Elf Sternberg

And at the bottom of that very page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Parte_Quirin), Wikipedia notes that the 1942 Quirin decision was superseded by the U.S. ratification of the Geneva Conventions in 1949, giving Geneva the force of federal law. The American Bar Association issued a report stating that the Quirin decision does not mean we could hold these people incommunicado without recourse to courts or lawyers.

The Supreme Court in 2006 decreed, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamdan_v._Rumsfeld), that the Gitmo detainees were indeed Prisoners of War under Article 3, and that the U.S. was in gross violation of Article 3 for each one of those detainees.

The big picture is that we, as a country, violated these people's rights. We held them without EITHER the protection of U.S. law OR international law, and we had to make a secret prison outside of our borders, and construct new exceptions to the law, in order to practice "extraordinary rendition" and "enhanced interrogation" -- kidnapping and torture, to us reality-based folk.