Raw Story links to a Guardian report that charges against a second Guantanamo prisoner have been dismissed. Charges against “Yasser Ahmed Hamdan, the man accused of being Osama bin Laden’s driver” were dropped for the same reason charges against “Omar Khadr, who has been held since he was 15-years-old” were dropped. Like all of the other prisoners in Bush’s gulag, Hamdan and Khadr had been designated by the Bush brain trust as “enemy combatants” not “unlawful enemy combatants” as required by the “Military Commissions Act adopted by the US Congress in 2006″.
Congress, you will remember, adopted the act to legitimize the Bush administration’s efforts to deny due process and habeas corpus rights to the Guantanamo prisoners after the Supreme Court ruled that the Guantanamo Bay military compound was in effect a part of the USA and, thus, the prisoners there are subject to the Constitutional due process guarantee.
The military judges in both cases dismissed the charges ruling that “the military tribunals did not have jurisdiction over detainees on the island”.
