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• Thursday, November 20, 2008 05:05 PM

  "Seven years . . . is enough!"

  http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/judge-orders-five-detainees-freed/

  The judge, in an unusual added comment, suggested to senior government leaders that they forgo an appeal of his ruling on freeing the five prisoners. While conceding that the government had a right to appeal that part of his ruling, Leon commented that he, too, had “a right to appeal” to leaders of the Justice Department, Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies, and his plea was that they look at the evidence regarding the five he was ordering released.

  “Seven years of waiting for our legal system to give them an answer to their legal question is enough,”

  he commented.

  [...]

  Near the close of the oral announcement of his decision, the judge cautioned observers not to read any wider effect into his ruling. “Few if any of the others will be factually like” the Bosnians’ case, he said, adding: “Nobody should be lulled into a false sense that all of the government’s cases will look like this one.”

  The judge also added that “there comes a time when the desire to resolve novel legal questions…pales in comparison to effecting a just result based on the state of the record.”

  It took nearly an hour for the judge to announce his ruling, because it was being translated, sentence by sentence, into arabic so that the six detainees could keep up with it via a telephone link with the U.S. Naval prison at Guatanamo Bay.

  - - scotusblog

  * * * * *

  Scott Horton at Harper's:

  http://harpers.org/archive/2008/11/hbc-90003877

  The hallmark of this regime is that it never admits to its own error or lawlessness. Prepare for an immediate appeal.

  - - Scott Horton at Harper's

  —sysprog Read sysprog's other letters
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