Supreme Tribunals

Bin Laden's former driver, Guantanamo captive Salim Ahmed Hamdan, isn't happy with his situation. He's given up lots of information, supposedly, and been granted no transparent rights for the duration of his 4 year captivity.

Hamdan is one of many captives who will be given a totally locked-down military tribunal in lieu of a trial, therefore he is a key figure in the movement to remove the secrecy of the tribunals. A legal team representing him has made a motion for the US Supreme Court to decide whether a circumvention of legal codes is indeed a violation of national and international human rights law.

The Federal Appeals court who gave the authority to the Pentagon to circumvent the US legal system? John Roberts.

Lawyers for a Guantanamo detainee asked the Supreme Court on Monday to consider blocking military tribunals for terror suspects, and overturn what they called an extreme ruling by high-court nominee John Roberts.

Roberts was on a three-judge federal appeals court panel that last month ruled against Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who once was al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden's driver.

Hamdan's attorneys told justices that the appeals court gave the White House authority "to circumvent the federal courts and time-tested limits on the executive."

"No decision, by any court, in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has gone this far," wrote Hamdan attorney Neal Katyal, a law professor at Georgetown University.

The Pentagon maintains it has the authority to hold military commissions, or tribunals, for terror suspects like Hamdan who were captured overseas and are now being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A lower-court judge ruled against the government, but Roberts and two other judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit disagreed. That opinion was written by Judge A. Raymond Randolph, who was named to the court by the first President Bush.

The ruling was handed down shortly before Roberts was named to the Supreme Court, to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

O'Connor has been skeptical of government wartime powers. In 2004, she wrote that "a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."

The appeals court said last month that the 1949 Geneva Conventions governing prisoners of war does not apply to the al-Qaida network and its members.

Katyal maintained that the decision "radically extended legal precedents set during conventional wars."

This case is a key factor in the future of America's role in the future of International Human Rights, and therefore the decisions made may have incredible implications in many spheres. I don't question the legality of the Pentagon's position: I don't know enough about international tribunal law to know whether it is a legal question or not. But I do know that international perceptions make me hesitant to accept this as a general rule. Primary cultures that use secret military tribunals tend to be the most radical, fundamental, and frightening legal systems on the globe. It's just not a good moral idea.