Time for Meaningful Justice at Guantanamo

[marmar]

from The American Prospect:



Time for Meaningful Justice at Guantanamo

For six years the Bush administration has denied detainees at Guantanamo the right to habeas corpus. It is time for the Court to resolve once and for all that Guantanamo detainees deserve their day in court.

Jonathan Hafetz | December 7, 2007 | web only




The Guantanamo detainee cases returned to the Supreme Court on Wednesday for yet another round in the longstanding battle over legal rights in the administration's "war on terror." Remarkably, the 300 plus men at Guantanamo still remain in legal limbo after six years of imprisonment. The prevailing mood among Members of the Court was that enough is enough.

The third in a trio of Guantanamo cases, Boumediene v. Bush could prove the most far-reaching. It asks the simple but important question of whether the Constitution's guarantee of habeas corpus, the right to challenge your imprisonment, protects the Guantanamo detainees. In other words, the Court is being asked to draw a line in the sand: to make clear that there are certain fundamental guarantees to which these individuals are entitled, no matter what the president or Congress says. And that is exactly the message those other branches need to hear.

Ironically for such a momentous case, much of the territory the Court explored on Wednesday was familiar. In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush that prisoners at Guantanamo have the right to file habeas corpus petitions in federal district court challenging the lawfulness of their confinement. In so doing, the Court rejected the president's assertion that judges had no business reviewing who the United States was detaining at Guantanamo or why. The difference was that the Court decided the case under the habeas corpus statute, not the Constitution, leaving open the possibility that Congress could take action to undercut its decision.

Two years later, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Court struck down the military commissions established by executive fiat to try the handful of Guantanamo detainees who had been charged with war crimes. (The rest of the detainees were all being held indefinitely without charge as "enemy combatants.") The Court also ruled in Hamdan that all detainees were protected, at a minimum, by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits torture and other abuse as well as any trial that is not conducted by a "regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples." Once again, however, the Court based its ruling on federal statutes, not the Constitution. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=time_for_meaningful_justice_at_guantanamo