Huh... Didn't See This Comin'

Apparently, the Geneva Conventions aren't quite so quaint after all.

In the wake of the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, it appears that the Department of Defense has now circulated a memo to all the players that the detainees we have at GTMO and other places are in fact human beings with all rights and priveleges thereunto pertaining, regardless of the condition in which we found them. From the Washington Post:

The Bush administration, in an apparent policy reversal sparked by a recent Supreme Court ruling, said today it will extend the guarantees of humane treatment specified by the Geneva Conventions to detainees in the war-on-terror.

In a memo released by the Pentagon this morning, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, citing the Supreme Court's decision, ordered all Pentagon personnel to "adhere to these standards" and to "promptly review" all policies and practices "to ensure that they comply with the standards" of the Geneva Convention's Common Article 3.

So while that might appear to the be the ball game, off course, things are still a little more complicated than that.

None of this has stopped Sparky Gonzalez and the untouchables from asking Federal Magistrates to ignore the Supreme Court and prevent anyone in GTMO from accessing the legal system anyway.

The idea the that Justice is floating is that Hamdan did not create a new challenge to enemy combatant status in the courts, but rather would dump all this on the D.C. District Court of Appeals as enshrined in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. Short version: "Sand monkeys still don't get no stinkin' Geneva rights as far as we're concerned."

Now granted this is all before the new Pentagon memo. So we will see how the other executive level departments react.

mojo sends