US Supreme Court: Gitmo Prisoners Have Habeus Corpus Rights

This is a major victory for the prisoners and yet another slap in the face from the court to the Bush administration.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.
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Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."
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It was not immediately clear whether this ruling, unlike the first two, would lead to prompt hearings for the detainees, some of whom have been held more than 6 years. Roughly 270 men remain at the island prison, classified as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The ruling could resurrect many detainee lawsuits that federal judges put on hold pending the outcome of the high court case. The decision sent judges, law clerks and court administrators scrambling to read Kennedy's 70-page opinion and figure out how to proceed. Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth said he would call a special meeting of federal judges to address how to handle the cases.

And here's Scalia's version of judicial "wisdom":

Scalia said the nation is "at war with radical Islamists" and that the court's decision "will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

Shorter Scalia: FEAR blah blah blah FEAR blah blah blah.

And the article also reminds us of how the Republicans have subverted the constitution every chance they got:

The court has ruled twice previously that people held at Guantanamo without charges can go into civilian courts to ask that the government justify their continued detention. Each time, the administration and Congress, then controlled by Republicans, changed the law to try to close the courthouse doors to the detainees.

They won't get away with that this time around.

The disposition of Omar Khadr's trial will likely be affected by this decision as well and the fact that we've now learned that notes about his detention were destroyed and that the judge handling his case was most likely dismissed because he ruled against US government lawyers should be more than enough for our Conservative government to stop stonewalling on bringing him home. It should be but since they don't even care that he was a child soldier when he was picked up - the first to be charged with war crimes - I'm sure we'll just keep getting the same "let the legal process play out" talking point in response to these developments. Like it was ever a legitimate legal process to begin with.
 

The Continuing Imprisonment of Omar Khadr

This is an absolute disgrace:

OTTAWA – A Guantanamo judge has dismissed an argument that Omar Khadr was a child soldier when he was captured in Afghanistan and so in need of protection, not prosecution. The ruling clears the way for the Toronto detainee’s trial.

U.S. Army Col. Peter Brownback’s ruling today, which upholds the Pentagon’s position that there is no minimum age for prosecution for war crimes, comes on the heels of an appearance by Khadr’s U.S. military lawyer before Canadian legislators.

That flies in the face of international law and basic morality and despite domestic and international pressure, Canada's Conservative government absolutely refuses to act until all legal proceedings and appeals have been exhausted with their useless foreign affairs minister, Maxime Bernier, towing the party line by stating that they're not concerned because he's "being well-treated".

That's not the point and we have no way of knowing if that's actually true, especially since Khadr's lawyers claim that he has been tortured and mistreated to the point where his psychological and physical well-being is at serious risk:

Mr. Edney said that when he saw Mr. Khadr recently, his client was so mentally debilitated that he wanted nothing more than crayons and some paper to colour on. Contrary to federal government assurances that Mr. Khadr is doing just fine, Mr. Edney said, his client is actually "ill and going blind. He needs all sorts of help."

The secrecy involved in these so-called tribunals also ought to be enough cause for concern as the Bush administration keeps changing the rules:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration assured the Supreme Court last December that Guantanamo Bay prisoners who felt they were unfairly being detained could have their cases thoroughly reviewed by a federal appeals court. Now, it's not so clear.

When the first case arrived at the appeals court, the Justice Department told the judges they could look at the evidence but should act on the assumption that the military made the right decisions at Guantanamo Bay.

That assertion led to a testy exchange recently between Appellate Judge Merrick B. Garland and Justice Department attorney Gregory Katsas. Garland wanted an explanation for the contradiction. Katsas said there was no contradiction at all.

The exchange underscores the challenge facing the administration: It doesn't want judges overseeing terrorism cases, but it can't eliminate them from the process without first getting their approval.

Normally, a prisoner who believes he's being unfairly detained can ask the courts to free him. It's a right known as habeas corpus that dates back to the 1300s and was written into the Constitution.

But the administration says that right does not exist for Guantanamo detainees. For years, administration officials have tried to limit judges' role in hearing detainees' cases and twice the administration has been set back by the Supreme Court.
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The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on the new detainee law. In doing so, it might spell out what role the appeals court is supposed to play.

It may sound like a mere argument about words — a semantics debate between "preponderance" and "deferential" — but the outcome will help determine how much oversight courts have over what happens at Guantanamo Bay.

The legal quagmire has gone on for years while the Gitmo prisoners are held in a hellish limbo while being presumed guilty.

Meanwhile:

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, April 28 -- The Defense Department's former chief prosecutor for terrorism cases appeared Monday at the controversial U.S. detention facility here to argue on behalf of a terrorism suspect [Salim Ahmed Hamdan], that the military justice system has been corrupted by politics and inappropriate influence from senior Pentagon officials.

Sitting just feet from the courtroom table where he had once planned to make cases against military detainees, Air Force Col. Morris Davis instead took the witness stand to declare under oath that he felt undue pressure to hurry cases along so that the Bush administration could claim before political elections that the system was working.

Davis told Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred, who presided over the hearing, that top Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, made it clear to him that charging some of the highest-profile detainees before elections this year could have "strategic political value."

Davis said he wants to wait until the cases -- and the military commissions system -- have a more solid legal footing. He also said that Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II, who announced his retirement in February, once bristled at the suggestion that some defendants could be acquitted, an outcome that Davis said would give the process added legitimacy.

"He said, 'We can't have acquittals,' " Davis said under questioning from Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, the military counsel who represents Hamdan. " 'We've been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.' "

Does anybody, including our foreign affairs minister, need any more evidence that the entire military tribunals process is just a political farce created by an imperialist administration bent on justifying to the public that its 'war on terror' is supposedly succeeding at the expense of defendants whose fates are predetermined?

Several other countries have long ago repatriated their citizens who were interred at the Gitmo gulag, yet Canada's government - holding on to its Bush poodle status even though he will soon be a distant memory (good riddance) - continues to try to boost the political image of the Republicans by using Omar Khadr as a political pawn. If only there was a way to hold this government criminally responsible for abandoning the one Canadian citizen left rotting in Gitmo.

The situation is simple: Canada's Conservatives are complicit in the prosecution and mistreatment of a child soldier and there is absolutely no defence for that.
 

Charges Against Hamden Dismissed as Well

If Bush and his legal advisers weren't steaming mad earlier today when the charges against Omar Khadr were dismissed, I imagine their heads exploded shortly thereafter.

Via The Guardian:

The Bush administration's plans to bring detainees at Guantánamo Bay to trial were thrown into chaos yesterday when military judges threw out all charges against a detainee held there since he was 15 and dismissed charges against another detainee who chauffeured Osama bin Laden.

In back-to-back arraignments for the Canadian Omar Khadr and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni national, the US military's cases against the alleged al-Qaida figures were dismissed because, the judges said, the government had failed to establish jurisdiction.

As The Guardian notes, the Hamdan case was the one that ended up in the Supreme Court which sent the issue back to congress to fix.

Mr Hamdan last year won a US supreme court challenge that led to the scrapping of the first Guantánamo tribunal system.

Yesterday's [Monday's] rulings also suggest that none of the 385 other detainees at Guantánamo, held for more than five years without charge, can be brought to trial before the tribunals because they too have been designated merely as "enemy combatants", lawyers said yesterday.
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It exposes the hastiness with which Congress moved in October to bring in legislation authorising the tribunals after the supreme court threw out the earlier version.

Now, once again barely a year later, the tribunals have been thrown into legal limbo at their first outing.

Just how many shots does the Bush administration get at going after these detainees? Until they get it right, apparently.

Ms Huskey said that amid the confusion, one thing appeared clear. The detainees, held without charge since 2002, were likely to face further delays before having their day in court. "What it does mean for Omar and all the detainees is that they are going to have a whole new process so that everyone can be charged," she said.

Related:

The wiki version of Hamdan v Rumsfeld
My earlier post about Omar Khadr. (Good discussion and more links in the comments there.)
The New York Times has more about the legal ramifications along with this reaction from the Pentagon:

The White House declined on Monday night to comment on the decisions. Beth G. Kubala, an Army major who is the spokeswoman for the Office of Military Commissions at the Pentagon, said that the day’s ruling demonstrated that the military judges operated independently. But she suggested that the military did not view the double defeat as paralyzing to its prosecutions of war crimes.

“The public should make no assumptions,” Ms. Kubala said, “about the future of military commissions.”