The court goes to war.(THE LAW)(Hamdan decision, terrorist interrogation)

ADMINISTRATION critics are understandably crowing over the Pentagon's announcement that enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay will be accorded Geneva Convention protections. The announcement represents a back-down from one of the central contentions in the administration's legal theory in waging the War on Terror: that Geneva does not, and was never meant to, apply to terrorists acting in blatant violation of the rules of war. The administration's hand was forced by the Supreme Court's execrable Hamdan decision, which imperiously and implausibly said that al-Qaeda detainees get Common Article 3 protection under Geneva.

The Court had no business deciding the Hamdan case at all. In last December's Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), Congress rescinded the unprecedented jurisdiction that the Supreme Court, in the 2004 Rasul case, had claimed over alien enemy combatants captured in wartime and held outside the U.S. This Court, however, acknowledges no limits on its powers--whether imposed by Congress or by the English language, which it had to torture in order to construe the DTA's unambiguous limitation of its jurisdiction as an invitation to meddle.

And meddle it did, claiming for itself the mantle of final authority over both international relations and military necessity--matters in which it wholly lacks institutional competence and that the Framers committed primarily to the chief executive.

The Court found that the military commissions for al-Qaeda detainees are unauthorized under federal law and unjustified under international law. Never mind that they guaranteed our enemies the right to counsel, to the presumption of innocence, to proof beyond a reasonable doubt before conviction, to the privilege against self-incrimination, and to more.

Properly understood, the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant to Hamdan's case. He is a terrorist who fails to meet the conventions' definition of a lawful ...