Criminal, Immunize Thyself

The Bush administration's get out of jail card for torturers.

By John Sifton
Posted Friday, Aug. 11, 2006, at 4:46 PM ET

If the Bush administration is still good at anything, it's this: distracting its opponents and seizing little victories from what might have been big defeats.

Take the administration's recent efforts to respond to the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Hamdan arose from a challenge to the president's authority to create novel military commissions to try Guantanamo detainees. In June, the court found these commissions were unlawful: Among other problems, their procedures were inconsistent with existing statutes and fell short of "fair trial" guarantees in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. (Defendants could, for instance, be convicted based on evidence they would never see.)