Do the thrown out charges at Gitmo mean the others charged can't be tried in these courts either?

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from Left Coaster: http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/010435.php

Did Bush just lose his entire detainee policy?

A military judge on Monday dismissed terrorism-related charges against a prisoner charged with killing an American soldier in Afghanistan, in a stunning reversal for the Bush administration's attempts to try Guantanamo detainees in military court.

The chief of military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay, Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, said the ruling in the case of Canadian detainee Omar Khadr could spell the end of the war-crimes trial system set up last year by Congress and President Bush after the Supreme Court threw out the previous system. The ruling immediately raised questions about whether the U.S. will have to further revise procedures for prosecuting prisoners, leading to major delays.


from WaPo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/04/AR2007060400188.html?hpid=moreheadlines


The judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, said he had no choice but to throw the Khadr case out because he had been classified as an "enemy combatant" by a military panel years earlier — and not as an "alien unlawful enemy combatant."

The Military Commissions Act, signed by Bush last year, specifies that only those classified as "unlawful" enemy combatants can face war trials here, Brownback noted during the arraignment in a hilltop courtroom on this U.S. military base.

Sullivan said the dismissal of Khadr case has "huge" impact because none of the detainees held at this isolated military base in southeast Cuba has been found to be an "unlawful" enemy combatant.

"It is not just a technicality — it's the latest demonstration that this newest system just does not work," Sullivan told journalists. "It is a system of justice that does not comport with American values."

Sullivan said that in order to reclassify Khadr — and other detainees — as "unlawful" enemy combatants, the whole Combatant Status Review Tribunal system would have to be overhauled, a time-consuming act.


more: http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/010435.php

[gratuitous]

1. Details, details

Jeez, it's like Judge Brownback never saw a kangaroo court before! Rules of procedure, evidence and law? That's just so much quaintness to be swept away under the imperial rule of George W. Bush, benevolent defender of democracy and scourge to terrorists everywhere. If you're going to insist that even the sloppy rules as now written have to be followed, what chance is there for a man to become a dictator? Get with the program, Mr. Brownback!

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2. What on god's earth is an "unlawful" enemy?

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3. No Quarter.

It means that after you surrender when we attack you we can kill you for trying to defend yourself against our attack.

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4. judgment before trial

Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the first case one cheats the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and the Evil by imposing all too unfavorable conditions of warfare on it. In the second case one cheats the Good by keeping as aloof from it as possible, and the Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost. --Kafka

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6. Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

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5. kick

:kick: