In separate rulings Monday, the court said that the foreign prisoners being held without charges at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and U.S. citizens held by the military as “enemy combatants” are entitled to appeal their imprisonment in federal courts. These were welcome victories for habeas corpus, one of the great principles of American jurisprudence and one that, regrettably, has been under siege of late. They were also forceful rebukes to the Bush administration, which since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks has seemed intent on broadening its powers to such an extent that a person’s right to challenge his or her imprisonment before a judge can be arbitrarily subverted.
One of the cases the court ruled on was brought by 14 of the almost 600 Guantanamo detainees. They insisted they had not engaged in combat against the U.S. in Afghanistan but, rather, were wrongly — or perhaps mistakenly — arrested in the confusion after the quick overthrow of the Taliban regime in late 2001 and 2002. The administration responded that the courts had no jurisdiction over Guantanamo, and that prisoners held outside the U.S. were not entitled to turn to American courts for relief. It cited, too, a 1950 Supreme Court case in which habeas corpus was denied to 21 Germans who had been captured in China after their country’s surrender and convicted of assisting the Japanese, who were still at war with the U.S.
The justices correctly gave short shrift to the Guantanamo argument, noting that the military base there has been under the U.S.’s “complete control and jurisdiction” for more than 100 years, as Fidel Castro might attest. And in the words of Justice John Paul Stevens, the detainees, unlike the Germans, who faced a military tribunal, “are not nationals of countries at war with the U.S., and they deny that they have engaged in or plotted acts of aggression against the U.S.; they have never been afforded access to any tribunal, much less charged and convicted of any wrongdoing.” In voting 6-3, the Supreme Court overturned federal district court and appeals court rulings that had sided with the administration.
The second case, in which the court delivered an even more emphatic 8-1 decision, was brought by Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Louisiana-born Saudi-American seized in Afghanistan. The government said that Hamdi was fighting for the Taliban and argued that the military has the right to hold him indefinitely without access to federal court. The court found that Hamdi is entitled to a lawyer and a hearing, though, somewhat problematically, it did not specify what kind of hearing he should be granted.
That omission notwithstanding, it is heartening that the Supreme Court, whose decisions often betray starkly ideological divisions among the justices, so strongly acknowledged that habeas corpus is as much a part of the bedrock of democracy as one-man, one-vote. Wrongful imprisonment is a tactic of tyrants. It has no place in our country. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor so eloquently noted, “It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation’s commitment to due process is most severely tested, and it is in these times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad.”