You hear that sound? That's the sound of the Constitution being burned

Check out this story from the AP via the Chicago Sun-Times:

Court: Military panels to try detainees

July 15, 2005

BY PETE YOST ASSOCIATED PRESS
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WASHINGTON-- A federal appeals court put the Bush administration's military commissions for terrorist suspects back on track Friday, saying a detainee at the Guantanamo Bay prison who once was Osama bin-Laden's driver can stand trial.

A three-judge panel ruled 3-0 against Salim Ahmed Hamdan, whose case was halted by a federal judge on grounds that commission procedures were unlawful.

"Congress authorized the military commission that will try Hamdan," said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The protections of the 1949 Geneva Convention do not apply to al-Qaida and its members, so Hamdan does not have a right to enforce its provisions in court, the appeals judges said.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson ruled last year that Hamdan could not be tried by a military commission until a competent tribunal determined that he was not a prisoner of war.

"We believe the military commission is such a tribunal," said the appeals court.

President Bush created the military commissions after the Sept. 11 attacks, opening a legal channel for alleged al-Qaida terrorists and their associates to be tried for war crimes.

But just 15 of the 520 detainees at Guantanamo Bay have been designated for such trials and only four have been charged.

The rest face indefinite detention, and the Bush administration refuses to grant any of the detainees prisoner-of-war status, a decision that has fueled international criticism of the United States.

Hamdan, a mechanic with a fourth-grade education, says he left his home country of Yemen looking for work and wound up in Afghanistan, working for bin Laden from 1997 until the U.S. attack in Afghanistan in 2001.

Hamdan denies conspiring to engage in acts of terrorism and denies he was a member of al-Qaida.

Hamdan's lawyers say he simply wanted to earn enough money to return to Yemen, buy his own vehicle and support his family as a driver.

The issue of military commissions has been eclipsed by alleged mistreatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, putting the Bush administration-- and some of its loudest critics-- on the defensive.

Sen. Dick Durbin apologized a week after comparing interrogation at the Guantanamo Bay prison to the methods of Nazis and other repressive regimes.

Muslims protested overseas after U.S. officials acknowledged in May they had substantiated five cases in which military guards or interrogators mishandled the Quran. The human rights group Amnesty International condemned conditions at the prison camp, calling Guantanamo "the gulag of our time," a description that President Bush dismissed as "absurd."

I'm not a gambling man anymore, but I'd be willing to put $20 down that, if the appeals court had ruled the other way, the righties would be screaming (C'mon everyone, it's singalong time! You know the words!) "activist judges", "promoting their own political agendas", "undermining the President's efforts in the war on terror", etc.

Just once, I'd like to hear them criticize judges when they need it, in cases like this when they wipe their asses with the United States Constitution. The Constitution was written with a system of checks and balances so that no one branch of the government becomes too powerful. This system, which has been working for over two hundred years, is being systematically dismantled by far-right ideologues who want to install the principles of totalitarianism in our society.