I heard this story on the way home this morning and the first thought I had was, "This is the fault of Congress." The Bush Administration invented a term - "illegal enemy combatants" - and, without any clear definition of what, exactly, that means, the courts have been at sea as to how to proceed.
A year and a half ago, the Supreme Court opened federal courts to habeas corpus hearings for those held at Guantanamo Bay prison. Among the many issues, apart from the question of what, exactly, such a creature is, are questions of the admissibility of evidence obtained through "enhanced interrogation", which the federal courts routinely dismiss as the equivalent of torture.
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Congress did not act to set up a framework for what the Bush Administration insisted all along would be a long, complicated, and non-traditional style of warfare. The Bush Administration, various offices of Legal Counsel all got together and cobbled together rules that the federal courts have, for the most part, found unconstitutional. Yet, absent any other legal framework, the habeas hearings have left a hodge-podge.
Too often we hear complaints about "government" as if it were some weird entity that bore no relation to the day-to-day functioning of our society. As Ari Shapiro's story makes abundantly clear, however, when Congress fails to fulfill its most basic Constitutional function - to pass laws - it creates legal headaches, to be sure. These legal headaches, however, hide very real human tragedies.
Yet another thing to get upset at the years of Congressional Republican rule, I guess.
