A President Rebuked

The only surviving World War II veteran on the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens, appointed three decades ago by a President as Republican as W., delivered the plain and airtight message: President Bush violated every standard of the military code, the US Constitution and international law with its order for military tribunals at Guantánamo. In its implications if not always its direct findings, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld is to Bush what the Pentagon Papers case was to Richard Nixon: a devastating rebuke to a President who thought he had a blank check; a clear reaffirmation of the rule of law even--or especially--in times of national crisis.

The Court's Hamdan ruling emphatically does not shut Guantánamo down. Indeed, the Court majority took pains to assert that the attacks of September 11 ignited the President's war powers and they do not challenge "the Government's power to detain [Salim Ahmed Hamdan] for the duration of active hostilities."

The ruling unambiguously declares that the President may not simply invent trials that conform to no known standard of law, which are not necessitated by urgent battlefield conditions, and deny defense lawyers access to evidence. It also dismantles every element of the Administration's case, from the conspiracy-to-commit-war crimes charges against the Yemeni national who was Osama bin Laden's driver in Afganistan to the necessity of an improvised process governed by no act of Congress. "Any urgent need...is utterly belied by the record," Justice Stevens writes. "Hamdan was arrested in November 2001 and he was not charged until mid-2004. These simply are not the circumstances in which, by any stretch of the historical evidence or this Court's precedents" justify a drumhead military commission.

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