The amount of name-calling that goes on around here runs completely counter to reasonable discussion. I appreciate your willingness to examine an alternative point of view.

Now, as to your points, my original posting on this topic was to state as Supreme Court decisions go I can think of at least three that were worse than this. The sky is not falling. I'm not even convinced this was a bad decision, but time will tell.

Let's go back five or six years and ask why we even started sending people to Guantanamo. The Bush administration made a conscious decision to put them there because there more than anywhere else where Old Glory flies they could be completely under executive control. Gitmo is technically Cuba. We're long-term renters there (although the current regime in Cuba has never accepted the terms of our lease). As such, what law really applies was an open question. We are now closing that question according to the Constitutional workings of our government.

I see little wrong and a lot right with demanding the government produce valid evidence that justifies holding these enemy combatants. As the military commissions were set up to run, all evidence produced by the government was to be presumed valid.

The lawyers cited commission rules that permit hearsay and evidence derived by coercion as examples of commission procedures that they argued would not be permitted by the Constitution.

Link

Try to bring hearsay or evidence obtained through torture into an American court, and they'll laugh you out of the building. How many standards of justice are there? I would argue there is one. The military commissions process would not have been justice except by accident.

Does this make everyone in Gitmo a US citizen? Nope. It just gives them access to our courts. Foreigners have had access to our courts for a long time.

The concern here, and I recognize it, is that some truly evil people at Gitmo will be set free on some miscarriage of justice in the notoriously fickle US court system. OJ did it, right? That is a risk. Thing is, sometimes our justice system works. What happend to Richard Reid? He's not a US citizen. He's not in Guantanamo. He's in jail. So is Zacarias Moussaoui. The American justice system is not useless in times of trial. I would argue instead that it shines most brightly then.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of the innocent bystander who has been in Gitmo for years undergoing "enhanced interrogation," being denied access to lawyers, unsure why he's there. There aren't any people like that, some of the hardliners scream. They're all guilty. Well, if the evidence is so compelling, so air tight, then they should have nothing to fear from this ruling.

The issue of Jose Padilla is somewhat unrelated, except it too points to the lengths the administration will go to subvert the Constitution in this war on terror. I do not accept the argument that we must sacrifice liberty for security. I wonder about those that do. Feel it or not, we are under surveillance, far more than in the past. I wonder how warantless spying is so acceptable to some people, the same people who are rightfully agitated when someone on the left proposes a federal gun registry or some such thing. When you give the government too much power, you invite tyranny. I do not trust the government to read my mail, track my reading habits, or listen to my phone calls without probable cause.

My final point is this, and as yet unaddressed by the posters here. What happens when the next president comes into office? Will you be happy with President Obama wielding the same power. I will not.