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June 29th, 2006 - Supreme Court
Blocks Bush, Gitmo War Trials News
article by the Associated Press |
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Supreme Court Blocks Bush,
Gitmo War Trials By Gina Holland The Associated Press Thursday, June 29, 2006; 2:04 PM Washington - The Supreme
Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in
ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees, saying in a
strong rebuke that the trials were illegal under U.S. and international law. Bush said there might still
be a way to work with Congress to sanction military tribunals for detainees
and the American people should know the ruling "won't cause killers to
be put out on the street." The court declared 5-3 that
the trials for 10 foreign terror suspects violate U.S. military law and the
Geneva conventions. The ruling raises major
questions about the legal status of the approximately 450 men still being
held at the U.S. military prison in Cuba and exactly how, when and where the
administration might pursue the charges against them. It also seems likely to
further fuel international criticism of the administration, including by many
U.S. allies, for its handling of the terror war detainees at Guantanamo in
Cuba, Abu Ghraib in Iraq and elsewhere. White House counselor Dan
Bartlett said the administration's task now is mostly technical - trying to
determine how to design military tribunals that would pass muster under the
decision. Republican senators said they would cooperate. Justice John Paul Stevens,
writing for the court, said the Bush administration lacked the authority to
take the "extraordinary measure" of scheduling special military
trials for inmates, in which defendants have fewer legal protections than in
civilian U.S. courts. The decision blocked a trial
for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as a bodyguard and driver for
Osama bin Laden. Hamdan, 36, has spent four years in the U.S. prison in Cuba.
He faces a single count of conspiring to commit terrorism against U.S.
citizens from 1996 to November 2001. It was a broad defeat for
the government, which two years ago suffered a similar loss when the high
court held the president lacked authority to seize and detain terrorism
suspects and indefinitely deny them access to courts or lawyers. Thursday's vote was split
5-3, with moderate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joining the court's liberal
members in most of the ruling against the administration. Chief Justice John
Roberts, named to the lead the court last September by Bush, was sidelined in
the case because as an appeals court judge he had backed the government over
Hamdan. Thursday's ruling, the final
one of the court's term, overturned that decision. Justices began a
three-month break after releasing the ruling. Six different justices wrote
176 pages. The administration had
hinted in recent weeks that it was prepared for the court to set back its
plans for trying Guantanamo detainees. The president also has told
reporters, "I'd like to close Guantanamo." But he added, "I
also recognize that we're holding some people that are darn dangerous." The court's ruling says
nothing about whether the prison should be shut down, dealing only with plans
to put detainees on trial. "Trial by military
commission raises separation-of-powers concerns of the highest order,"
Kennedy wrote in his opinion. "Concentration of power (in the executive
branch) puts personal liberty in peril of arbitrary action by officials, an
incursion the Constitution's three-part system is designed to avoid." The prison at Guantanamo
Bay, erected in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the
United States, has been a flash point for international criticism. Hundreds
of people suspected of ties to al-Qaida and the Taliban - including some
teenagers - had been swept up by the U.S. military and secretly shipped there
since 2002. Three detainees committed
suicide there this month, using sheets and clothing to hang themselves. The
deaths brought new scrutiny and criticism of the prison, along with fresh
calls for its closing. Justice Clarence Thomas
wrote a strongly worded dissent from Thursday's ruling and took the unusual
step of reading part of it from the bench - something he had never done
before in his 15 years. He said the court's decision would "sorely hamper
the president's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy." The court's willingness,
Thomas wrote in the dissent, "to second-guess the determination of the
political branches that these conspirators must be brought to justice is both
unprecedented and dangerous." Justices Antonin Scalia and
Samuel Alito also dissented. In his own opinion, Justice
Stephen Breyer said, "Congress has not issued the executive a 'blank
check.'" "Indeed, Congress has
denied the president the legislative authority to create military commissions
of the kind at issue here. Nothing prevents the president from returning to
Congress to seek the authority he believes necessary," Breyer wrote. Justices also rejected the
Bush administration's claim that the case should be thrown out on grounds
that a new law stripped the court's authority to consider it, and that Hamdan
should not have been allowed to appeal until after the conclusion of his
trial. The court said the law
passed last year to limit lawsuits by Guantanamo detainees does not apply to
pending cases like the one brought by Hamdan. "It's certainly a nail
in the coffin for the idea that the president can set up these trials,"
said Barbara Olshansky, legal director of the Center for Constitutional
Rights, which represents about 300 Guantanamo detainees. Hamdan has claimed he is
innocent and worked as a driver for bin Laden in Afghanistan only to eke out
a living for his family. Stevens suggested that the
administration would be best off trying Hamdan and others before regular
military courts-martial trials. The case is Hamdan v. Rumsfeld,
05-184. External link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/29/AR2006062900952.html High
Court Rejects Detainee Tribunals 5 to 3 Ruling Curbs President's Claim Of
Wartime Power By Charles Lane Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, June 29, 2006; A01 Washington
- The Supreme Court yesterday struck down the military commissions President
Bush established to try suspected members of al-Qaeda, emphatically rejecting
a signature Bush anti-terrorism measure and the broad assertion of executive
power upon which the president had based it. Brushing
aside administration pleas not to second-guess the commander in chief during
wartime, a five-justice majority ruled that the commissions, which were
outlined by Bush in a military order on Nov. 13, 2001, were neither
authorized by federal law nor required by military necessity, and ran afoul
of the Geneva Conventions. As
a result, no military commission can try Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the former aide
to Osama bin Laden whose case was before the justices, or anyone else, unless
the president does one of two things he has resisted doing for more than four
years: operate the commissions by the rules of regular military
courts-martial, or ask Congress for specific permission to proceed
differently. "[I]n
undertaking to try Hamdan and subject him to criminal punishment, the
Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this
jurisdiction," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the majority opinion. While
the decision addressed only military commissions, legal analysts said its
skeptical view of presidential power could be applied to other areas such as
warrantless wiretapping, and that its invocation of the Geneva Conventions
could pave the way for new legal claims by detainees held at the military
facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The
ruling shifts the spotlight to Congress, whose members face reelection this
fall and who have largely avoided the military commission issue since the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks because of its political uncertainties. The
invitation for the president to turn to Congress was extended in a short
concurring opinion by one of the justices in the majority, Stephen G. Breyer,
who made it clear that the concerns of critics had penetrated deeply at the
court. "Where,
as here, no emergency prevents consultation with Congress, judicial
insistence upon that consultation does not weaken our Nation's ability to
deal with danger. To the contrary, that insistence strengthens the Nation's
ability to determine - through democratic means - how best to do so," Breyer
wrote. "The
Constitution places its faith in those democratic means," Breyer
concluded. "Our Court today simply does the same." Joining
Stevens and Breyer in the majority were Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, David H.
Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Perhaps
the only silver lining for the administration was that the decision did not
affect the government's authority to keep terrorism suspects at Guantanamo
Bay or elsewhere, a point Bush emphasized in his reaction. "We take the
findings seriously," he said. "The American people need to know
that this ruling, as I understand it, won't cause killers to be put out on
the street." But
the court's action was clearly a setback for the White House. At the high
court, its approach to the war on terrorism has suffered the broadest in a
series of defeats, and the administration has been sent back to the drawing
board in dealing with hundreds of suspected members of the Taliban and
al-Qaeda - at a time when international pressure is mounting to shut down
Guantanamo Bay. This
is not the situation the president envisioned when he unveiled the military
commissions as a tough-minded alternative to the civilian trials that the
Clinton administration had used against terrorists. As first outlined in
2001, the commissions did not give defendants a presumption of innocence or
guarantee a public trial. Yet
the swift and certain punishment that supporters of the commissions expected
has not materialized. The commissions quickly became mired in questions about
what many saw as their lack of due process for defendants, and about the
unilateral way in which Bush had created them. Though
the Defense Department has modified commission procedures in favor of the
accused, military and civilian lawyers continue to object that defendants
have no right to be present for the entire trial or to see all of the
evidence against them. While 14 of the 490 terrorism suspects at Guantanamo
Bay have been designated for trial, not a single case has been decided. Justices
Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented. Chief
Justice John G. Roberts Jr. did not participate because he served on the
three-judge appeals court panel whose ruling upholding the commissions was
under review. Scalia
and Thomas read their dissents from the bench, a demonstration of their
strong disapproval of the court's decision. Scalia argued that the court
should have stayed out of the case because of a law Congress passed late last
year circumscribing the appeal rights of military commission defendants. Thomas
said the majority "openly flouts our well-established duty to respect
the Executive's judgment in matters of military operations and foreign
affairs." But
center stage at yesterday's dramatic session belonged to Stevens, the
86-year-old World War II veteran who served as a Navy officer and a Supreme
Court law clerk during the late 1940s, the last time the United States made
extensive use of military commissions. Though
Stevens, the most liberal member of the court, has sometimes employed sharp
rhetoric against the Bush administration in other cases, he read a summary of
his 73-page opinion yesterday in a somber, seemingly deliberately low-key
manner. The written version seemed designed to pick apart the Bush case for
the commissions rather than denounce it. Stevens
ruled that the court had jurisdiction, rejecting the administration's
argument that it had been ousted from the case by the Detainee Treatment Act
of 2005. That law, even though it blocked habeas corpus petitions by
Guantanamo Bay prisoners and shifted all appeals regarding military tribunals
to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, did not
clearly state that it was meant to apply retroactively to Hamdan and others,
Stevens wrote. At
the heart of Stevens's reasoning was the observation that an existing
statute, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), already prescribes
broad rules for military commissions, saying that their procedures must track
those of courts-martial unless that is impractical. But
the administration's commissions, Stevens noted, do not meet this standard
because they deprive defendants of protections that are basic to the
courts-martial. The administration had cited special dangers involved in
fighting terrorism, but Stevens concluded that "nothing in the record
before us demonstrates that it would be impracticable to apply court-martial rules
in this case." Additionally,
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, a provision that guarantees
"minimum" protections for detainees, applies to the war against
al-Qaeda, and is thus a part of the "law of war," Stevens wrote. This
means that terrorism suspects benefit from Common Article 3's prohibition
against trials by anything other than "a regularly constituted court
affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable
by civilized peoples." Because
they were not properly authorized by Congress and do not match court-martial
rules, Bush's military commissions do not qualify, Stevens wrote. The
court's opinion embraced a role for international humanitarian law that the
administration has repeatedly rejected. "The
court seems to be saying that the war on terrorism at least in some regards
is governed by Common Article 3," said Michael J. Glennon, a professor
of international law at Tufts University. "That's an important
step." Legal
analysts said that the court's opinion could lead to a challenge to the
National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program, because wiretapping
is already covered by a federal statute, the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, just as military commissions were, in the court's view,
covered by the UCMJ. "The
same reasoning would seem to apply to the NSA case, because the argument that
the authorization to use military force enables them to ignore FISA goes down
the drain," said Joseph P. Onek, senior counsel of the Constitution
Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization that opposed the
commissions. ©
2006 The Washington Post Company External link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/29/AR2006062900928.html |