The Supreme Court ruled today that Bush has overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and international Geneva conventions.

The case focused on Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden. Hamdan, 36, has spent four years in the U.S. prison in Cuba. He faces a single count of conspiring against U.S. citizens from 1996 to November 2001.

The Bush administration had hinted in recent weeks, the NY Times reports, “that it was prepared for the court to set back its plans for trying Guantanamo detainees.” It appears that the Bush administration was wrong. Chief Justice John G. Roberts had recused himself from the case.

Judges who did not side with the Bush administration wrote:

“Trial by military commission raises separation-of-powers concerns of the highest order,” Kennedy wrote in his opinion.

In his own opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer said, “Congress has not issued the executive a ‘blank check.”‘

“Indeed, Congress has denied the president the legislative authority to create military commissions of the kind at issue here. Nothing prevents the president from returning to Congress to seek the authority he believes necessary,” Breyer wrote.

I’m currently reading “Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power,” written by Joseph Margulies, a Minneapolis lawyer and civil rights activist, who served as lead counsel in Rasul v. Bush. I’ll write more about the book in the next few days, in the interim, I’ll note here that it chronicles the attempts of the Bush administration to “extend the bounds of presidential authority while limiting official culpability.”

Today’s decision by the Supreme Court raised “core constitutional principles of separation of powers as well as fundamental issues of individual rights.” Specifically, the questions raised concerned:

The power of Congress and the executive to strip the federal courts and the Supreme Court of jurisdiction.

The authority of the executive to lock up individuals under claims of wartime power, without benefit of traditional protections such as a jury trial, the right to cross-examine one’s accusers and the right to judicial appeal.

The applicability of international treaties — specifically the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war — to the government’s treatment of those it deems “enemy combatants.”

A background of the Geneva Conventions is available here.

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