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Limbo continues for
Guantanamo prisoners
Habeas corpus, Latin for "you have the body" is one of the bedrocks of American legal rights - and international law as well.
It grants someone who is jailed by the government the right to know what the charges are and to challenge those allegations publicly in court.
But it doesn't apply to the hundreds of "no-bodies" being held by the U.S. military at its base in Guantanamo, Cuba.
Sadly the federal court of appeals for the District of Columbia held recently that the rights of habeus corpus do not apply to those persons designated "enemy combatants" by the Bush administration held at Guantanamo.
No matter that the United States has held the base at Guantanamo for more than 100 years with an indefinite lease. "Cuba, not the United States, has sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay," the judges held. Really? Are we to assume then that those held at the U.S. military base can appeal their jailings to Fidel Castro? We think not.
So, then, according to this court, the government can offshore prisoners held on whatever flimsy pretext or hearsay evidence and not have to make a public accounting.
The Constitution holds that habeas corpus cannot be suspended by Congress except in cases of invasion or rebellion. Clearly that has not happened, either.
What has happened is that the Bush administration wanted a free hand in dealing with prisoners swept up in Afghanistan and elsewhere without anyone looking over their shoulder. The military and the administration called them the "worst of the worst", but many were detained solely on the basis of hearsay and dozens have already been released.
The U.S. Supreme Court has twice rejected the administration's arguments on the open-ended detention of "enemy combatants". Instead of abiding by those rulings, the administration importuned the then Republican-controlled Congress to pass the Military Commissions Act to give the administration the power to try prisoners using military tribunals instead of the federal courts where the demands of proof are much greater.
There are those who are quite comfortable with the use of military tribunals, especially now that Congress has officially bought into that system of trial. The Wall Street Journal editorialized last week, "We never had a problem with the Bush administration's plan to set up military commissions shortly after 9/11."
Certainly such tribunals have had a place in U.S. history and have been used repeatedly in nation vs. nation wars and our own Civil War.
Whether they should be the chosen judicial instrument in an open-ended, borderless "war on terror" is open to debate.
Others argue the military tribunal system is secret, affords the accused less chance of presenting his or her case or contesting even hearsay evidence and is notoriously effective in gaining convictions.
We noted one column in the Roanoke Times over the weekend citing a study by Seton Hall School of Law that reviewed 517 of the Guantanamo detentions and found that only five percent of them had been captured by U.S. forces. Ninety percent of them "were rounded up by Pakistani and Afghan Northern Alliance forces or warlords for bounties of as much as $20,000 each - a fortune in that poor region - and placed in U.S. custody."
Bounty justice deliberated in secret hardly seems up to the due process standards that Americans expect of a legal system.
If the Supreme Court does not overturn the appeals court decision on habeas corpus, Congress should go back and re-examine what it wrought last fall.
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