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Supreme Court: Gitmo Military Trials Illegal
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday strongly limited the power of the Bush administration to conduct military tribunals for suspected terrorists imprisoned overseas at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The 5-3 ruling means officials will have to come up with a new policy to prosecute at least 10 so-called "enemy combatants" awaiting trial -- it does not dispute the government's right to detain suspects.
At the center of the dispute was a Yemeni man, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's driver and bodyguard.
Hamdan's lawyers argued that Bush exceeded his authority by setting up military commissions to try terrorist suspects, whom the administration terms "enemy combatants," rather than prisoners of war.
The administration's position was that the term means detainees do not have the rights traditionally afforded prisoners of war, as outlined in the Geneva Conventions.
The enemy combatant designation, according to the Bush administration, means the suspect can be held without charges in a military prison without the protections of the U.S. criminal justice system, such as the right to counsel -- a status the court rejected.
The detention center opened in 2002, after the war in Afghanistan, and is still holding indefinitely about 460 men suspected of links to al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The case was a major test of President Bush's authority as commander in chief in during war. Bush has aggressively asserted the power of the government to capture, detain, and prosecute suspected terrorists in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
"The military commission at issue is not expressly authorized by any congressional act," said Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority. The tribunals, he said, "must be understood to incorporate at least the barest of those trial protections that have been recognized by customary international law."
"In undertaking to try Hamdan and subject him to criminal punishment, the executive (Bush) is bound to comply with the rule of law that prevails in this jurisdiction," Stevens said.
Three issues were before the high court: whether the planned tribunals are a proper exercise of presidential authority; whether detainees facing prosecution have the right to challenge the procedures of those tribunals and their detentions; and whether the Supreme Court even has the jurisdiction to hear such appeals.
The administration had argued the president has long enjoyed wide discretion in his role as commander in chief.
"This is the president invoking an authority that he's exercised in virtually every war that we've had," Solicitor General Paul Clement told the justices. He argued that the Guantanamo detainees are enemy combatants, who are not afforded the rights of prisoners of war in the traditional sense, since terrorists do not fight on behalf of a country or recognized army.
Late last year, Congress passed and President Bush signed the Detainee Treatment Act, which ostensibly limited court intervention over the prisoner issue.
Hamdan's attorney, Neal Katyal, told the justices, "If you adopt the government's reading here, they have said they want to try 75 military commission cases or so in the first wave, you will then be left with 75 trials that take place without even the most basic question of what the parameters are that these commissions are operating under."
Katyal said the government's charge of conspiracy against Hamdan is not allowed under international standards of law for prisoners of war, and that earlier federal courts had rejected that standard as well, since it was too broadly defined.
President Bush on Wednesday said he was considering shutting the overseas prison at Guantanamo, and was to decide after the court made its decision. "I'd like to end Gitmo, like it to be over with," he said at a European Union summit in Vienna.
"One of the things we will do is that we will send people back to their homes countries. We have about 400 people left 200 have been sent back. There are some who need to be tried in U.S. courts. They are cold-blooded killers. They will murder somebody if they are let out on the street. And yet we believe there ought to be a way forward in the court of law."
Many world leaders have pressured Bush to close the camp.
Chief Justice John Roberts did not participate in the Hamdan case. He had ruled against the government last year when the case was argued in a lower federal appeals court.
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