The big news at Guantanamo Bay is that a federal judge in Washington shut down the “military commissions,” otherwise known as tribunals, being held on the U.S. base in Cuba. Proceedings were halted against a former driver for Osama Bin Laden, who denies he was a terrorist and disputes his prisoner status as an “enemy combatant.”
Reporters dispatched to cover the tribunals had been entertaining the local wildlife. One of the reporters, seen in the photo, is feeding a Gitmo lizard. The lizards, I’m told, are as animated as puppies and just as friendly. “They will eat out of your hand, but never bite.”
That’s more than you can say for the U.S. Justice Department, which is appealing the judge’s ruling.
Postscript: “The order stunned military officials here” The Wall Street Journal reported from Guantanamo on Tuesday. The judge “rejected the government’s position that the president, as commander in chief, inherently holds ‘untrammeled power to establish military tribunals’ without specific authorization from Congress.”
According to the report, “the judge also dismissed the administration’s claim that the Geneva Conventions had no force in the Afghan conflict because it was conducted against a terrorist organization and its allied militia, rather than a conventional army.” He ruled, too, that “the Bush administration’s military commission violated the convention, since it offers a lesser degree of rights to enemy prisoners than those that would be afforded to U.S. soldiers facing trial.”
