President Bush on Friday offered his most extensive comment so far on the Supreme Court’s decision June 29 in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. In a press conference in Chicago, he used various formulations to suggest that the Court had silently endorsed the use of the military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold terrorist suspects.
In one of those comments, the President said: “In other words, they accepted the use of Guantanamo and the decision I made.” (The excerpt containing all of his remarks on the subject, taken verbatim from the White House transcript, can be found here.)
The Court’s main opinion, by Justice John Paul Stevens, did not go as far as the President implied. In the only part of the opinion that relates to the President’s comments, Stevens wrote: “It bears emphasizing that Hamdan does not challenge and we do not today address the Government’s power to detain him for the duration of active hositilties in order to prevent…great harm and even death to innocent civilians.”
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