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Court rules:   New York City public schools may explicitly ban nativity scenes during Christmas while in the same policy explicitly permitting displays of menorahs during Hanukkah and the star-and-crescent during Ramadan.

This boggles the mind.   Either all three must be permitted, or all three must be banned — right?

The policy at issue expressly states that the display of "secular holiday symbol decorations is permitted," and it lists as examples the menorah and the star and crescent. The policy specifically excludes the display of the Christian nativity scene. The City defended its policy by arguing that the menorah and star and crescent were permissible symbols because they were "secular," whereas the nativity scene had to be excluded because it was "purely religious." Even though the majority recognized that the City’s argument was fallacious, stating that the policy "mischaracterizes" these symbols, it still upheld the discriminatory ban on the Christian nativity.

This is nuts.  There’s no way the U.S. Supreme Court will go for the argument that a menorah is secular "enough" and a nativity scene is not secular "enough."  Since when is the government allowed to decide the degree to which speech is religious in order to determine if it will be permitted?

I wonder if it’s because there really aren’t any widely recognized secular symbols of Hanukkah that can be substituted for the menorah (dreidels? latkes?).  Why, if we didn’t classify a menorah as "secular," children wouldn’t be allowed to experience Hanukkah-based art projects at all.   Whereas Christmas always has jolly old St. Nicholas. 

I mean Santa.  Strike that last bit.

A story worth reading:

• A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).
• Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.
• Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.
• The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability.

These locals had strong incentives to tar as terrorists any and all Arabs they could get their hands on as the Arabs fled war-torn Afghanistan in late 2001 and 2002 — including noncombatant teachers and humanitarian workers. And the Bush administration has apparently made very little effort to corroborate the plausible claims of innocence detailed by many of the men who were handed over.

  I hope that the matter gets the careful attention and investigation from the press that it deserves.   

Some of the points strike me as problems of degree rather than of kind, and rely on subjective interpretations of what’s prudent with respect to national security, and what standard of evidence is sufficient.  For example, I’m suspicious of terms like "best available evidence" — the best available evidence may not actually be good evidence.  (Thank goodness U.S. juries are not instructed to convict based on the "best available evidence!")

Here’s what alarms me:  (1) deception on the part of the administration in claiming or implying that individuals were seized by U.S. troops "on the battlefield" when many of them could have been handed over to the Americans by "reward-seek[ers]"; (2)  the general resistance of the administration to any kind of just resolution or "due process" for individual detainees.

No, their situation isn’t exactly the same as a U.S. citizen charged with a federal crime, and no, they don’t have precisely the same legal protections as a U.S. citizen charged with a federal crime, and yes, the standards for releasing the men can reasonably be set higher than "not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" if national security demands it.  But come on — if you start from the position that it’s even reasonably possible that even one of the people detained at Guantanamo was wrongly or mistakenly detained — and no reasonable person could possibly assume otherwise — simple ethics, let’s even say morality, requires that the administration allow each man to make his case and to be re-patriated if he meets some standard of inculpability. 

It’s unsurprising and, frankly, within the reasonable exercise of their power for the administration to argue for a higher standard of innocence to be met, to present the evidence that they have against each, to stress the demands of national security.  The administration’s proper role here is that of the prosecutor, and we expect a prosecutor to champion the prosecutor’s side.  What’s unreasonable is the "trust us, every one of these men is guilty and dangerous, it would be unnecessary and risky to question this" attitude that the administration has stubbornly stuck to from the very beginning.  I don’t deny that the questions are difficult and perhaps even literally dangerous, but they need to be asked now, and they always have been, because justice requires it.