History Forum / General / British History / February 2007

"U.S. citizens and foreigners being held inside the country normally have
the right to contest their detention before a judge. The Justice Department
said foreign enemy combatants are not protected by the Constitution."

DSH
--------------------------------------------------------

Court: Detainees Can't Challenge Cases

Feb 20 10:47 AM US/Eastern

By MATT APUZZO
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Guantanamo Bay detainees may not challenge their
detention in U.S. courts, a federal appeals court said Tuesday in a ruling
upholding a key provision of a law at the center of President Bush's anti-
terrorism plan.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled
2-1 that civilian courts no longer have the authority to consider whether
the military is illegally holding foreigners.

Barring detainees from the U.S. court system was a key provision in
the Military Commissions Act, which Bush pushed through Congress last year
to set up a system to prosecute terrorism suspects.

The ruling is all but certain to be appealed to the Supreme Court,
which last year struck down the Bush administration's original plan for
trying detainees before military commissions.

The Military Commissions Act was crafted in response to that decision
and the president hailed it as a necessary tool for bringing terror suspects
to justice.

Civil libertarians and leading Democrats decried the law as
unconstitutional and a violation of American values. The law allows the
government to indefinitely detain foreigners who have been designed as
"enemy combatants" and authorizes the CIA to use aggressive but undefined
interrogation tactics.

But the most criticized provision of the law was the one stripping
U.S. courts of the authority to hear arguments from detainees who said they
were being held illegally.

Attorneys argued that the detainees aren't covered by that provision
and that the law is unconstitutional.

"The arguments are creative but not cogent. To accept them would be to
defy the will of Congress," Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote.

U.S. citizens and foreigners being held inside the country normally
have the right to contest their detention before a judge. The Justice
Department said foreign enemy combatants are not protected by the
Constitution.

Randolph and Judge David B. Sentelle ordered that the hundreds of
cases pending in the lower courts be dismissed.

Judge Judith W. Rogers dissented, saying the cases should proceed.

"District courts are well able to adjust these proceedings in light of
the government's significant interests in guarding national security,"
Rogers wrote.