corrente

I guess there are some things you can't get a Republican judge to do...

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that prisoners seized as potential terrorists and held for more than two years in Cuba may challenge their captivity in American courts, a defeat for President Bush in one of the first major cases arising from the Sept. 11 attacks.

For now, the high court said only that the men can take the first legal step in contesting U.S. authority to hold them.

The men can now presumably take their complaints to a U.S. federal judge, even though they are physically held beyond U.S. borders.

Lawyers for the foreign-born men held at Guantanamo had told the court that unless American courts could look over the military's shoulder, the Cuban camp would be a legal no man's land. Cuban law certainly does not apply within the base, so it must be U.S. law that governs, they argued.

Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said that the inmates' status in military custody is immaterial.

"What is presently at stake is only whether the federal courts have jurisdiction to determine the legality of the executive's potentially indefinite detention of individuals who claim to be wholly innocent of wrongdoing," he wrote.

They do, he said, in sending the case back to a lower court to consider the inmates' claims.

In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas, said the decision was "an irresponsible overturning of settled law in a matter of extreme importance to our forces currently in the field."
(via AP)

So, Bush it seems that Bush's acts are still subject to judicial review—even if Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas don't agree. Good!