Guantanamo Inmates May Seek Release, High Court Says
(Bloomberg) — Guantanamo Bay inmates have constitutional rights and may seek release in federal court, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a rebuke to the Bush administration and Congress on their handling of accused terrorists.
The justices, voting 5-4, said a 2006 law unconstitutionally stripped Guantanamo prisoners of the right to file so-called habeas corpus petitions. The majority, pointing to the six years that some detainees have spent in captivity, said a system of limited judicial review set up by Congress didn’t adequately protect inmate rights.
“The costs of delay can no longer be borne by those who are held in custody,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “The detainees in these cases are entitled to a prompt habeas corpus hearing.”
The ruling bolsters the legal rights of the 270 inmates at Guantanamo’s Camp Delta, set up in 2002 to detain accused al- Qaeda fighters captured after the Sept. 11 attacks. More broadly, the decision may mean a more powerful wartime role for the judiciary.
The decision may further delay or even derail the criminal trials of dozens of inmates. A lawyer for Salim Hamdan, a former driver to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, said he will seek dismissal of war-crimes charges against him.
Joining Kennedy’s opinion were Justices John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented. Scalia took the unusual step of reading a summary of his dissent from the bench.
`Live to Regret’
“The nation will live to regret what the court has done today,” Scalia said in his written opinion.
President George W. Bush’s administration contended that the Constitution and its guarantee of habeas rights don’t cover enemy prisoners held outside the country, in this case on Cuban territory that the U.S. occupies under a 1903 lease. Habeas corpus is a legal device that dates back to 14th-century England and lets inmates claim they are being wrongfully held.
Kennedy wrote that Guantanamo “while technically not part of the United States, is under the complete and total control of our government.” He said the constitutional habeas guarantee “has full effect at Guantanamo Bay.”
The ruling is “everything we could have hoped for,” said David Cynamon, a lawyer representing some of the inmates at the high court. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, said the court “has upheld the Constitution of the United States.”
Bush Reaction
Bush, speaking at a news conference in Rome, said that “it’s a deeply divided court and I strongly agree with those who dissented.” He said his administration will abide by the decision.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain said the ruling “obviously concerns me; these are unlawful combatants.” Democratic candidate Barack Obama praised the decision as “a rejection of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo.”
The justices were reviewing appeals by 37 inmates being held as “enemy combatants.” The group includes six Algerian natives seized in Bosnia in 2002 and a larger group of men who were taken into custody in Afghanistan or the bordering areas of Pakistan. None of those inmates have been criminally charged, although today’s ruling will affect those who have been.
“The entire Military Commissions Act is turned on its head,” said Navy Lieutenant Commander Brian Mizer, one of Hamdan’s attorneys, referring to the 2005 law that created the procedures for criminal trials of the detainees.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
The military plans to prosecute about 80 inmates, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Prosecution efforts have stalled in recent months.
All Guantanamo inmates appear before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, or CSRT, a military panel that decides whether the men are “enemy combatants” who should remain in detention. A 2005 law gives inmates only a limited right to appeal that conclusion to a federal court in Washington.
Lawyers for the prisoners say those procedures are a poor substitute for habeas rights. During CSRT hearings, shackled inmates appear before a panel of three officers.
The inmates can’t have a lawyer present, are barred from seeing much of the evidence against them and in most circumstances can’t call witnesses in their defense. In a number of cases, a second CSRT was convened after the first panel concluded an inmate wasn’t an enemy combatant.
`Risk of Error’
Although Kennedy stopped short of saying the CSRTs themselves were unconstitutional, he said they carried “considerable risk of error” even when prosecutors were acting diligently and in good faith.
“Given that the consequence of error may be detention of persons for the duration of hostilities that may last a generation or more, this is a risk too significant too ignore,” Kennedy wrote.
He said the outcome might have been different had the case involved detainees who had been “held for a short period of time while awaiting their CSRT determinations.”
In dissent, Roberts criticized the court for striking down “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.”
Roberts predicted lengthy litigation would be necessary to sort out the precise rights detainees will have in habeas proceedings.
`Shapeless Procedures’
“The majority merely replaces a review system designed by the people’s representatives with a set of shapeless procedures to be defined by federal courts at some future date,” he said.
Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court in Washington said in a statement that he will hold a meeting of judges at the court to consider how to proceed with an expected flood of Guantanamo detainee cases. The court’s docket includes nearly 200 Guantanamo cases, most of which were on hold pending today’s decision.
Officials at Guantanamo say the CSRTs have led to the release of more than three dozen prisoners.
The cases are Boumediene v. Bush, 06-1195, and Al Odah v. United States, 06-1196.
To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net.
June 12th, 2008 | Category: Detainee, habeas corpus
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