The President and Congress are not above the Constitution

The Supreme Court gave a stinging, if narrow, rebuke yesterday to President Bush and congress regarding detainees at Guantanamo. By declaring that detainees have the right to seek their release in our standard court system, the Supreme Court should have finally put an end to Bush's flaunting of the constitution in the name of the "war on terror." Amnesty hails the decision but calls it "a limited victory for human rights." Scotusblog looks at some of the scenarios that may play out in the White House, the Pentagon and the court system. There is, of course, a multitude of other coverage.

It seems to me, though, that the real tragedy of this is how long it has taken. Bush has essentially shown that the courts move so slowly on issues like this that a president can get away with more than 6 years of human rights and constitutional abuses. Worst of all, there are no repercussions for these actions. The President and the Congress are not above the Constitution, but for long periods of time, they can act as if they are.

2 Amnesty Campaigns

I've added 2 campaigns from Amnesty International to my links. The first one, which you will find on the left, is called Unsubscribe Me. It is a campaign to enlist people to show their displeasure about human rights abuses perpetrated in the name of the "war on terror." If you are appalled by things like water-boarding, Abu Ghraib, unlawful detentions in Guantanamo or any other abuses, please sign up.

The second campaign is called irrepressible, and you'll find it along the bottom of my blog. It exists because countries around the world are censoring and blocking internet access to sites that are critical of them or their leaders. To make matters worst, many companies are helping them in their censorship (including the company hosting this blog). Irrepressible dynamically publishes censored content to a site every time the page is loaded. This helps subvert the companies' and governments' attempts at censoring public web content. Take a read and consider adding irrepressible to your own site.

Blog for Human Rights Day

Today is "Blog for Human Rights" day, as you can see from the image on the left. As such, I'd like to call your attention to a little-known illegal detention that has gone on for almost a year in India. Dr. Binayak Sen is a health activist and human rights advocate in Chhattisgarh province in India. He was detained almost a year ago, on May 24, 2007. The charges against him have been investigated and shown to be false, and yet he is still unlawfully held. We like to think of India as a country with a solid human rights record, but cases like this show that things are not quite so rosy as we'd like them to be.