The Supreme Court handed down its rulings on rights of detainees. You can listen to some commentary on NPR if you are streaming enabled.

The basics of the decision as I absorb them now is that the court found that Bush’s claim the he could classify people as enemy combatants and hold them indefinitely without access to lawyers or a day in court was extraordinary and in the words of Justice O’Connor would “condense power into a single branch of government” and that “war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.”

It is good that the Supreme Court saw fit to exercise their powers to protect the right of habeus corpus. I was frankly amazed at the absolutely brazen nature of the Bush administrations assertions that American citizens could be held indefinitely merely by virtue of executive privilege. Of course, the Supreme Court got it wrong before, so perhaps they thought they could set the clock back sixty years and relive the glory days when the government could deprive American citizens of their liberty without cause or appeal.

The Supreme Court also handed down rulings on the status of detainees at Guantanamo, finding that despite their detention in Guantanamo, they cannot be held without the protection of the judicial process. Again, the Bush administration brazenly held them there in their own private gulag, and argued that they need never give them any ability to argue their cases before an impartial judge.

I’ll try to provide links to the text of the actual decisions as soon as I can find them online.