Do Over At Gitmo?

The government is seriously considering starting over from scratch in its process of determining if detainees at Guantanamo Bay are enemy combatants. It appears that the hearings it held the firs time were too flawed to reconstruction to the satisfaction of the D.C. Court of Appeals.

The administration would have been better off simply conceding the right of detainees to habeas corpus review of their enemy combatant status, at least after the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that such a thing might exist in the Hamdi case. If it had done so, our international reputation for human rights would not be in tatters, the detainees who need to be in Guantanamo Bay would still be there, and they would be done by now.

This move seems like little more than a stall for time, with only about fifteen months left in the Bush Administration.