Supreme Court Affirms Detainees' Right to Use Courts: "The Supreme Court ruled today that people being held by the United States as enemy combatants can challenge their detention in American courts - the court's most important statement in decades on the balance between personal liberties and national security.
The justices declared their findings in three rulings, two of them involving American citizens and the other addressing the status of foreigners being held at the Guant�namo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Taken together, they were a significant setback for the Bush administration's approach to the campaign against terrorism that began on Sept. 11, 2001.
'Due process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decisionmaker,' an 8-to-1 majority held in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Saudi-born United States citizen seized in Afghanistan in 2001. Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the basic outlines of the decision.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that the campaign against terrorism notwithstanding, 'a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens.'
In the Guantanamo case, the court ruled, 6 to 3, that federal courts have the jurisdiction to consider challenges to the custody of foreigners. The finding repudiated a central argument of the administration.
"Aliens at the base, like American citizens, are entitled to invoke the federal courts' authority," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. "United States courts have traditionally been open to nonresident aliens."
... "At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society," Justice Stevens wrote. "For if this nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny.""
- posted by geoff @ #