The rulings halted current proceedings involving two detainees and sparked new debates about the wisdom and legality of the commissions themselves. But larger questions remain about the role that such military commissions fill at Guantanamo, where the overriding purpose is to detain individuals without any trial at all. That purpose is obscured by the continued and misplaced focus on military trials -- a product of our cultural fascination with courtroom drama.Read the whole thing here.
Meanwhile, Ezra assesses the strange evasiveness and lack of prescriptive specificity found in leading liberal hawks' get-tough rhetoric about Iran. (Yes, that includes Democracy's Ken Baer.) He draws the connection to these analysts' past support of the Iraq war: "The new approach is not to refight the battle over the Iraq war, but to argue that those who got it right, or who got it wrong but eventually came to the right answer, are now in danger of overlearning the lessons of the war -- and missing the danger posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." He pushes back against that gambit here. Also today, Harold Meyerson details a typical day for the Bush-era DoJ -- Al Gonzalez shrugs off the 53 no-confidence votes from U.S. senators, while his department shrugs off the request for support from swindled Enron shareholders involved in a major Supreme Court case. Stuff happens.
--The Editors
