Supreme Court Rejects Guantanamo War Crimes Trials
The Reminder
The Subtance
Let the right wing bloviating about "activist courts" begin!
On the other hand...
Justices Reject Pact In Ruling Against Noncitizen Suspects
In 5-3 Decision, Justices Rebuke Bush's Anti-Terror Policy
By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 29, 2006; 10:44 AM
The Supreme Court today delivered a stunning rebuke to the Bush administration over its plans to try Guantanamo detainees before military commissions, ruling that the commissions are unconstitutional.
In a 5-3 decision, the court said the trials were not authorized under U.S. law or the Geneva Conventions. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the opinion in the case, called Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. recused himself from the case.
The ruling, which overturned a federal appeals court decision in which Roberts had participated, represented a defeat for President Bush, who had ordered military trials for detainees at the Guantanamo Bay naval base. About 450 detainees captured in the war on terrorism are currently held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.
The case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 36-year-old Yemeni with links to al-Qaeda, was considered a key test of the judiciary's power during wartime and carried the potential to make a lasting impact on American law. It challenged the very legality of the military commissions established by President Bush to try terrorism suspects.
The case raised core constitutional principles of separation of powers as well as fundamental issues of individual rights. Specifically, the questions concerned:
# The power of Congress and the executive to strip the federal courts and the Supreme Court of jurisdiction.
# The authority of the executive to lock up individuals under claims of wartime power, without benefit of traditional protections such as a jury trial, the right to cross-examine one's accusers and the right to judicial appeal.
# The applicability of international treaties -- specifically the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war -- to the government's treatment of those it deems "enemy combatants."
Hamdan was captured by Afghan militiamen in late November 2001 after the radical Islamic Taliban movement was driven from power in Afghanistan by U.S.-backed Afghan forces. He was subsequently turned over to U.S. authorities, who sent him to the U.S. detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba in 2002.
He acknowledged that he had worked as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden, whom he met in Afghanistan in 1996. But he denied having any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks carried out by bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
On Nov. 13, 2001 -- the day the Afghan capital, Kabul, fell to U.S.-backed forces after five years of Taliban rule -- President Bush issued Military Order No. 1 declaring that military commissions would try foreign terrorist suspects for alleged war crimes and sentence them to punishments including death. The administration argued that the commissions were authorized by laws on military justice, by a congressional resolution passed on Sept. 14, 2001, and by the powers vested in the president as commander in chief under the U.S. Constitution.
Hamdan later became one of the first 10 detainees at Guantanamo chosen to face military trials. He was charged in July 2004 with conspiracy to commit terrorism and war crimes while serving as a weapons courier and driver for bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda members. If convicted, he faced a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Military prosecutors alleged that Hamdan delivered arms, ammunition and other supplies to al-Qaeda fighters, picked up weapons at Taliban warehouses and drove or accompanied bin Laden to appearances at al-Qaeda training camps and other events. During these appearances, bin Laden would give speeches encouraging followers to carry out suicide attacks and engage in holy war against Americans, the prosecution alleged.
Specifically, prosecutors charged, Hamdan served as a driver in a convoy in which bin Laden fled potential U.S. reprisal attacks in Afghanistan at the time of the al-Qaeda bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. In addition, he allegedly received weapons training at al-Qaeda's Farouq training camp in southern Afghanistan on various occasions between 1996 and 2001.
In April 2004, Hamdan, represented by Georgetown University law professor Neal K. Katyal, , filed a petition for habeas corpus, challenging the legality of his detention. While the petition was pending before the U.S. District Court in Washington, the government formally filed the conspiracy charges against him and set in motion his trial before a military commission.
In August 2004, Hamdan appeared in a makeshift courtroom at Guantanamo as the U.S. military formally opened its first trial of an alleged al-Qaeda collaborator. His appearance, after nearly three years in detention, marked the first time that the United States had used military commissions to try war crimes suspects since World War II.
Hamdan's military attorney promptly attacked the military commission process, calling it unfair, and challenged the qualifications of the presiding officer and several other members.
In November 2004, the U.S. District Court granted Hamdan's habeas petition in part, ordering a halt to the military commission. The court ruled that Hamdan could not be tried by a military commission unless a competent tribunal determined that he was actually an "unlawful combatant" and not a prisoner of war under the 1949 Geneva Convention.
Hamdan maintained that instead of facing a military commission under a presidential order, he should be tried by a court martial under the U.S. Code of Military Justice in accordance with the 1949 convention. That would afford him the same rights accorded to U.S. military personnel tried by courts martial, rather than the restrictions he would encounter in a military commission. Human rights groups have charged that the commissions' rules do not meet international standards for fair trials.
The Bush administration appealed the District Court's ruling, and the Defense Department meanwhile gave Hamdan and other Guantanamo detainees hearings before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal. In Hamdan's case, the tribunal affirmed that he was an enemy combatant requiring continued detention. It said he was "either a member of or affiliated with al-Qaeda."
In July 2005, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned the District Court's decision, breathing new life into the military commissions. The appeals court said the Geneva Convention does not apply to al-Qaeda members and that the military commissions were authorized by Congress.
The Supreme Court agreed in November last year to hear Hamdan's appeal of the ruling. Chief Justice Roberts, one of the judges who voted against Hamdan's appeal when he served on the appeals court, recused himself from the case.
Congress entered the fray in December, passing the Detainee Treatment Act, which stripped federal courts of jurisdiction over Guantanamo detainees' habeas corpus petitions that were "pending on or after" the date of the law's enactment. The act also provided an alternative military process for reviewing the enemy combatant status of detainees and designated the D.C. Circuit appeals court as the sole venue for appeals of military commission verdicts.
Arguing that the act implicitly accepts the legitimacy of the military commissions and that it disallows Hamdan's habeas petition, the administration asked the Supreme Court in January to dismiss the case. Administration lawyers said the proper time for Hamdan to file a constitutional challenge was after his trial before a military commission.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/29/AR2006062900928.html
Justices Reject Pact In Ruling Against Noncitizen Suspects
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 29, 2006; A04
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a treaty guaranteeing consular access for noncitizens arrested in the United States does not require states that violate the accord to allow belated appeals or throw out confessions.
By a vote of 6 to 3, the court ruled that the United States did not consent to such remedies in 1969 when it ratified the Vienna Convention, a 170-nation pact that commits signatories to provide one another's arrested citizens access to consular officials, if they request it, and to inform detainees of their rights under the treaty "without delay."
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague decided otherwise two years ago, but its interpretation of the Vienna Convention, while entitled to "respectful consideration," is not binding on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.
Though gently worded, the court's rebuff of the ICJ sent a strong signal: At a time when the role of foreign law at the court has become a controversial subject among the justices, and between the court and Congress, the Roberts court will not go out of its way to accommodate foreign or multilateral legal authorities, even when construing a global treaty.
In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer protested that the court's "approach leaves States free to deny effective relief for Convention violations, despite America's promise to provide just such relief." The opinion, he added, "risks weakening respect abroad for the rights of foreign nationals, a respect that America, in 1969, sought to make effective throughout the world."
But Roberts argued that the remedies called for by the two petitioners in yesterday's cases, Mario Bustillo and Moises Sanchez-Llamas, are "by any measure extraordinary."
Bustillo, a Honduran convicted of a 1997 murder in Springfield, had argued that Virginia's failure to comply with those provisions entitles him to seek a new trial, despite state rules that say it is too late.
Sanchez-Llamas, who is from Mexico, said his conviction for trying to kill a police officer in Oregon should be thrown out because it was based on incriminating statements he made to police without being informed of the treaty.
Roberts noted that, in effect, the two men were asserting the Vienna Convention entitled them to more than they could have received for comparable violations of ordinary federal laws or the Constitution. "It is no slight to the Convention to deny petitioners' claims under the same principles we would apply to an Act of Congress, or to the Constitution itself," he wrote.
In reaching its conclusions, the court did not decide whether the Vienna Convention creates rights that people can raise in U.S. court, as the ICJ has declared, or whether its provisions were meant to be enforced exclusively through diplomatic negotiations, as the Bush administration argued.
Instead, Roberts wrote that, even assuming there is such a right, the relief the two men sought would not be justified.
That formulation may have helped Roberts put together a majority that included two justices, Anthony M. Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who are sympathetic to the limited use of foreign law -- and are eager for good relations between the U.S. judiciary and its counterparts abroad.
In a separate concurring opinion, Ginsburg argued that, in her view, the Vienna Convention does create individual rights, but that, even under the ICJ's broader interpretation of U.S. treaty responsibilities, neither of the men would have qualified for relief.
Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined Roberts.
The United States led the international effort to negotiate the Vienna Convention, largely out of concern for its citizens caught up in jails of authoritarian states abroad.
But in recent years, Mexico and Germany successfully sued the United States at the ICJ because some of their citizens who were not informed of their Vienna Convention rights were sentenced to death in the United States.
The ICJ ruled in 2004 that the United States had to give 51 Mexicans on death row a new chance to appeal the violation of their consular access rights in a U.S. court, even though U.S. states' procedural rules say defendants forfeit legal claims if they do not assert them at trial.
In his dissent, Breyer, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and David H. Souter, said that the Vienna Convention creates individual rights and that he would have sent the cases back to the state courts to determine whether the violations in these two cases were so harmful that the treaty's purposes could not be met unless Bustillo and Sanchez-Llamas received the remedies they sought.
Separately, the court upheld the denial of reading material as a disciplinary measure in Pennsylvania's Long-Term Segregation Unit, where the state keeps about 40 especially violent and recalcitrant prisoners.
Prisoner Ronald Banks sued when his Christian Science Monitor was barred, claiming a violation of his First Amendment rights. Last year, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia ruled in his favor. But by a vote of 6 to 2, the court overturned that ruling.
Alito had to sit out the case because he had ruled in favor of prison authorities while on the appeals court.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Article III Sec 2
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority
The Subtance
The Supreme Court today delivered a stunning rebuke to the Bush administration over its plans to try Guantanamo detainees before military commissions, ruling that the commissions are unconstitutional. In a 5-3 decision, the court said the trials were not authorized under U.S. law or the Geneva Conventions.
The case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 36-year-old Yemeni with links to al-Qaeda, was considered a key test of the judiciary's power during wartime and carried the potential to make a lasting impact on American law. It challenged the very legality of the military commissions established by President Bush to try terrorism suspects. The case raised core constitutional principles of separation of powers as well as fundamental issues of individual rights.
Congress entered the fray in December, passing the Detainee Treatment Act, which stripped federal courts of jurisdiction over Guantanamo detainees' habeas corpus petitions that were "pending on or after" the date of the law's enactment. Administration lawyers said the proper time for Hamdan to file a constitutional challenge was after his trial before a military commission.
Let the right wing bloviating about "activist courts" begin!
On the other hand...
Justices Reject Pact In Ruling Against Noncitizen Suspects
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a treaty guaranteeing consular access for noncitizens arrested in the United States does not require states that violate the accord to allow belated appeals or throw out confessions.Supreme Court Rejects Guantanamo War Crimes Trials
By a vote of 6 to 3, the court ruled that the United States did not consent to such remedies in 1969 when it ratified the Vienna Convention, a 170-nation pact that commits signatories to provide one another's arrested citizens access to consular officials, if they request it, and to inform detainees of their rights under the treaty "without delay."
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague decided otherwise two years ago, but its interpretation of the Vienna Convention, while entitled to "respectful consideration," is not binding on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.
In 5-3 Decision, Justices Rebuke Bush's Anti-Terror Policy
By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 29, 2006; 10:44 AM
The Supreme Court today delivered a stunning rebuke to the Bush administration over its plans to try Guantanamo detainees before military commissions, ruling that the commissions are unconstitutional.
In a 5-3 decision, the court said the trials were not authorized under U.S. law or the Geneva Conventions. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the opinion in the case, called Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. recused himself from the case.
The ruling, which overturned a federal appeals court decision in which Roberts had participated, represented a defeat for President Bush, who had ordered military trials for detainees at the Guantanamo Bay naval base. About 450 detainees captured in the war on terrorism are currently held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.
The case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 36-year-old Yemeni with links to al-Qaeda, was considered a key test of the judiciary's power during wartime and carried the potential to make a lasting impact on American law. It challenged the very legality of the military commissions established by President Bush to try terrorism suspects.
The case raised core constitutional principles of separation of powers as well as fundamental issues of individual rights. Specifically, the questions concerned:
# The power of Congress and the executive to strip the federal courts and the Supreme Court of jurisdiction.
# The authority of the executive to lock up individuals under claims of wartime power, without benefit of traditional protections such as a jury trial, the right to cross-examine one's accusers and the right to judicial appeal.
# The applicability of international treaties -- specifically the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war -- to the government's treatment of those it deems "enemy combatants."
Hamdan was captured by Afghan militiamen in late November 2001 after the radical Islamic Taliban movement was driven from power in Afghanistan by U.S.-backed Afghan forces. He was subsequently turned over to U.S. authorities, who sent him to the U.S. detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba in 2002.
He acknowledged that he had worked as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden, whom he met in Afghanistan in 1996. But he denied having any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks carried out by bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
On Nov. 13, 2001 -- the day the Afghan capital, Kabul, fell to U.S.-backed forces after five years of Taliban rule -- President Bush issued Military Order No. 1 declaring that military commissions would try foreign terrorist suspects for alleged war crimes and sentence them to punishments including death. The administration argued that the commissions were authorized by laws on military justice, by a congressional resolution passed on Sept. 14, 2001, and by the powers vested in the president as commander in chief under the U.S. Constitution.
Hamdan later became one of the first 10 detainees at Guantanamo chosen to face military trials. He was charged in July 2004 with conspiracy to commit terrorism and war crimes while serving as a weapons courier and driver for bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda members. If convicted, he faced a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Military prosecutors alleged that Hamdan delivered arms, ammunition and other supplies to al-Qaeda fighters, picked up weapons at Taliban warehouses and drove or accompanied bin Laden to appearances at al-Qaeda training camps and other events. During these appearances, bin Laden would give speeches encouraging followers to carry out suicide attacks and engage in holy war against Americans, the prosecution alleged.
Specifically, prosecutors charged, Hamdan served as a driver in a convoy in which bin Laden fled potential U.S. reprisal attacks in Afghanistan at the time of the al-Qaeda bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. In addition, he allegedly received weapons training at al-Qaeda's Farouq training camp in southern Afghanistan on various occasions between 1996 and 2001.
In April 2004, Hamdan, represented by Georgetown University law professor Neal K. Katyal, , filed a petition for habeas corpus, challenging the legality of his detention. While the petition was pending before the U.S. District Court in Washington, the government formally filed the conspiracy charges against him and set in motion his trial before a military commission.
In August 2004, Hamdan appeared in a makeshift courtroom at Guantanamo as the U.S. military formally opened its first trial of an alleged al-Qaeda collaborator. His appearance, after nearly three years in detention, marked the first time that the United States had used military commissions to try war crimes suspects since World War II.
Hamdan's military attorney promptly attacked the military commission process, calling it unfair, and challenged the qualifications of the presiding officer and several other members.
In November 2004, the U.S. District Court granted Hamdan's habeas petition in part, ordering a halt to the military commission. The court ruled that Hamdan could not be tried by a military commission unless a competent tribunal determined that he was actually an "unlawful combatant" and not a prisoner of war under the 1949 Geneva Convention.
Hamdan maintained that instead of facing a military commission under a presidential order, he should be tried by a court martial under the U.S. Code of Military Justice in accordance with the 1949 convention. That would afford him the same rights accorded to U.S. military personnel tried by courts martial, rather than the restrictions he would encounter in a military commission. Human rights groups have charged that the commissions' rules do not meet international standards for fair trials.
The Bush administration appealed the District Court's ruling, and the Defense Department meanwhile gave Hamdan and other Guantanamo detainees hearings before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal. In Hamdan's case, the tribunal affirmed that he was an enemy combatant requiring continued detention. It said he was "either a member of or affiliated with al-Qaeda."
In July 2005, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned the District Court's decision, breathing new life into the military commissions. The appeals court said the Geneva Convention does not apply to al-Qaeda members and that the military commissions were authorized by Congress.
The Supreme Court agreed in November last year to hear Hamdan's appeal of the ruling. Chief Justice Roberts, one of the judges who voted against Hamdan's appeal when he served on the appeals court, recused himself from the case.
Congress entered the fray in December, passing the Detainee Treatment Act, which stripped federal courts of jurisdiction over Guantanamo detainees' habeas corpus petitions that were "pending on or after" the date of the law's enactment. The act also provided an alternative military process for reviewing the enemy combatant status of detainees and designated the D.C. Circuit appeals court as the sole venue for appeals of military commission verdicts.
Arguing that the act implicitly accepts the legitimacy of the military commissions and that it disallows Hamdan's habeas petition, the administration asked the Supreme Court in January to dismiss the case. Administration lawyers said the proper time for Hamdan to file a constitutional challenge was after his trial before a military commission.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/29/AR2006062900928.html
Justices Reject Pact In Ruling Against Noncitizen Suspects
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 29, 2006; A04
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a treaty guaranteeing consular access for noncitizens arrested in the United States does not require states that violate the accord to allow belated appeals or throw out confessions.
By a vote of 6 to 3, the court ruled that the United States did not consent to such remedies in 1969 when it ratified the Vienna Convention, a 170-nation pact that commits signatories to provide one another's arrested citizens access to consular officials, if they request it, and to inform detainees of their rights under the treaty "without delay."
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague decided otherwise two years ago, but its interpretation of the Vienna Convention, while entitled to "respectful consideration," is not binding on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.
Though gently worded, the court's rebuff of the ICJ sent a strong signal: At a time when the role of foreign law at the court has become a controversial subject among the justices, and between the court and Congress, the Roberts court will not go out of its way to accommodate foreign or multilateral legal authorities, even when construing a global treaty.
In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer protested that the court's "approach leaves States free to deny effective relief for Convention violations, despite America's promise to provide just such relief." The opinion, he added, "risks weakening respect abroad for the rights of foreign nationals, a respect that America, in 1969, sought to make effective throughout the world."
But Roberts argued that the remedies called for by the two petitioners in yesterday's cases, Mario Bustillo and Moises Sanchez-Llamas, are "by any measure extraordinary."
Bustillo, a Honduran convicted of a 1997 murder in Springfield, had argued that Virginia's failure to comply with those provisions entitles him to seek a new trial, despite state rules that say it is too late.
Sanchez-Llamas, who is from Mexico, said his conviction for trying to kill a police officer in Oregon should be thrown out because it was based on incriminating statements he made to police without being informed of the treaty.
Roberts noted that, in effect, the two men were asserting the Vienna Convention entitled them to more than they could have received for comparable violations of ordinary federal laws or the Constitution. "It is no slight to the Convention to deny petitioners' claims under the same principles we would apply to an Act of Congress, or to the Constitution itself," he wrote.
In reaching its conclusions, the court did not decide whether the Vienna Convention creates rights that people can raise in U.S. court, as the ICJ has declared, or whether its provisions were meant to be enforced exclusively through diplomatic negotiations, as the Bush administration argued.
Instead, Roberts wrote that, even assuming there is such a right, the relief the two men sought would not be justified.
That formulation may have helped Roberts put together a majority that included two justices, Anthony M. Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who are sympathetic to the limited use of foreign law -- and are eager for good relations between the U.S. judiciary and its counterparts abroad.
In a separate concurring opinion, Ginsburg argued that, in her view, the Vienna Convention does create individual rights, but that, even under the ICJ's broader interpretation of U.S. treaty responsibilities, neither of the men would have qualified for relief.
Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined Roberts.
The United States led the international effort to negotiate the Vienna Convention, largely out of concern for its citizens caught up in jails of authoritarian states abroad.
But in recent years, Mexico and Germany successfully sued the United States at the ICJ because some of their citizens who were not informed of their Vienna Convention rights were sentenced to death in the United States.
The ICJ ruled in 2004 that the United States had to give 51 Mexicans on death row a new chance to appeal the violation of their consular access rights in a U.S. court, even though U.S. states' procedural rules say defendants forfeit legal claims if they do not assert them at trial.
In his dissent, Breyer, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and David H. Souter, said that the Vienna Convention creates individual rights and that he would have sent the cases back to the state courts to determine whether the violations in these two cases were so harmful that the treaty's purposes could not be met unless Bustillo and Sanchez-Llamas received the remedies they sought.
Separately, the court upheld the denial of reading material as a disciplinary measure in Pennsylvania's Long-Term Segregation Unit, where the state keeps about 40 especially violent and recalcitrant prisoners.
Prisoner Ronald Banks sued when his Christian Science Monitor was barred, claiming a violation of his First Amendment rights. Last year, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia ruled in his favor. But by a vote of 6 to 2, the court overturned that ruling.
Alito had to sit out the case because he had ruled in favor of prison authorities while on the appeals court.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
posted by JimG at 12:21 PM
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