US Supreme Court rules Bush overstepped authority

The Supreme Court ruled today that President George Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under US law and Geneva conventions.

The case focused on Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden. Hamdan, 36, has spent four years in the US prison in Cuba. He faces a single count of conspiring against US citizens from 1996 to November 2001.

Two years ago, the court rejected Bush’s claim to have the authority to seize and detain terrorism suspects and indefinitely deny them access to courts or lawyers. In this follow-up case, the justices focused solely on the issue of trials for some of the men.

The vote was split 5-3, with moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy joining the court’s liberal members in ruling against the Bush administration. Chief Justice John Roberts, named to the lead the court last September by Bush, was sidelined in the case because as an appeals court judge he had backed the government over Hamdan.

Today’s ruling overturned that decision.

Bush spokesman Tony Snow said the White House would have no comment until lawyers had had a chance to review the decision. Officials at the Defence and Justice Departments were planning to issue statements later in the day.

The Bush administration has hinted in recent weeks that it was prepared for the Supreme Court to set back plans for trying Guantanamo detainees.

The president told reporters: “I’d like to close Guantanamo. I also recognise that we’re holding some people that are darn dangerous.”

The court’s ruling says nothing about whether the prison should be shuttered, dealing only with plans to put detainees by trial.

“Trial by military commission raises separation-of-powers concerns of the highest order,” Kennedy wrote in his opinion.

The prison at Guantanamo Gay, erected in the months after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States, has been a flash point for international criticism. Hundreds of people suspected of ties to al-Qaida and the Taliban – including some teenagers – have been swept up by the US military and secretly shipped there since 2002.

Three detainees committed suicide there this month, using sheets and clothing to hang themselves.

The deaths touched off new scrutiny and criticism of the prison, along with fresh calls for its closing.

Judge Stevens said the Bush administration lacked the authority to take the “extraordinary measure'' of scheduling special military trials for inmates, in which defendants have fewer legal protections than in civilian US courts.

He suggested they would be best off trying Hamdan and nine others before regular military courts-martial.

Judge Clarence Thomas, one of the judges who voted against the ruling, wrote a strongly worded dissent and took the unusual step of reading part of it from the bench.

The court’s decision would “sorely hamper the president’s ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy“, he said.

Its willingness, he wrote in the dissent, “to second-guess the determination of the political branches that these conspirators must be brought to justice is both unprecedented and dangerous“.

Two years ago the US government suffered a loss similar to today’s when the high court ruled that the president lacked authority to seize and detain terrorism suspects and indefinitely deny them access to courts or lawyers.

Earlier this month the suicides of three detainees at Guantanamo brought new criticism of the prison, together with fresh calls for its closing.

Amnesty International also called for the US to disclose details about any other “war on terror detention centres“.

“We need to know what ‘other Guantanamos’ exist and just how many ‘war on terror’ prisoners the US is holding in secret,” Ms Allen said.