Georgetown Law Professor and civil liberties expert David Cole has an excellent op-ed on the detainees at Guantanamo in Sunday's Los Angeles Times (free subscription required). Here's a snippet:

The Supreme Court recently decided, over the government's objections, to take up legal challenges by the Guantanamo detainees and U.S. citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi. Only after that decision did the Pentagon announce that Hamdi would be allowed to talk to his lawyer, that the juveniles and several others at Guantanamo would be released and that the military would provide annual reviews for those still detained.

The Pentagon no doubt hopes that these initiatives will show that it can be trusted with wholly unchecked authority. But the fact that it made these overtures only when threatened with legal oversight underscores the necessity of the rule of law.

Guantanamo is, in short, the perfect symbol of what the administration has sought generally in the war on terrorism: the authority to act without the constraints of law. The nations of the world are concerned that we want that authority not only on an isolated leasehold in Cuba but in their backyards as well.