• Freaks at the Times

    The New York Times opines editorially on yesterday’s Hamden decision from the Supreme Court:

    The message of this ruling is that the executive branch cannot continue in its remarkable insistence that because there is a war on terror, it no longer needs to follow established procedures that would subject it to scrutiny by another branch of government. The justices rejected the administration’s constant refrain — made in everything from its “enemy combatant” policies to its defense of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying — that the authority Congress granted the president to use force after Sept. 11, the exigencies of wartime, or simply the inherent powers of the presidency allow President Bush to trample on existing laws as he sees fit.

    The President is doing nothing so hyperbolic, but when a paper’s editorials read like cheap dKos diaries, one expects a little off-the-deep-end moobattiness. As near as I can tell, the ruling said only that the Geneva Convention, an old treaty for old circumstances, had been converted by the Court into a new treaty covering new circumstances. It’s a bandaid and a legal leap, I think, but it is what has been done. The Geneva Convention is what the majority of the Supreme Court believe it to be.

    I’m not uncomfortable at all with the Supreme Court’s ruling. The United States has laws and procedures for all people, including mutants who seek to destroy civilization, and it is a good thing that our standards are being guarded. That being said, the Times’ moonbat-rant had little to do with this notion.