Divided Supreme Court Rules Gitmo Detainees Have Habeas Corpus Protection

Unbelievable.

In a stunning blow to the Bush Administration in its war-on-terrorism policies, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign nationals held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to pursue habeas challenges to their detention. The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights.

The Court stressed that it was not ruling that the detainees are entitled to be released — that is, entitled to have writs issued to end their confinement. That issue, it said, is left to the District Court judges who will be hearing the challenges. The Court also said that “we do not address whether the President has authority to detain” the individuals at the U.S. Naval base in Cuba; that, too, it said, is to be considered by the District judges.

Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion. Chief Justice Roberts, Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito dissented.

The decision will be linked to as soon as it is available.

For now, all I can say is that the five justices who went along with this gross distortion of constitutional law have some explaining to do how they can extend constitutional protections to a class of individuals that the Constitution never intended to be granted such protections. Even when Congress appeared to spell out that the detainees didn't have such protections, the Court decided that Congress didn't properly take it away.

UPDATE:
Jonathan Alter at Volokh notes the following:

... it appears to hold that Guantanamo detainees have habeas rights, that these rights can only be denied through a valid suspension of habeas rights (under the Suspension Clause of the Constitution), that the procedures created by the Detainee Treatment Act were not an adequate substitute for habeas, and therefore Section 7 of the Military Commission Act is an unconstitutional suspension of the detainees' habeas rights.

This jibes with the notion that the Court feels that its judgment is superior to that of the Congress and the Executive Branch. That is not how the Constitution was written, and it certainly suggests judicial overreach.

UPDATE:
Mark Levin weighs in and notes that while the media is pushing this as a defeat for the Administration, the real losers in all this is the nation, which will now have to confront terrorists using the courts to avoid detainment. It also means that in any future conflict, POWs could seek access to the courts since they have a stronger argument for court access than enemy combatants.

This is a huge mess created by the Court out of its own folly and intention to override the will of Congress to create a system for trying enemy combatants captured on far flung battlefields.

UPDATE:
Here's a link to the 134 page decision. For a contrary opinion to mine, see TalkLeft's analysis.

UPDATE:
Scalia's scathing dissent hits all the points I've been making:

Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that
goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension
Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separationof-
powers principles to establish a manipulable “functional”
test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus
(and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other
constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes
important precedents, most conspicuously Justice
Jackson’s opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager.
It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law
that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens
abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically,
it sets our military commanders the impossible task
of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards
this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports
the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.
The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done
today. I dissent.

UPDATE:
Others weighing in: Hot Air, Stop the ACLU, Michelle Malkin, Jammie, baldilocks, Macranger, and Outside the Beltway.