Supreme Court strikes down Guantanamo tribunals; Bush's war-court system is ruled unlawful

Five years into the war on terror, the Bush administration's system for trying Guantanamo detainees had never faced a full legal reckoning — until now. On June 29, 2006, the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the military commissions established by the Department of Defense in March 2002 violated both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The plaintiff was Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni citizen who had worked as Osama bin Laden's driver and bodyguard, captured by militia forces in Afghanistan in 2001. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority that even in wartime, the executive branch could not simply invent its own judicial system outside the bounds of law Congress had already set…