I am going to put my vote up for an auction type sale.  The highest bidder shall have my vote.  There are no minimum bids, and I have no "reserve".

There is only one catch.  In order to make a bid, the candidate must be pre-qualified.  And in order to pre-qualify, they have to demonstrate a commitment to justice.  One way to do that:

free the Uighurs who are now detained in Guantanamo, and grant them refugee status in the US

...and I thought that anything Bush says now wouldn't bother me anymore.

After the Supereme Court ruling last month gave all detainees the right to petition federal judges for immediate release, Dana Perino, speaking for Bush in a press conference Thursday, said that the dangerous detainees who are detained in Guantanamo could end up on the streets of the U.S.A.  Her quote, as reported by the AP:
"I'm sure that none of us want Khalid Sheikh Mohammed walking around our neighborhoods."

Uh.. I may not be the brightest bulb in the box, but I thought that Homeland Security was supposed to be able to take care of that very unlikely possibility. After all, wasn't Khalid the Al-Quida third in command, and tactical mastermind of 9/11? He is either a confessed civilian mass murderer or a war crimes criminal, and he'll have his day in one court or another.

Another absurd tale from down in the rabbit hole. In the first court review of the Bush Administration's secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, it was revealed that the government claimed the accusations presented in its secret documents should be considered truth -- not because there were hard facts backing them up -- but because the accusations were repeated in multiple government documents.

Thankfully the federal appeals court has unanimously ruled that the claims supporting Huzaifa Parhat's six-year detention in Guantanamo were "bare and unverifiable." The absurdity of the Bush Administration's argument was not lost on the court. Reports the New York Times: "The court compared [the government's argument] to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem 'The Hunting of the Snark': 'I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.' 'This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,' said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit."

This is just another example of the Bush Administration tossing aside objective fact in order to create a world where they make their own rules; it's just another stop on our country's journey from Human Rights Watchdog to Human Rights Abuser. And it just goes to show how the mere existence of Guantanamo flies in the face of the Constitution. The Bush Administration has lost a string of Guantanamo Bay court decisions. But it's simply not enough to try to counteract these injustices as they happen; we need to start at the source. We need to close Guantanamo Bay Detention Center and do what we can to reverse this smear on the human rights history of the United States. You can start by signing Progressive Future's Close Guantanamo Petition and telling your friends.

In January, 2006 outraged that her country was illegally imprisoning people at Guantanamo, Mahvish Rukhsana -- a journalist and recent law school graduate -- volunteered to translate for the prisoners and eventually began representing an Afghan detainee. She has since published the stories of the detainees she has met in the newly-released book, My Guantanamo Diary. For more information, please visit http://www.mahvishkhan.com.

The work that lawyers like Rukhsana have done to advocate on behalf of these detainees contributed to a recent Supreme Court ruling to grant habeas corpus to all Guantanamo prisoners. That is why I felt so privileged to be able to talk to her about the importance of upholding the Constitution and restoring our international reputation. My interview with Rukhsana was conducted just before the Supreme Court's landmark ruling, and has been edited down to narrative form. [cross-posted from www.progressivefuture.org]

This from the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

The justices handed the Bush administration its third setback at the high court since 2004 over its treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The vote was 5-4, with the court's liberal justices in the majority.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

It was not immediately clear whether this ruling, unlike the first two, would lead to prompt hearings for the detainees, some of whom have been held more than 6 years. Roughly 270 men remain at the island prison, classified as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The administration opened the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to hold enemy combatants, people suspected of ties to al-Qaida or the Taliban.

The Guantanamo prison has been harshly criticized at home and abroad for the detentions themselves and the aggressive interrogations that were conducted there.

The court said not only that the detainees have rights under the Constitution, but that the system the administration has put in place to classify them as enemy combatants and review those decisions is inadequate.

By sheer coincidence or by one of the most cynical of all political ploys in U.S. history, five alleged plotters of the September 11, 2001 attack on New York City's former Twin Towers complex are to be arraigned today in front of a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay.

The arraignment and subsequent trial begin proceedings today almost seven years after the attack, over four years after the most recent detainee was taken into custody and precisely two days after the start of a general election campaign for presidency of the United States.

The BBC has reported the arraignment and some history here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7437 164.stm

When I was a freshman in college, I was given the once-in-an-American-lifetime chance of visiting Cuba on a cultural exchange tour with my choir. Between the art, the food and the music, I spent the entire week entranced by the vividness of Cuban life. But I will also never forget being invited into the home of a local Havana woman to take part in a Santeria ritual. I was touched by how the Cuban people could welcome Americans into their lives, while also despising the practices of our government.

The cloud that the U.S.'s maligned reputation had cast over our trip was especially palpable when we traveled around the city of Guantanamo. Here was a structure, a prison, which stood to represent American-branded justice, yet its very existence went against everything our country stood for: the right to a fair trial, the notion of innocent until proven guilty, and protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

In a speech that demonstrated both President Bush's clinging to a retrograde ideology of McCarthy-era scapegoating, and his blatant lack of self-awareness, Bush yesterday gave a speech admonishing Cuban leadership for violations of human rights and international law. Wait a second, don't we know someone else who is guilty of these?