Gitmo Verdict Came a Few Days Late

By BARBARA OLSHANKY

The dramatic Supreme Court decision last month declaring the Bush administration's Guantanamo military tribunals scheme to be lawless and unconstitutional, is a landmark ruling that strikes a powerful blow for liberty. Hamdan v. Rumsfeld represents our democracy at its best, with a judicial branch taking its constitutional role seriously and boldly examining what our chief executive's actions. There could be not have been a happier day for a constitutional and human rights lawyer like myself.

But my joy in finally getting this decision was tempered by the knowledge that it came a few days late. Just two weeks earlier, three of the Guantanamo detainees that we were representing at the Center for Constitutional Rights committed suicide, despairing that they would ever be released from their horrific and illegal confinement. Making that tragic incident all the more horrible and personally wrenching for me, since one of the victims was my own client--is knowing that he had actually been scheduled to be released three days hence. Because of the wall of secrecy and inaccessibility the government has illegally erected around the detainees, even with the information recently released via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit we could not identify him and get word to him about his impending release in time.

As the lead habeas attorney for 300 of the Guantanamo detainees for CCR, the organization that brought the original challenge to the unlawful detention of hundreds of men in Guantánamo Bay, I am intimately aware of the wretched conditions under which they have been living, and of the unconstitutional lengths to which this administration has gone to keep them beyond court jurisdiction. In our original case, Rasul v. Bush, the High Court, upholding a tradition of more than 800 years' standing, said every person gets to challenge the King's decision to place him or her in the dungeon, and the King must provide a legally cognizable reason. When that first ruling came down on June 28, 2004, I assumed our system of checks and balances was working well.

But I was wrong.

Lawyers for the detainees still had to endure two years of Administration refusal to comply with the court's decision, with the Justice Department attorneys insisting people might have the right to go to court but once there they have no protections to be enforced. Now we know this obscene delaying tactic for what it has been from the start: a blatant trampling on the Constitution by the President.

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