Supreme Court Rejects Administration's Handling of Detainees

In a series of major rulings issued yesterday, the Supreme Court roundly rejected the Bush administration's refusal to grant "enemy combatants" their day in court as an unconstitutional violation of due process. President Bush's belief that his commander-in-chief status gives him the power to detain individuals indefinitely without due process of law has no grounding in our Constitution. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stated in her opinion, "A state of war is not a blank check for the president."

• The war on terrorism does not give the president the authority to throw away the Constitution. The rulings – which give 600 detainees in held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and U.S. citizen Yasar Hamdi the right to challenge their detentions before an impartial arbiter – demonstrate that the Bush administration's legal policies in the war on terrorism have been unconstitutional from the start.
• America stands for the rule of law and the rights of the accused. The court rejected the Bush administration's attempts to create a legal black hole by ruling that even foreign terrorism suspects detained by the United States at Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge the legality of their detentions before a neutral adjudicator.
• The Bush administration should learn that America's commitment to legal fairness is what truly sets us apart from terrorists and dictators. The Supreme Court did the Bush administration and the country a favor yesterday by stating the obvious: you can't lock someone up indefinitely without legal rights and say that you're upholding the rule of law. By reaffirming our core constitutional values yesterday, the court proved to the world that America takes its democratic freedoms seriously.

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