Camp X-ray prisoners win case

THE US Supreme Court ruled yesterday 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 George Bush in one of the first major cases arising from the September 11 attacks.

The 6-to-3 ruling passes no judgment on the guilt or innocence of the approximately 600 foreign-born men, including four Britons, held in the Navy-run prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The justices also did not address the broad issues of human rights and civil liberties surrounding the prisoners’ seizure and detention without trial or guaranteed access to a lawyer.

The high court said only that the men can take the first legal step in contesting US authority to hold them.

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

Lawyers for the 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 US law that governs, they argued.

Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said that the inmates’ status in military custody was 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.

When the Supreme Court agreed last year to hear their case, the men had already been held for about two years without charge.