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Guantanamo future in doubt

The future of the infamous Guantanamo detention centre was thrown into doubt on Thursday after the U.S. Supreme Court delivered the most serious blow yet to President George Bush’s policy of holding prisoners indefinitely without trial.

The justices, in a historic ruling, said the 270 prisoners, held for more than six years for alleged links with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, have a constitutional right to take their cases to civilian courts on the U.S. mainland.

Lawyers for the prisoners hailed the ruling as a vindication of their battle to have Guantanamo, in Cuba, closed.

Travelling in Rome, Mr. Bush said he did not agree with the ruling. “We’ll abide by the court’s decision. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it,” he said.

The nine-member supreme court normally has a rightwing bent but Justice Anthony Kennedy, a maverick conservative who holds the balance of power, joined his more liberal colleagues to provide a 5-4 majority.

“The laws and constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Kennedy said.

At present the prisoners are classed as enemy combatants and face trial in military commissions set up by the Bush administration.

Their lawyers are expected to lodge habeas corpus petitions with federal courts as a matter of urgency, demanding their release.

Scores of cases related to the prisoners have been on hold in the federal courts pending the ruling. Federal judges, thrown into consternation by the ruling, met on Thursday to decide how to proceed.

It is the third time that the Supreme Court has ruled against Mr. Bush on Guantanamo. On the previous two occasions, the administration and the Republican-controlled Congress changed the law to strip the detainees of their right to habeas corpus.

Mr. Bush cannot go to Congress this time because it is now controlled by the Democrats, who favour closing the camp.

The definitive nature of the ruling will make it harder for the Bush administration to manoeuvre round.

One option, though it would create an outcry, would be to close the camp and transfer the prisoners to another country, such as Afghanistan.

In the split decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, sided with the dissenters. He described the existing set-up at Guantanamo as “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.”

Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas also dissented. Justice Scalia said the nation is “at war with radical Islamists” and that the court’s decision “will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”

Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens joined Justice Kennedy to form the majority.

Justice Souter wrote a separate opinion in which he emphasised the length of the detentions.

“A second fact insufficiently appreciated by the dissents is the length of the disputed imprisonments, some of the prisoners represented here today having been locked up for six years,” he said.

Reflecting the chaos created by the ruling, a lawyer for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s one-time driver, said he will seek dismissal of the charges against Hamdan. A military judge had already delayed the military trial’s start at Guantanamo to await the Supreme Court ruling.

Navy Commander Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said he had no immediate information whether a hearing at Guantanamo for Omar Khadr, a Canadian charged with killing a U.S. special forces soldier in Afghanistan, would go forward next week as planned.

Vince Warren, executive director of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents more detainees than any other group of lawyers, said he hoped the Bush administration would not react by transferring the detainees to “a black hole” in another country, such as Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.

Clive Stafford Smith, director of the London-based Reprieve, which represents 35 prisoners, said the ruling was “catastrophic” for Mr. Bush’s “secret prisons policy.” He added: “But the prisoners still have a long way to go.”

Amnesty International wrote to the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, on Thursday urging him to raise with Bush on his visit to London next week the issue of three prisoners with British links.

The three prisoners are: Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian formerly resident in London; Shaker Aamer, a Saudi national formerly resident in London; and Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who lived in Bournemouth.

Both the presidential candidates, the Democrat Barack Obama and the Republican John McCain, have said they would close Guantanamo on taking over the White House.

Mr. McCain reiterated that pledge: “I was in favour of closing Guantanamo Bay and I am still in favour of that.”

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