Word: hamdan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...liberties. Often that has meant trampling on them. From John Adams' Sedition Act to Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus to Woodrow Wilson's draconian Espionage Act to F.D.R.'s internment of American citizens of Japanese descent, Presidents have constitutionally overreached. Last week's Supreme Court decision in the Hamdan case suggested that Bush had too--although his actions hardly compare with the examples above...
There is no clear evidence that Mashaal was responsible for the soldier's kidnapping. According to Palestinian sources close to Hamas' secretive inner workings, Mashaal had no motive for sabotaging any future peace talks between Prime Minister Haniya and the more moderate President Abbas. To the contrary, says Osama Hamdan, Hamas' chief representative in Lebanon, Mashaal was instrumental in persuading Haniya and other Hamas leaders to accept Abbas' peace proposal, a plan based on a document crafted by Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli jails that indirectly accepts Israel's right to exist. According to Hamdan, Mashaal "reached a kind of unity...
...Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld totals 185 pages and can be summarized in two words: Start over. If the Bush Administration wants to try terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay in special military tribunals, it can't just declare them legal--it needs to work with the other branches of government to make them so. That in itself was a rebuke to the Administration's claim that it alone can decide how to defend Americans from terrorism. What the court did not say--despite the exultation of civil libertarians and the outrage of advocates of executive power...
...Gitmo. But a Seton Hall University study culled from the government's own data found that only 8% of the camp's prisoners were actually fighters for al-Qaeda. More than half were not determined to have committed any hostile act against Americans or their allies. Even Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the detainee at the center of the Supreme Court case, was Osama bin Laden's chauffeur and bodyguard--hardly the criminal mastermind that requires a country to create a maximum security prison. To its credit, the government has been trying to repatriate the less dangerous detainees as well as those...
...covered by Geneva, which prohibits "humiliating and degrading treatment." Some techniques, like shackling prisoners for 24 hours and leaving them in their own excrement, are known to have been used at Gitmo and would certainly fall under that definition. Regardless of what the prevailing interpretations of the Hamdan decision are, the government would do well to read the tea leaves and begin envisioning a world in which officials will be forced by a future ruling similar to Hamdan to gather crucial intelligence while conforming to Geneva. Gitmo has always been a laboratory for the Bush Administration's edgiest ideas about...