What's happening with those poor devils at Camp Xray ???

In interviews, dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda.

Bush claimed right to waive prisoner abuse laws

President Bush speaks with forked tongue; it's a wonder the right-wingers continue to support this creep.

I guess it's a good thing they are American detainees and not international detainees.

Court: Terror suspects can challenge detentions
Guantanamo Bay ruling is blow to administration policy on terrorism

MSNBC staff and news service reports
Updated: 4:22 p.m. ET June 28, 2004

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court dealt a setback to the Bush administration on Monday, ruling that both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals seized as potential terrorists can challenge their treatment in U.S. courts.

The court refused to endorse a central claim of the White House since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: That the government has authority to seize and hold suspected terrorists or their protectors and indefinitely deny them access to courts or lawyers while interrogating them.

The court did back the administration in one important respect, ruling that Congress gave President Bush the authority to seize and hold a U.S. citizen, in this case Louisiana-born Yaser Esam Hamdi, as an alleged enemy combatant.

Foreigners gain access to U.S. courts

The four dissenters said they would have decided the heart of the case. "At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society," wrote Justice John Paul Stevens.

The court left hard questions unanswered in all three cases.

The administration had fought any suggestion that Hamdi or another U.S.-born terrorism suspect could go to court, saying that such a legal fight posed a threat to the president's power to wage war as he sees fit.

"We have no reason to doubt that courts, faced with these sensitive matters, will pay proper heed both to the matters of national security that might arise in an individual case and to the constitutional limitations safeguarding essential liberties that remain vibrant even in times of security concerns," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in the Hamdi case.

O'Connor said that Hamdi "unquestionably has the right to access to counsel."

The court threw out a lower court ruling that supported the government's position fully, and Hamdi's case now returns to a lower court.

O'Connor was joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer in her view that Congress had authorized detentions such as Hamdi's in what she called very limited circumstances.

Lawyers rush to get access

Lawyers for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. military base in Cuba plan to ask this week for access to their clients, armed with the Supreme Court ruling that the prisoners can fight their detention in court.

Lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the case to the high court, said they would seek access to their clients within the week.

"We will be asking for access to our clients and for information about their mental and physical health," said attorney Joseph Margulies. "We will move very quickly to seek access to our clients, something that has been denied them from the beginning of this litigation."

The center wants to talk to the two prisoners it represented in the Supreme Court case. Dozens of others have also asked the center act on their behalf, and lawyers will file requests for access to them as well.

Margulies said the government now has the responsibility of giving specific reasons for the detention of each prisoner. "At a minimum, they must now come forward with some evidence," he said. "You don't simply hold people in a lawless void based on nothing more than executive say-so."

Extent of presidential authority at issue

Congress voted shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks to give the president significant authority to pursue terrorists, but Hamdi's lawyers said that authority did not extend to the indefinite detention of an American citizen without charges or trial.

Two other justices, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, would have gone further and declared Hamdi's detention improper.

Still, they joined O'Connor and the others to say that Hamdi, and by extension others who may be in his position, are entitled to their day in court. Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented on that point.

Hamdi and Padilla are in military custody at a Navy brig in South Carolina. They have been interrogated repeatedly without lawyers present.

In the Guantanamo case, the court said the Cuban base is not beyond the reach of American courts even though it is outside the country. Lawyers for the detainees there had said to rule otherwise would be to declare the Cuban base a legal no-man's land.

Ruling applies only to Guantanamo detainees

The high court's ruling applies only to Guantanamo detainees, although the United States holds foreign prisoners elsewhere.

The Bush administration contends that as "enemy combatants," the men are not entitled to the usual rights of prisoners of war set out in the Geneva Conventions. Enemy combatants are also outside the constitutional protections for ordinary criminal suspects, the government has claimed.

The administration argued that the president alone has authority to order their detention, and that courts have no business second-guessing that decision.

The case has additional resonance because of recent revelations that U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners and used harsh interrogation methods at a prison outside Baghdad.

For some critics of the administration's security measures, the pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison illustrated what might go wrong if the military and White House have unchecked authority over prisoners.

At oral arguments in the Padilla case in April, an administration lawyer assured the court that Americans would abide by international treaties against torture, and that the president or the military would not allow even mild torture as a means to get information.

Q Larry, is the Pentagon considering moving prisoners from Gitmo back to the United States in response to the Supreme Court decision, in order to make them more available to U.S. courts, U.S. --

MR. DIRITA: The impact of the decision is being examined. It's not just by the Pentagon. There's work being done in the interagency process with the Department of Justice. Certainly the Department of Defense is involved to determine what -- how best to comply with the Supreme Court rulings, how -- to understand them first and foremost, and see what the intent of the rulings was.

Certainly the ability to detain enemy combatants at Guantanamo is not in question. What's in question is how -- what process is established to ensure proper treatment. We've established certain processes already. There are some number of detainees down there, and Secretary England was down here this last week talking about this, who may in fact be, after review, the types of individuals that can be repatriated wherever they may come from. So I don't think anybody has a desire to see that process -- I mean, if there are people that can be released after some due process of review that we've established, it's worth considering whether that's the right and next thing to do, and we can do that and remain consistent with the Supreme Court ruling. But the fact is no decisions have been made in that regard.

Q But that process doesn't give them lawyers or provide them with access to civilian courts.

MR. DIRITA: Right.

Q Is the building perhaps considering bringing them back to the country to give them access to U.S. civilian courts?

MR. DIRITA: [..] in answer to your question, there's a range of things that are under examination to determine what is the best way to ensure that we're operating consistent with the ruling in the case of Guantanamo, but on the other side of the equation is everybody has a desire not to hold people that need not be held. And it's conceivable -- and I'm not saying this is the way it will end up -- it is conceivable that people who can be determined no longer needing to be held need not necessarily be part of a judicial process if we can make that determination short of a judicial process. That's all I'm saying, and those are the kinds of questions that are being evaluated right now. There have been no decisions as far as I know, and it's going to take time to sort through this.

July 4, 2004
DETAINEES
Officials Detail a Detainee Deal by 3 Countries