Guantánamo detainees to get their day in court

What happened

In a sharp rebuke to the Bush administration, the Supreme Court ruled last week that terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay have the right to challenge their detentions in a regular civilian court. By a 5–4 vote, the bitterly divided court held that this right, known as the writ of habeas corpus, is a fundamental principle of American justice that cannot be overridden during the war on terrorism. “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion. The 270 detainees left at Guantánamo will now be allowed to go to federal court and request that the government either present evidence against them or let them go.

In a scathing dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia predicted that detainees would be released only to commit acts of terrorism. The ruling “will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” he said. “The nation will live to regret what the court has done today.” A visibly angry President Bush said he agreed with Scalia and the other conservative dissenters. “We’ll abide by the court’s decision,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.”

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What the editorials said

Bush is right—the task of protecting the country against terrorism is too important to leave in the hands of unelected, unaccountable judges, said the New York Daily News. Congress and the president had already established a review process for the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, modeled after the Geneva Conventions, to ensure that detainees can challenge the allegations against them in military tribunals. But that wasn’t good enough for the Supreme Court, which chose to place “extreme legal niceties over national security.”

National security is not at stake here, said USA Today. The court did not order Bush to shut down Guantánamo or free any terrorists. It merely said that the government cannot hold a person indefinitely without showing an independent judge or jury some evidence of wrongdoing. Is that really so onerous? Let’s not forget that the Bush administration was forced to release hundreds of long-term Gitmo detainees because they were either innocent or were simple foot soldiers sold to the U.S. by bounty hunters. These abuses of justice have given the U.S. “a black eye throughout much of the world.’’

What the columnists said

In a nation founded on a profound respect for individual liberty and the rule of law, why is this a controversial ruling? asked Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. “It’s hard for me to believe that arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, and torture continue to be debated, as if there were pros and cons.” The administration, Scalia, and their conservative allies seem to believe that fears of terrorism trump the Constitution and all basic human rights. But surely we’d all be safer if the government and police could permanently lock up anybody who might be a criminal or a terrorist. “If the only thing that mattered were security, why would we bother to have an independent judiciary?”

Bush only has himself to blame here, said Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune. The president and his aides have been asserting that he has “near-absolute authority to wage this war,” with the power to throw anyone—even American citizens—behind bars without charges or judicial review. It’s hardly surprising that the courts have felt it necessary to stop this attempt to turn the president into “a virtual monarch.”

Congress can still step in and minimize the damage from this reckless ruling, said Andrew McCarthy in National Review Online. The Supreme Court may have handed the fate of the detainees to federal courts, but “it is Congress that enacts rules of procedure and evidence.” Building on existing law governing pretrial detention in criminal cases, Congress can order federal judges to grant the government a presumption in favor of detention, unless a detainee can prove “beyond a reasonable doubt that he was not an enemy combatant.’’

What next?

Republican presidential nominee John McCain this week called the ruling “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.” Democratic nominee Barack Obama praised it, and called for Guantánamo to be shut down. “The Supreme Court,” said Linda Greenhouse in The New York Times, “finds itself on the verge of becoming something that it has not been for many election cycles—a campaign issue.”