Two military judges have ruled with respect to two Guantanamo prisoners that their combatant status review tribunals determined only that the prisoners were “enemy combatants” but did not make the necessary determination that they were “alien unlawful enemy combatants.” The determination that an enemy combatant is “unlawful” (for example, fights without uniform or conceals his weapon) was a necessary prerequisite for the military tribunal to acquire jurisdiction over the individual.

Under directives from President Bush and senior Defense Department officials, military officials here have held detainees after finding simply that they were “enemy combatants.”

This legal deficiency is potentially an issue for all 380 Guantanamo detainees. Everybody at Guantanamo is an enemy combatant, but that doesn’t mean the combat was unlawful. One of the detainees was a 15 year old kid at the time he was apprehended. He apparently threw a grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan. War is hell; throwing a grenade during a firefight is presumptively “legal.”

I’m horribly, horribly biased, but I think my little girl, Harper, is very, very cute. Here she is at the Pretty Prairie Berry Farm:

Originally uploaded by amasson.

Seventy-nine year old Jack Kevorkian was released from prison after 8 years. Kevorkian strikes me as a practitioner of civil disobedience in the mold of David Thoreau and those who followed him. It’s appropriate that Kevorkian went to jail, but his fight is not without merit. At root, he stands for the proposition that all humans should have the right to terminate their own lives. And, they should be able to do it legally, with dignity, and without pain. Perhaps I’m just projecting my own beliefs onto him. There are many who object to the unregulated, illegal way Kevorkian was going about his assisted suicides. But, the fact is, there was no regulated, legal way to assist people.

There are a lot of pitfalls to be avoided. Protections need to be in place to ensure that the person choosing death is competent to make the choice and that others, including the death practitioner, are not unduly influencing the decision. In most cases, personally, I think suicide is the coward’s way out. But, there are definitely situations where that is not the case. If, for example, you have nothing but an extended future of unrelenting pain to look forward to, it’s cruel of society to force continued life on a person.

It sounds like, now that he’s out of prison, the more visible aspects of Kevorkian’s fight are over. He says he will continue to advocate for his cause, but he will do so legally.

Despite Kevorkian’s efforts, I don’t think the debate has advanced much over the past 20 years. Maybe it never will.

I really enjoyed this lede by Nick Werner, writing for the Muncie Star Press (and reprinted at the Indy Star):

When faced with making good on a $5,000 down payment or returning a seven-year-old Cadillac to a dealership, Craig D. Allen chose a third option, police said.

It creates tension, drama, and mystery. He could have just said that a deadbeat who wanted something for nothing used violence to get his way.

This Memorial Day Weekend, I drove to Akron, Ohio – the Midwest smelled like a barbecue. The state troopers were thick as flies on the Ohio Interstates. And, here is the peculiar thing. For some reason, Buckeyes are repelled by the right lane of their highways. I drove I-70 from Richmond to Columbus, then I-71 up to Akron. In a lot of spots, the Interstate is 3 lanes. A normal scenario was this – the middle lane occupied by one vehicle traveling at about 65 mph, the left lane occupied by a line of vehicles with the lead one traveling at about 66.5 mph, and the right lane empty. What’s a Hoosier to do on Indy-500 weekend? Go about 75 mph in the right hand lane, of course. (Making me a criminal-alien in the Buckeye state, I suppose.) The only problem is that some deviant would occasionally use the slow lane for going slow, throwing the whole thing off. It’s an annoying driving scenario that happens everywhere to some extent, but it always strikes me as being particularly bad in Ohio for some reason.

The South Bend Tribune has an article attacking tuition increases at all of Indiana’s major public universities over the next biennium:

Ivy Tech – 7.8%
University of Southern Indiana – 12%
Purdue – 9%
Indiana State – 11%
Ball State – 9.8%
I.U. – 10%

These hikes — all considerably above the overall cost-of-living growth — come after the Indiana General Assembly approved a $26 billion budget that met the needs of higher education better than any in recent years . .. In past years, state universities complained that the skinflint General Assembly left them no choice but to pass growing costs on to students and families. That excuse doesn’t wash this year. Yet the universities proceeded anyway to feed the phenomenon of “education inflation.” Every public university in Indiana has raised tuition way more than 100 percent in a decade.

There is a pretty good Wikipedia entry on college tuition costs.

So, what is it that’s changing about the college tuition equation that requires increases that well exceed inflation — cost of infrastructure? professors salaries? cost of the administrative bureaucracy? Is the per capital quality or quantity of any of these things increasing? Are taxpayers shouldering less of the educational burden; requiring more dollars to come out of individuals directly? (And, if so, where have the tax dollars been shifted?)

I haven’t the foggiest idea of the answers to any of these questions.

(H/t Reverent & Free), Leo Morris at Opening Arguments writes:

[I]t does little good to keep going back and playing the “what if” game about Iraq. We are where we are, and it’s easy to see who in the debate has America’s national security in mind and who is mostly interested in something else.

Hogwash. The notion that “we are where we are” (and never mind how we got here) has the potential to do a great deal of harm in the long term. We need to determine exactly what went wrong and why and who is responsible so that false mythologies don’t grow that allow us to get into this mess again. It seems to me that part of the reason we got into Iraq was because people were able to harbor “stabbed in the back” theories of why we lost Viet Nam without getting laughed out of the room. Had we learned, instead, that “if you get in the middle of a civil war, you lose” perhaps we wouldn’t have been so quick to get the middle of a Sunni/Shiite conflict contained only by the brutality of Saddam Hussein. Another lesson would be the seemingly simple lesson of holes: If you find yourself in one, stop digging.

Ken Kusmer, writing for the Associated Press has an article entitled $1M fraud stuns S. Ind. school system. The article says that Switzerland County School Corporation treasurer, Ann Geyman, has been fired for embezzling around a million dollars. The Switzerland County School budget has an annual budget of about $15 million. She apparently told the school attorney and the superintendent that she and her husband had money problems and, in particular, her husband had a gambling problem. Ms. Geyman offered her resignation, but the school board found it more appropriate to reject the resignation and fire her.

Just, for what it’s worth, the Grand Victoria casino in Rising Sun, Indiana is only about 23 miles away from Vevay, IN where the school corporation is based.

Thought I’d post a little primer on what the phrase “Rule of Law” means. It gets bandied about quite a bit but doesn’t get explained very often. I’ll go with the first line of the Wikipedia entry:

The rule of law is the principle that governmental authority is legitimately exercised only in accordance with written, publicly disclosed laws adopted and enforced in accordance with established procedure.

I’ll also go ahead and throw in my half-remembered recollection of Alvin Toffler’s description of law as “potential violence.” The government has asserted a monopoly on violence and it has been crystallized into a body of law which dictates when and how that force can be used. That we are a “government of laws, not men” means that we have attempted to create a bulwark against arbitrary and self-serving use of force by individuals.

When you think of laws as “potential violence,” it becomes much clearer why legal authority must only be used in accord with legal constraints. If the wielder of power exceeds those constraints, he or she stops acting as a representative of our government of laws and starts acting as an individual. An individual wielding the potential violence of the United States government, free of legal constraints, is a frightening prospect.

With that in mind, concepts like the Unitary Executive are a little frightening. That particular piece of hogwash posits that Article II of the Constitution puts strict limits on the ability of the Congress to regulate activities of executive branch agencies — the net result of the theory being to put a substantial amount of unregulated “potential violence” into the hands of the individual who happens to occupy the Office of the President at a given time.