too soon

Question: Why haven't you cheered the recent US Supreme Court decision ruling on the military tribunals at the Guantánamo Bay prison camps?

Answer: Because Gitmo still exists. The prisoners are still there.

Don't get me wrong. It's an important ruling. It's a great ruling. The Supreme Court is finally pushing back the Cheney White House's mad power grab, finally deciding in favour of the Constitution and not some hyperbolic war against imagined enemies. Affirming that there actually aren't two sets of rules, one for the United States and another for everyone else.

Bruce Shapiro, writing for The Nation, says the ruling is to Bush what the Pentagon Papers were to Nixon: "a devastating rebuke to a President who thought he had a blank check; a clear reaffirmation of the rule of law even--or especially--in times of national crisis."

The human rights lawyers who represent the Guantánamo prisoners were thrilled. Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights said, "It doesn't get any better."

The decision also gives us some hope that the junta is not complete. William Kennedy, now the Court's swing vote, swung the right way. Justice John Paul Stevens, is still a beacon at 86 years old.

But meanwhile: they're still in there. The prisoners. Their situation has not changed.

Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive writes:

The question is whether Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld will obey the Court or whether they will directly flout it. This latter course of action is unlikely, though the legal claim the Administration has been asserting — that the judiciary has no authority to interfere with the exercise of the President’s commander in chief powers — suggests that this may have crossed their minds.

More likely, the Administration will drag its feet, as it did after the Rasul decision, the 2004 ruling that allowed Guantánamo detainees to challenge their detention. And Bush will probably look to Republicans in Congress to give him approval for tribunals and more.

I don't put anything past the murderers and thieves who have taken over the US. I can't celebrate until the prison camps are empty.

We have to keep the spotlight on this darkness, all of us, all over the world.