Opinion: Brit disses Gitmo

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Considering the support -- some would say cover -- Tony Blair has provided to George W. Bush in the war in Iraq, the administration ought to give a respectful hearing to some criticism from Blair’s attorney general. Speaking Monday at an American Bar Association meeting in Miami, Lord Goldsmith segued from a celebration of Magna Carta to a trenchant critique of the Bush administration’s heedlessness of the rule of law in the war on terror.

The money quote, as Andrew Sullivan would say, is: ‘Respecting the rule of law means ... subjecting executive action to the scrutiny of the democratic institutions but also of the courts. Judicial scrutiny is a key part of the rule of law. It was to us shocking that until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise in the Rasul v President Bush decision it was thought appropriate to assert that the legality of detentions in a US facility under US control could not be the subject of consideration by the US courts.’

This rebuke is all the more stinging because it comes from a country that in some ways is less protective of civil liberties than the US is. One could even say that Goldsmith was throwing stones from a glass courthouse: The British House of Lords, the closest thing in the UK to the Supreme Court, is much less powerful than our high court, and lacks the advantage of being able to ground its rulings in a written constitution. Even so, Goldsmith was right.

In his ABA speech, Goldsmith also reiterated his view that the detention facility at Guantamo Bay in Cuba should be closed, notwithstanding changes in the process by which ‘enemy combatants’ detained there will be tried. Most Americans are unaware of how controversial Gitmo is in the UK, where a play featuring sympathetic British inmates became a cause celebre.

Last June, President Bush told a news conference that ‘I’d like to close Guantanamo,’ but that was before 14 ‘high-value’ prisoners were transferred there from CIA prisons abroad. Yet even those prisoners could be confined in the United States proper if what Goldsmith called a ‘symbol of injustice’ were shuttered.