Court Rules Guantánamo Detainees Are Not Entitled to Due Process
By Carol Rosenberg
The New York Times
Sept. 2, 2020
Excerpt:
A federal appeals court panel has ruled for the first time that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are not entitled to due process, adopting a George W. Bush-era view of detainee rights that could affect the eventual trial of the men charged in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The 3-to-0 decision issued on Friday by Judge Neomi Rao at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the indefinite detention of Abdulsalam Al Hela, 52, who argued for release by saying that the evidence against him relied on anonymous hearsay and that he never joined or supported Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group.
A U.S. District Court earlier found that Mr. Al Hela, a Yemeni who fought in the U.S.-backed jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, became “a trusted member of the international jihadi community for decades” by helping would-be terrorists with travel and false identities.
But the appeals court judges were split on how and whether to address the broader question of whether Mr. Al Hela was entitled to the same due process protections as a U.S. citizen. The appeals court decision means the Guantánamo judges may not see themselves as obliged to consider those rights through a constitutional lens.
“No court ever expressly held that the due process actually applies,” said Brenner M. Fissell, a law professor at the Hofstra law school who has worked on Guantánamo’s detainee appeals at the war court. “Now we have literal language at the court that is reviewing the criminal cases that no one who has person or property and is not a citizen can invoke the due process clause.”
Mr. Fissell said the decision harks back to the era before habeas corpus when the Bush administration sought to “carve out this weird island, their weird zone as a legal terra incognita,” essentially a constitutional no-go zone.
Read the full article on The New York Times website.
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