NEW YORK, 3 July 2004 — A major legal landmark happened this week in Washington when two rulings by the US Supreme Court disputed the sweeping wartime powers claimed by President George W. Bush.
First is the case of Yaser Hamdi, the American citizen captured amongst the Taleban in Afghanistan. The Supreme Court rejected the administration’s claim that military authorities could hold a US citizen as an “enemy combatant” ad infinitum and deny him the opportunity to contest his imprisonment before a neutral decision maker.
Then, in a law suit brought by 14 foreign nationals, the Supreme Court rejected the government’s argument that just because the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay is ostensibly under Cuban sovereignty, US courts lack jurisdiction to legal claims brought by persons who had no choice as to where the US military chose to detain them.
The United States might head off legal challenges to detentions of suspected Al-Qaeda and Taleban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, by releasing those who no longer need to be held, a Pentagon spokesman said.
Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita said no decision had been made on how to respond to Supreme Court rulings this week, but he said “everybody has a desire not to hold people that need not be held.”
“It is conceivable that people who can be determined no longer needing to be held, need not necessarily be part of a judicial process if we can make that determination short of a judicial process,” he said.
DiRita noted that a panel has been formed under Navy Secretary Gordon England to do case-by-case reviews of detainees at Guantanamo to determine whether they no longer pose a threat and can be released.
“If there are people that can be released, after some due process of review that we’ve established, it’s worth considering whether that’s the right next thing to do, and we can do that and remain consistent with the Supreme Court ruling,” he said.
About 595 suspected Taleban and Al-Qaeda prisoners are being held at Guantanamo, most of whom were captured in Afghanistan more than two years ago. The Pentagon has released 134 other detainees following agreements with the governments of the nationals involved.
Another six detainees have been designated as candidates for trial by special US military commissions, but charges have only been filed against three detainees more than two years after their capture.
The Supreme Court ruling raised the prospect of court challenges across the country on behalf of the remaining prisoners at the maximum security detention center at Guantanamo. The Los Angeles Times reported this week that one option under consideration by Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers was to move the prisoners from Guantanamo to a detention facility in the United States so that all proceedings could be consolidated in one place. DiRita evaded a question about whether such a move was under consideration.
He said lawyers from across the government were examining the rulings “to understand them, first and foremost, and see what the intent of the rulings was.”
Asked in a radio interview Wednesday for the administration’s response to the high court’s ruling, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, “Well, thus far, it’s been silence and consideration.”
Rumsfeld has said in the past that evidence that would stand up in court was often lacking against detainees because of the chaotic conditions under which they were captured.
The US interest was to keep them off the battlefield and hold them as long as they might be of intelligence value, he has said.
The US government believed the remote US Navy base in Cuba was beyond the reach of the US courts, and so built a large prison facility there to house prisoners captured during the war in Afghanistan in 2001.
