Law: Court supports Guantanamo inmates
Hundreds of prisoners who've been stripped of all semblance of due process by the U. S. government now can hope for a chance at freedom. Most of them have been held without hearings for years. The men detained are accused of having links to Al Qaeda or other terrorist group. The Bush administration has claimed that since the prisoners are not American citizens and are not being held on American soil, they have no rights. A U.S. District Court says otherwise.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Guantanamo Bay terrorism suspects have the constitutional right to pursue lawsuits challenging their imprisonment, a federal judge ruled on Monday in a defeat for the Bush administration that struck down how the U.S. military reviewed their cases.
The prisoners at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have the constitutional right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law, U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green said.
She ruled that the special military tribunals to determine the status of each Guantanamo detainee as an "enemy combatant" violated the constitutional protection of a fair hearing. Such a designation allows the government to hold the suspects indefinitely.
Green said the procedures failed to give the detainees access to material evidence and failed to let lawyers help them when the government refused to disclose classified information.
In addition to those constitutional defects applying to all the cases, Green also cited problems with the tribunals relying on statements possibly obtained by torture or coercion, and by using a vague and overly broad definition of enemy combatant.
Though there were 50 named plaintiffs, the ruling probably applies to most of the 550 inmates at Guantanamo Bay. The Bush administration tried to evade the constitutional issues by setting up a form of tribunal that it claimed replaced judicial review. The body, called the "Combatant Status Review Tribunal," used evidence that would not be admissible in normal judicial proceedings. In fact, some of the evidence may have been obtained by torture. Once an inmate was designated an enemy combatant, he was deprived of the right to due process that normally applies to U.S. citizens, and, foreign nationals charged with crimes in the U.S.
Judge Green was unrelenting in her disapproval of the special tribunal. But, earlier this month, another federal judge ruled that the procedure is legal.
The Washington Post reports.
In a 34-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said that Congress has granted President Bush the authority to detain foreign enemy combatants outside the United States for the duration of the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban, and that the courts have little power to review the conditions under which such prisoners are held.
In a 34-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said that Congress has granted President Bush the authority to detain foreign enemy combatants outside the United States for the duration of the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban, and that the courts have little power to review the conditions under which such prisoners are held.
Leon's decision was the first district court interpretation of the Supreme Court's ruling last year in Rasul v. Bush , which affirmed that the Guantanamo detainees, who number about 550, have the right to ask federal judges to release them through a writ of habeas corpus.
Ultimately, the controversy will likely be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Reasonably related
It is believed that some of the abusive practices that later surfaced at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were in use in Guantanamo Bay.
