Geneva Conventions win again

A federal judge today ruled that President Bush is not above the law, as much as he would like to be:

Controversial military commission trials created by President Bush to try alleged terrorists were dealt a crippling blow today when a federal judge ruled the proceedings invalid under U.S. and international law, forcing a halt to the first trial in which the system was used.

The presiding officer of a panel that was hearing the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, suspended hearings against the Yemeni man after learning that U.S. District Judge James Robertson had ruled that Hamdan was denied due process.

The sweeping ruling affects all of the nearly 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay because Robertson ruled that the administrative hearings - called "combatant status review tribunals" - that the Pentagon crafted to decide whether each inmate was an "enemy combatant" fail to pass muster under international law.

Until the preliminary hearings conform to the international Geneva Convention, Robertson ruled, the ongoing military commission hearings that try selected inmates for crimes of war are invalid.

Until such hearings determine otherwise, Robertson ruled, detainees like Hamdan must be considered prisoners of war and accorded all the rights granted them under the Geneva Convention.

The combatant status review tribunals, by contrast, have been widely criticized because they deny the prisoners access to lawyers and often rely on Bush's determination that all detainees at Guantanamo are enemy combatants.

"The president," Robertson wrote in his opinion, "is not a tribunal."