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WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court Thursday ruled prisoners at the
Guantanamo military base have a right to challenge their detention
in US civilian courts, dealing a stiff rebuke to the Bush
administration.
“The laws and constitution are designed to
survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” the court
said in its historic ruling, the third blow in four years to the
government’s case for trying “war on terror” suspects in
military tribunals. “Liberty and security can be reconciled; and
in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the
law.”
The court ruled by five to four that prisoners
in the US military prison in southeastern Cuba “have the
constitutional privilege of habeas corpus.”
President George W. Bush said he would abide by
the decision but disagreed with it, and would consider seeking new
legislation, while the Pentagon said it would examine the
implications of the ruling.
“It’s a Supreme Court decision, we’ll
abide by the court’s decision. That doesn’t mean I have to agree
with it,” Bush said from Rome during a European tour.
Thursday’s ruling should now give the
prisoners and their legal teams the right to demand to know on what
basis they are being held.
So far the Bush administration has refused to
unveil the body of evidence to justify the prisoners’ continued
detention, saying it would endanger national security.
It was not immediately clear how Thursday’s
ruling would affect those 270 detainees still held in the jail,
opened in January 2002 to deal with suspects rounded up in the US
“war on terror.”
Two-thirds of the 800 prisoners who have passed
through Guantanamo’s barbed-wire gates have been freed, mostly
without charge, after several years in captivity.
Australian David Hicks is the only “war on
terror” detainee to have so far been sentenced at Guantanamo after
pleading guilty in a deal which allowed him to serve out his
nine-month term at home.
Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said the
department was disappointed with the ruling and would review it, but
noted that it did not directly affect the 20 Guantanamo detainees
who currently face trial before military commissions, and military
commission trials will continue to go forward.
Those trials include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
considered the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks
in the United States, and Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Hamdan.
The Supreme Court took up the issue of
Guantanamo inmates in 2004 and again in 2006, ruling both times that
detainees had a statutory—legal but not constitutional—right to
contest their indefinite detention.
-- AFP
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