Transcript
STUART TAYLOR, JR.: Pietro mentioned the undoubted importance of the three decisions, all on June 28th, that we're going to discuss today. They were widely characterized in the media and by civil libertarians as triumphs for the rule of law and major defeats for President Bush. After all, the administration was only able to persuade one of the nine justices, Clarence Thomas, that it was right on all issues. But some experts nonetheless see these decisions, on balance, as important victories for the president. And I expect we'll hear both views ably expounded today.
The Court, being economical as usual, pronounced its judgment in 10 separate opinions spread across three cases, 179 pages, and 69 footnotes. I will try to summarize them in three or four minutes.
In all three cases, President Bush claimed the powers to seize suspected enemy combatants anywhere in the world, hold them incommunicado for days, months, potentially years for purposes of interrogation, and keep them locked up for as long as the relevant hostilities continue, even for life if it's al Qaeda and it goes on that long.
During this time, the administration said, detainees have no right to see lawyers, no right to see family members, no right to see anyone else except their interrogators—no right to see their interrogators, for that matter, if the interrogators get tired of them—no rights to any judicial review for those who are non-Americans held outside the United States, and only the most cursory judicial review for American citizens, even if they're seized inside the United States.
Accordingly, in the first of the three cases, as the order I'll take them, the Guantanamo case, called Rasul v. Bush, the administration's position was that no court in the world could question anything the military might do to the 600 or so suspected Taliban and al Qaeda fighters who were captured in or near Afghanistan and then taken to Guantanamo and have been detained there, most of them, ever since, with some being released.
Six justices rejected that view. They gave unprecedented scope to the federal habeas corpus law, which provides for judicial review of executive detentions and has roots going back to the Magna Carta. The justices ruled that the habeas corpus law requires at least some form of judicial review for all of the Guantanamo detainees who claim to be innocent civilians picked up by mistake, as many of them do.
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