A federal appeals court upheld the Military Commissions Act: Findlaw for the Public -.
(AP) - WASHINGTON-Guantanamo Bay detainees may not challenge their detention in U.S. courts, a federal appeals court said Tuesday, a ruling that upholds a crucial provision of a law at the center of President George W. Bush's campaign against terror.
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 U.S. military is holding foreigners illegally at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba.
Barring detainees from the U.S. court system was a primary provision in the Military Commissions Act, which Bush pushed through Congress last year to set up a system to prosecute terror suspects.
The ruling is all but certain to be appealed to the U.S. 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 Bush described 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 detain indefinitely foreigners who have been designed as "enemy combatants" and authorizes the CIA to use aggressive but undefined interrogation tactics.
The most criticized provision of the law was the one stripping U.S. courts of the authority to hear arguments from detainees who contended they were being held illegally.
Attorneys argued that the detainees are not covered by that provision, and 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 within the United States 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 continue.
"District courts are well able to adjust these proceedings in light of the government's significant interests in guarding national security," Rogers wrote.
with this recent ruling the onus is definitely on the legislature and on grass-roots organizing to keep the issue of habeas restoration alive.
join us at:
projecthamad.org
--read our blog entry "Behind the Black Robes" where we uncover the backgrounds of the 2 judges, Sentelle and Randolph, who ruled to uphold the Military Commissions Act
--read Brandon Mayfield, the U.S. citizen and attorney who was wrongly incarcerated for the Madrid bombings, who blogs about his case against the U.S. government concerning the constitutionality of the Patriot Act
projecthamad.org/blog
additionally we have the video testimony that Guantanamo detainee Adel Hamad's lawyers released on YouTube (with 68,000 views so far) after all legal recourse for their client was blocked
join the project!!
Posted by: david | February 22, 2007 at 12:04 AM