Detainees may not contest detention in US courts

AP/MSNBC:

Guantanamo Bay detainees may not challenge their detention in U.S. courts, a federal appeals court said Tuesday in a ruling upholding a key provision of a law at the center of President Bush’s anti-terrorism plan.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 that civilian courts no longer have the authority to consider whether the military is illegally holding foreigners.

Barring prisoners from the U.S. court system was a key provision in the Military Commissions Act, which Bush pushed through Congress last year to set up a system to prosecute terrorism suspects.

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“The decision reaffirms the validity of the framework that Congress established in the MCA permitting Guantanamo detainees to challenge their detention” through military hearings coordinated by the Defense Department,” said spokesman Erik Ablin.

Under the commissions act, the government may indefinitely detain foreigners who have been designed as “enemy combatants” and authorizes the CIA to use aggressive but undefined interrogation tactics.

But most criticized by Democrats and civil libertarians was a provision that stripped U.S. courts of the authority to hear arguments from detainees who said they were being held illegally.

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The attempt to give enemy combatants constitutional access to the US courts is ridiculous on its face. It has never been done in the history of warfare and it would be a way to tie the hands of this country in defending itself from a determined enemy. Recently released detainees are already trying to go to Iraq to kill our troops. The terrorist rights crowd and the terrorist lost their case today and hopefully they will lose it in the Supreme court too.