Enemy Combatants Win Right to U.S. Courts
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By ANNE GEARAN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court dealt a setback to the Bush administration's war against terrorism Monday, ruling that both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals seized as potential terrorists can challenge their treatment in U.S. courts.
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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 detain suspected terrorists or their protectors and indefinitely deny access to courts or lawyers while interrogating them.
The court did back the administration in one important respect, ruling that Congress gave President Bush ( news - web sites ) the authority to seize and hold a U.S. citizen, in this case Louisiana-born Yaser Esam Hamdi, as an alleged enemy combatant.
That bright spot for the administration was almost eclipsed, however, by the court's ruling that Hamdi can use American courts to argue that he is being held illegally. Foreign-born men held at a Navy prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, can also have their day in U.S. courts, the justices said.
Ruling in the Hamdi case, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor ( news - web sites ) said the court has "made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."
Hamdi and most of the Guantanamo detainees were picked up in antiterrorism sweeps in Afghanistan ( news - web sites) in the weeks following the attacks more than two-and-a-half years ago. They have been held without access to much of the outside world since then.
Hamdi and a few of the Guantanamo detainees have only recently been allowed to see lawyers, and none of the men has been able to see family members or other visitors.
Steven R. Shapiro, legal director of the ACLU, called the rulings "a strong repudiation of the administration's argument that its actions in the war on terrorism are beyond the rule of law and unreviewable by American courts."
The court sidestepped a third major terrorism case, ruling that a lawsuit filed on behalf of detainee Jose Padilla improperly named Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instead of the much lower-level military officer in charge of the Navy brig in South Carolina where Padilla has been held for more than two years.
Padilla must refile a lawsuit challenging his detention in a lower court.
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," 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 H. Rehnquist and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen Breyer ( news - web sites ) in her view that Congress had authorized detentions such as Hamdi's in what she called very limited circumstances.
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 H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg ( news - web sites ), 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.
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 base a legal no-man's land.
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," all of the men at issue in Monday's cases were 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 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.
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