The Gitmo detainees again

John Yoo opines in the Wall Street Journal:

In World War II, no civilian court reviewed the thousands of German prisoners housed in the U.S. Federal judges never heard cases from the Confederate prisoners of war held during the Civil War. In a trilogy of cases decided at the end of World War II, the Supreme Court agreed that the writ did not benefit enemy aliens held outside the U.S. In the months after the 9/11 attacks, we in the Justice Department relied on the Supreme Court's word when we evaluated Guantanamo Bay as a place to hold al Qaeda terrorists.

Again repeating the fiction (that's the polite word for bald-faced lie) that the Bush Administration has simply been following precedent with its treatment of terrorist suspects. Nothing could be less true - Yoo was part of an effort to deliberately create a legal black hole where no precedents or legal constraints applied and rules could be made up on the fly as convenient. They had a choice of saying, "We're going to treat these people as POW's" or "We're going to treat these people as violent criminals," in which case none of this mess would exist.

It's always a "power-grab" when someone expects a Bushie to obey the law.