One week after the US Supreme Court dealt a blow to the Bush administration by ruling against indefinite detention of so-called "enemy combatants," US officials are scrambling to implement the verdict, Khaled Dawoud reports from Washington Lawyers representing dozens of the 595 detainees held at the infamous US Guantanamo Bay prison have started filing suits which demand access to their clients following the historic Supreme Court ruling that shattered the Bush administration's policy of open-ended detention of so-called "enemy combatants." Last week's ruling, which denied the Bush administration the right to hold both Americans and foreign nationals incommunicado, clearly took US officials by surprise. Pentagon officials said they were still studying the ruling and developing a policy that would fulfill its requirements. They also conceded that the prisoners held in Guantanamo were not informed of the Supreme Court's decision. Pentagon sources said they were considering speeding up the process of releasing nearly 200 detainees held for more than two years in order to reduce the number of legal cases. The remaining detainees could be moved to the US mainland, where they would be held in military bases and granted access to courts. Legal experts said they no longer expect prisoners to be transferred to Guantanamo. After declaring that "a state of war is not a blank cheque for the president", the Supreme Court said detainees must be given the right to challenge their detention before a judge or other "neutral decision-maker". The majority opinion among the nine-judge panel also emphasised the right of detainees held in other locations to challenge their open-ended imprisonment. White House Spokesman Scott McClellan sought to minimise the damage of the clearly embarrassing Supreme Court ruling, saying the administration was working on addressing the "concerns" expressed by the highest US court. Following 11 September 2001, the Bush administration invented the unprecedented label of "enemy combatants" to justify the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists in its open- ended war on terror. That label was aimed at depriving the detainees of their rights as prisoners of war granted by the Geneva Conventions which include their right to legal counsel. In what local and international human rights groups described as massive violation of basic rights, US authorities transferred hundreds of suspected members of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda in inhumane conditions to the Guantanamo prison, which is officially part of Cuba but officially under US control, according to a lease signed more than a 100 years ago. Other suspected terrorists arrested in Gambia, Bosnia and Georgia were also transferred to the prison. The Bush administration picked the island to deprive the detainees from access to US courts or any judicial system, claiming it was not part of US territory. But the US Supreme Court shattered such absurd logic, saying the prison was "territory over which the United States exercises exclusive jurisdiction and control". The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents 53 Guantanamo detainees, said it was planning to file suits on behalf of all detainees to grant them the right to challenge their detention. A spokesman for the centre said the Pentagon has also promised to allow them access to their clients and are expected to organise a trip to the infamous detention centre soon. In its ruling the court said that an "enemy combatant" was entitled to "notice of the factual basis for his classification" and a "fair opportunity to rebut the government's factual assertions before a neutral decision-maker". It added that, "these essential constitutional rights may not be eroded," and pointed out that the government's insistence that courts could not examine the cases of detainees "serves only to condense power into a single branch of government". Jeffrey Foge, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that besides demanding access to their clients, they also want US courts to investigate the interrogation conditions at the prison. Although the Supreme Court made no references to the recent Abu Ghraib scandal, many observers believed it influenced the ruling. Legal experts believe that allowing US authorities to be judge, jury and executioner and depriving detainees from any access to the outside world was one reason the US soldiers felt they had a free hand in torturing prisoners. This fact was referred to clearly in the Supreme Court verdict. The ruling said, "History and common sense teach us that an unchecked system of detention carries the potential to become a means for oppression and abuse of others." Two US citizens, Yasser Hamdi and José Padilla, were declared "enemy combatants" in the war on terror. The Supreme Court ruled in favour of Hamdi, but asked Padilla's lawyers to refile their case over technical reasons. Justice John Paul Stevens, who disagreed with the majority in dismissing Padilla's case over technical grounds (because his lawyers filed the case in New York and not in California where he is now held at a naval base), wrote, "Executive detention of subversive citizens, like detention of enemy soldiers to keep them off the battlefield, may sometimes be justified to prevent persons from launching or becoming missiles of destruction. It may not, however, be justified by the naked interest in using unlawful procedures to extract information. Incommunicado detention for months on end is such a procedure. Whether the information so procured is more or less reliable than that acquired by extreme forms of torture is of no consequence. For if this nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolised by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants, even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny." US officials sought to justify the continued detention of prisoners at Guantanamo and of the two American citizens by claiming that they obtained significant intelligence information. However, lawyers representing the detainees questioned the value of any information they possessed more than two years following their imprisonment. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has already released more than 120 detainees from Guantanamo, indicating that many of them were held by mistake in the chaos that followed the US occupation of Afghanistan. Among those released were three Afghan adolescents. A US official told Al-Ahram Weekly they posed a threat to US security, but it was later discovered the three juveniles, aged 11-14, were only cooking meals at one of the suspected Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.
