JIHADI GOT HIS GUN:

Court gives no rights to detained: Military's prisoners can't appeal status (Lyle Denniston, 3/12/2003, Boston Globe)

A federal Appeals Court ruled yesterday that hundreds of individuals captured during the war on terrorism and now held by the US military in Cuba have no right to challenge their detention in American courts.

As foreign citizens in military custody outside the United States, the detainees have no rights under the Constitution, even if they were determined not to be enemies of the United States, the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled.

Since January 2002, the government has sent as many as 650 people to Camp X-Ray at the American military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Only five are known to have been released since then. They have had no access to their families or lawyers.

The ruling solidifies their legal isolation. A foreigner ''without property or presence in this country has no constitutional rights, under the due process clause or otherwise,'' the court said.

''If the Constitution does not entitle the detainees to due process, and it does not,'' the three-judge panel added, ''they cannot invoke the jurisdiction of our courts to test the constitutionality or the legality of restraints on their liberty.''

The families of 16 detainees -- 12 Kuwaitis, two Australians, and two Britons -- said that none of them had taken up arms against the United States, even though they were captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan during US military operations after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Although the Justice Department insisted that all were enemy combatants, to strengthen its case that they have no rights, that argument was unnecessary. The Appeals Court made clear that, even if they were innocent of committing hostile acts against the United States, they still would have no right to be in US courts.

The circumstances that put the detainees beyond the reach of any American court, the judges said, are that they are overseas and in the custody of the US military, have never been in this country, and were captured during military operations outside the United States.

Thomas Willner, a Washington lawyer for 12 of the detainees, said the ruling ''gives a green light to US officials to imprison foreigners outside the rule of law. It allows the executive branch to capture any foreigner, at any time, for any reason, and to jail him or her outside the law and with no rights whatsoever, simply by choosing to imprison him or her outside our sovereign territory.''

During WWII we had almost half a million Nazi prisoners of war in 511 camps in 45 of the 48 states. Imagine if the government had to justify the detention of every one of these enemy combatants. But, of course, it didn't. There were no Willners then, lawyers willing to ignore the fact their country's at war and that the "foreigners" in question are the enemy. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 17, 2003 12:53 PM