. Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court, he was one of the members of a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court here that ruled for the administration in the case.

In the courtroom on Thursday, the chief justice sat silently in his center chair as Justice Stevens, sitting to his immediate right as the senior associate justice, read from the majority opinion. It made for a striking tableau on the final day of the first term of the Roberts court: the young chief justice, observing his work of just a year earlier taken apart point by point by the tenacious 86-year-old Justice Stevens, winner of a Bronze Star for his service as a Navy officer in World War II.

Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, Mr. Hamdan’s Navy lawyer, told The Associated Press that he had informed his client about the ruling by telephone. ”I think he was awe-struck that the court would rule for him, and give a little man like him an equal chance,” Commander Swift said. “Where he’s from, that is not true.”

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/01/2006 at 10:06 AM   
Filed Under: • Media-Bias •  
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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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