Litigation

Appeals Panel: War Powers Trump Detainee Rights

By Peter Hardin

A federal appeals court panel in the District of Columbia has approved broad power for the government to hold terrorism suspects.

Not even the international law of war  limits  a U.S. president’s war power to hold Guantanamo Bay detainees and other noncitizens suspected of terrorism or support for it, the three-judge panel wrote in an opinion, according to an article in the New York Times.

In the case, Ghaleb Nassar al-Bihani, formerly a cook for a Taliban brigade and now a Guantanamo detainee, challenged his detention. He maintained he did not participate in the military of a nation engaged at war. A native of Yemen, he said the United States’ war against the Taliban ended in 2002.

It was the appeals court’s first decision interpreting the legal rights of inmates at Guantanamo who seek their freedom by filing a habeas corpus petition. The court upheld broad powers of the government to hold suspected former Taliban fighters indefinitely, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that prisoners held in Guantanamo may challenge their detention in U.S. courts. The District of Columbia appeals court, by taking such an expansive view of government power this week, went “out of its way to poke a stick in the eye of the Supreme Court,” said law professor Eric M. Freedman of Hofstra University.

In another case this week, a test was expected in the same appeals court of whether this government power reaches around the globe to detention at Bagram Air Base prison in Afghanistan, according to SCOTUSblog. You can learn more about issues of detainees rights in Gavel Grab.

Full post as published by The Gavel on January 07, 2010 (boomark / email).