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so both rb's are in the same situation then of not quite knowing what the hell is actually being talked about.
best i could assemble it, the logic of this latest ruling follows from the two cases i linked above. they made even be appeals of the same case.
one way of reading the consequences of the rulings is a legitimation of bush-people views concerning "combattants" as over against "prisoners of war"...but the main arguments are stranger, having basically to do with rumsfeld et al operating "in good faith" on the basis of fucked up interpretations of the legal situation as a whole, the same interpretations which enabled the development of "enemy combattant" as a viable category, separate from "prisoner of war"--relative to which there are rules.
so it amounts to a repetition of the bush administration's "thinking" that resulted in these people sitting in gitmo without access to legal counsel of any due process subject to periods of torture and neglect...
but both rulings are, like i said above, about protecting individuals within the administration from being sued personally for actions carried out on the basis of policies, even those the legal basis for which was at the very best dubious.
which makes me wonder if rasul et al simply sued the wrong people...maybe they shoulda sued the architects of the legal argument itself, folk like john yoo....but i'm sure this "working in good faith" thing would be applied to him as well.
it's all very strange. there seems no place to stop it nor any reason to stop it. no-one is accountable, everyone operates in
"good faith"....it sounds like a version of the nuremburg defense except applied to a curious fiction of a system without a head or center. a kind of hall of mirrors more.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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