This is important and it is not just a technicality-it seems the entire military trial system may be fatally flawed, which is a claim I made at the time the Military Commissions Act was shoved through last year. This means doom for the entire system create after last June’s Supreme Court ruling (which declared the previous military system to that unlawful).
From the McClatchy story on this ruling:
The chief defense counsel, Marine Corps. Col. Dwight Sullivan, said each and every captive currently held at Guantnamo is classified merely as an “enemy combatant” not an “unlawful enemy combatant.”
Sullivan declared the war court “a complete failure” and urged the Pentagon to end its efforts to prosecute Guantanamo detainees under the last year’s Military Commissions Act.
“The system right now should just stop,” said Sullivan. “The commission is an experiment that failed and we don’t need any more evidence that it is a failure.”
Brownback [the judge] also rejected military prosecutors’ request that he delay the ruling so they could he appeal it. He said Congress had not established a process for appealing such a ruling.
To summarize, the Guantanamo military judge, who cannot be appealed, has ruled that his court has no jurisdiction over the prisoners his court was created to try. The inability to appeal is the reason that I predicted at the time the Military Commissions Act was rammed through, that it would fail. With no ability to appeal this judge’s ruling, now the question is what Bush will do next: will he fire the judge and stick in a new one with orders to rule the Bush way, subjecting the prisoners to double jeopardy? Will he just skip the Military Commission system altogether and ordered them all executed, or one by one?
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