Crossroads for detainees

After four years in operation, America's terrorist prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is at a crossroads.

Will it return to its roots: a kind of rights-free zone where Al Qaeda suspects are interrogated with little judicial oversight? Or will it become an ever stronger magnet for vigorous legal challenges, based on alleged violations of international human rights, the Geneva accords, American law, and US constitutional protections?

The White House, Congress, and the courts have all weighed in on the issue. Now the matter is before two key courts, whose rulings will help define not just the scope of judicial oversight at Guantánamo, but perhaps also the role of America's system of divided government in wartime.

To opponents, Guantánamo symbolizes all that is wrong with the administration's approach to terrorism. A draft report for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights concludes that US treatment of the detainees has violated international law and, at times, has amounted to torture, the Los Angeles Times reported.

"I do think we'll look back on it [as] a period of horrible shame and regret for how we treated people, how we disobeyed our own law and international law," says Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

But to the administration and its supporters, Guantánamo is a necessary innovation to wage and win a new kind of warfare involving an enemy plotting to kill as many Americans as possible.

Guantánamo was built not merely to warehouse war prisoners for the duration of the war on terror, but to create a mechanism to pry intelligence information from suspected Al Qaeda supporters. When suspects began arriving at the US Navy base in January 2002, critics warned that they were being dumped into a legal black hole.

But the Supreme Court and several federal judges have since ruled in the detainees' favor, spawning a blitz of lawsuits filed on behalf of more than 500 detainees, attacking the legality of key parts of the administration's war on terror.

Then, on Dec. 30, 2005, Congress entered the fray by passing a law stripping the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear pretrial appeals in Guantánamo cases.

What exactly the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 requires, however, is hotly debated by legal analysts.

The first indication of how the courts may view Guantánamo's future role will probably come from the Supreme Court. On Friday, the justices are scheduled to consider at their closed-door conference a Bush administration motion that the high court dismiss the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden. Mr. Hamdan's case is one of the most important of the high court's current term. It is a test of the legality of President Bush's military commission process.

Hamdan was scheduled to face war-crimes charges before a military commission at Guantánamo in 2004. On the eve of his trial, a federal judge in Washington agreed with Hamdan that the commission process was illegal. That ruling was overturned by a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The case is now before the Supreme Court. But after it agreed to hear the case, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act.

Page: 1 | 2