The 5-4 decision today on the Guantanamo Bay issue illustrates that the Court is still not solidly in the hands of the right wingers. Kennedy showed tremendous courage.

Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia are a solid block for the conservatives and should be around for years to come (unless Cheney shoots Scalia on one of their hunting trips ). If McCain wins - it is very likely that he will appoint at least the 5th member of this gang notwithstanding the likelihood that the Democrats will pick up more seats in the Senate making any confirmation more difficult.

This is a very big issue that hasn't gotten much attention. It will be interesting to see how (or if) it plays out in the election.

I think it is the one issue that could really "unite" the democratic party once all the Obama/Hillary smoke blows over. All you'd have to do is remind the Hillary/McCain democrats that Stevens 88 years old, and Kennedy is 71...and if McCain gets into office there will be more people like Alito, Thomas, etc up there. My guess is that once the Hillary/McCain democrats think about that, they will be voting for Obama in a second. The only real question is wether anyone will make it an overt political issue over the next year or so.

Courage? I'm sorry, but this decision was terrible.

I am one Democrat who is disgusted by this ruling. For the first time in our history, we're giving terrorists--foreign enemies--the same rights as Americans. This is absurd! Moreover, these enemy combatants or whatever Bush wishes to call them, now have more rights and more protections than the Nazis at Nuremburg had! I'm all for civil rights, but these people aren't deserving of the same constitutional protections American citizens have.

I don't always agree with the Justices who dissented in this decision, but after reading the entire opinion, I'm with them. The Court even went against its own precedents. This is one of the Court's worse decisions in quite some time!

And that is the point - precisely stated.

The Bush administration has assumed that it can treat non-USA citizens as non-human as long as they are not in official USA territory.

Innocent people have been proven in our courts to have been persecuted by our government in our name. Innocent people have almost certainly died in the custody of our intelligence agencies or after being rendered to surrogates in countries where habeus corpus is a joke.

What we should be ashamed of is that this was not a unanimous decision by our highest court which is the only body that has final say in how to interpret our constitution.

Two Bush appointees, a Bush One appointee and an appointee of the scion of the Republican party have made a mockery of that document with pseudo-intellectual opinions that justify torture and murder by our government.

I can not think of a more important reason why we can not afford to have John McCain as the next president.

I am sorry. You just can't lock people up forever, with under a claim that asserts "someone (we won't tell you who), told us something (we can't tell you what), about some evidence we have (we can't show it to you) about someone who is now in jail (and we can't tell you who is in jail)." I don't care if it is a US citizen of not. The governmet can not, and should not, act under such scope of authority. The only right given them by the Supreme Court is to defend themselves and refute charges against them. That is not the "same rights" provided to Americans. Moreover, it is not "absurd" that someone actually has the chance to see the and counter the case against...rather, it is the hallmark of humanity.

I agree with this:

As Charles Fried, solicitor general in the Reagan administration, has reportedly put it, the Bush administration "badly overplayed a winning hand." Bush and his advisers so flouted ordinary, and old, ideas of justice and liberty that they put the Supreme Court in an impossible position: either rubber-stamp denials of due process to detainees who say they were seized by mistake, or step in and create a new set of problems by making rules on a slow, messy, case-by-case basis.

Nobody likes to see likely terrorists win cases. But it was an avoidable situation caused by the administration's overreaching.

Taking it upon yourself to be judge, jury and executioner of someone simply because they live overseas and are not citizens of this country is not just over-reaching. It is murder. It is not war. It is murder. It is not self-defense. It is murder. It is not national security. It is murder.

Quibbling with words and niceties won't change the facts if agencies for the US have, in our names, murdered people without any kind of due process simply because they were foreigners in a foreign land accused by god-only-knows-who of god-only-knows-what.

That you happen to have the authority of the president of the United States of America behind you doesn't change that.

We are supposed to be a nation of laws. Not a religious institution. Principals of justice is international, not just biblical, talmudic, koranic or whatever.

No national leader should have absolute, and secretive authority over the life of anyone however small that person might be. If they have facts to show a crime was committed they should be judged in the light of day, and proportionate punishment meted out in the same light of day.

And we should treat others the way we would want to be treated if in a similar situation. That's universal law.