Supreme Court to Hear Arguments on Guantanamo Detainees, Gore on Patriot Act

The BBC reports that the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether the prolonged dentention without due process of “Enemy Combatants” from the Afghan war is constitutional.

In their application to the Supreme Court, lawyers for two Australian and 12 Kuwaiti nationals, and the Britons, said: “The United States has created a prison on Guantanamo Bay that operates entirely outside the law”.

“Within the walls of this prison, foreign nationals may be held indefinitely, without charges or evidence of wrongdoing, without access to family, friends or legal counsel, and with no opportunity to establish their innocence.”

While I'm on politics and foreign policy, Al Gore recently gave a rousing speech at an event sponsored by moveon.org in which he spoke out on the Bush administration's approach in Iraq and in particular on the civil rights abuses of the Patriot act:

. . . this President has claimed the right for his executive branch to send his assistants into every public library in America and secretly monitor what the rest of us are reading. That's been the law ever since the Patriot Act was enacted. . . . And speaking of the Patriot Act, the President ought to reign in John Ashcroft and stop the gross abuses of civil rights that twice have been documented by his own Inspector General. And while he's at it, he needs to reign in Donald Rumsfeld and get rid of that DoD “Total Information Awareness” program that's right out of George Orwell's 1984.