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Gitmo Rat Gets to Blab | ||
2004-07-31 | ||
WASHINGTON (AP) - For the first time in the nearly three years since the Sept. 11 attacks, a prisoner picked up as a potential terrorist and held nearly incommunicado at a U.S. prison in Cuba got a chance Friday to convince his jailers that he should go free. The hearing at the Navy prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is the government's most visible response since a Supreme Court ruling last month granted new legal rights to about 600 foreign-born men held at the U.S. base on Cuba's southeastern tip. Separately Friday, the Justice Department filed its first detailed response to lawsuits from Guantanamo detainees. The detainees have no constitutional rights, including the right to see a lawyer, the government said in federal court filings. The Supreme Court's ruling gave the Guantanamo prisoners a means to challenge their captivity in federal court, and the government will allow outside lawyers to help them, but that does not mean that wider constitutional protections apply, government lawyers wrote. "As aliens detained by the military outside the sovereign territory of the United States and lacking a sufficient connection to this country, petitioners have no cognizable constitutional rights," the lawyers said in court papers. At the Pentagon, Navy Secretary Gordon England said the hearing into whether the Navy is properly holding an unidentified prisoner as an enemy combatant is the first of some 600 to be held over the coming one to four months. The administrative hearing was closed to the press and the public. Pentagon spokeswoman Cmdr. Beci Brenton said there was no immediate decision on the prisoner's fate. Human rights lawyers said the military process is a sham, part of government foot-dragging since the Supreme Court largely rejected the Bush administration's legal arguments in three cases about the detention of potential terrorists. "The government is making every effort they can to comply as minimally as possible with the Supreme Court's opinion and the Constitution and to delay as long as possible the moving forward of these cases," said Jeffrey Fogel, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents several detainees.
Defense lawyers said the process is an end-run around the Supreme Court. "The Supreme Court made clear that the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay are entitled to go before a federal judge with a lawyer to challenge their detention," said Deborah Pearlstein, director of law and national security at Human Rights First. "These hearings do not provide a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention, and may even jeopardize any later legal challenges."
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Posted by:Steve White |
#1 It would be fun to have the Marine DI performing the "hearing." After every statement he could yell, "I can't HEAR YOU." - Sgt Carter. |
Posted by: Super Hose 2004-07-31 1:51:51 AM |