I've been reading a bit about the big Supreme Court decision that was handed down yesterday. Basically it says the US cannot hold detainees indefinitely in Guantanamo without Habeaus Corpus, which is basically the right to fight your detention in court.

Now I'm totally for that for US citizens. For non-US citizens detained as enemy combatants? Different story. It's not that I think these people should have no rights, but the US legal system is set up with a different threshold. When some US soldiers capture a terrorist, they don't have time to read him his Miranda rights, and fulfill all the things that, if not fulfilled, allow criminals to get off on technicalities. Do we really want to let a known terrorist go because a lawyer forgot to reveal some evidence to another lawyer, or because it's circumstancial evidence ("well, we saw the rocket come from that window, and when we got to the building, he was the only person within 100 yards, so it was definitely him"... "Yes, well you can't prove it was him, so he goes free"). I'm not sure that's a good idea, and I think that's what Scalia was hinting at in his strongly worded dissent. That and that the case seemed to be more about who gets to be in charge of detainees, the administration, or congress. And I'm usually against the idea of giving congress more control over anything, much less stuff having to do with war.