It won’t be the lead story on the nightly news tonight, but a key War on Terror court ruling today upholding the legality of military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay is a significant victory for the Bush administration–and a big defeat for the Gitmo bashers, most of whom deny that these hearings have even taken place at all.

*I’ve uploaded the court opinion, which you can view in PDF format by clicking Download file.*

Via AP:

A federal appeals court put the Bush administration’s military commissions for terrorist suspects back on track today, saying a detainee at the Guantanamo Bay prison who once was Osama bin-Laden’s driver can stand trial.

A three-judge panel ruled 3-0 against Salim Ahmed Hamdan, whose case was halted by a federal judge on grounds that commission procedures were unlawful.

“Congress authorized the military commission that will try Hamdan,” said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The protections of the 1949 Geneva Convention do not apply to al-Qaida and its members, so Hamdan does not have a right to enforce its provisions in court, the appeals judges said.

Paul at Power Line and Shannen Coffin at The Corner weigh in.

As I wrote last month:

Every single detainee currently being held at Guantanamo Bay has received a hearing before a military tribunal. Every one. As a result of those hearings, more than three dozen Gitmo detainees have been released. The hearings, called “Combatant Status Review Tribunals,” are held before a board of officers, and permit the detainees to contest the facts on which their classification as “enemy combatants” is based.

Gitmo-bashers attack the Bush administration’s failure to abide by the Geneva Conventions. But as legal analysts Lee Casey and Darin Bartram told me, “the status hearings are, in fact, fully comparable to the ‘Article V’ hearings required by the Geneva Conventions, in situations where those treaties apply, and are also fully consistent with the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case.”

Treating foreign terrorists like American shoplifters with full access to civilian lawyers, classified intelligence, and all the attendant rights of a normal jury trial is a surefire recipe for another 9/11. That is why the Bush administration fought so hard to erect an alternative tribunal system long established in wartime in the first place.

The few critics who acknowledge the existence of the tribunals argue they aren’t sufficient. They “provided due process in form, but not in substance,” as Newsday put it. That view is shared by a Carter-appointed liberal judge, but an earlier decision by a Bush-appointed judge upheld the tribunals. In the end, courts will almost certainly affirm the legality of the Gitmo tribunals, which as noted, were modeled after the due process standards described in the Hamdi decision.

Ed Morrissey on the decision:

It looks like some common sense has returned to the Geneva Convention debate. The lack of a uniform, the absence of al-Qaeda acceptance of the Convention, and the clear international character of the conflict all point to not only a lack of standing for POW status, but good reason to deny it. The entire point of these Geneva provisions is to protect civilian populations by giving a clear distinction between them and the combatants. Obviously, wearing a uniform puts combatants at higher risk, but nations agreed to do that in order to keep civilians from getting unnecessarily harmed. AQ intends on inflicting as much harm on civilians as possible while hiding among them for unfair advantage — which disqualifies them from the GC’s protections. We must not allow them to acquire those protections if we want to discourage others from violating these tenets of conflict.

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