Guantanamo

GUANTANAMO....Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick on the real heroes of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay:

Since the inception of the commissions, the brakes have almost always been applied when some member of the military has balked, even when going along would have been the far easier course....Start with Charles Swift....Next up, Col. Morris Davis....yet another military naysayer: Keith Allred....Four others — Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr, Capt. Carrie Wolf, and Lt. Col. Stuart Couch.

....The truth is that the best thing the commissions have going for them right now are the lawyers and judges in uniform who have, albeit reluctantly, refused to play along. If they'd been out on the battlefield, they'd have killed any detainee they met as an enemy. But they're not willing to see them killed in the wake of a sham trial. That's not because they value the lives of terrorists over the lives of Americans or because they value legal formalism over the exigencies of war. It's because they come out of a long military tradition of legal integrity and independence. And much as it must pain them, this precludes them from being yes men for the Bush administration at the expense of the rule of law.