Supreme Court, here we come.
From the AP:
Guantanamo Bay detainees may not challenge their detention in U.S. courts, a federal appeals court said Tuesday in a ruling upholding a key provision of a law at the center of President Bush’s anti-terrorism plan.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 that civilian courts no longer have the authority to consider whether the military is illegally holding foreigners.
Barring detainees from the U.S. court system was a key provision in the Military Commissions Act, which Mr. Bush pushed through Congress last year to set up a system to prosecute terrorism suspects.
The ruling is all but certain to be appealed to the Supreme Court, which last year struck down the Bush administration’s original plan for trying detainees before military commissions.
Update: In a later edition of the story, the AP reports that that “attorneys for the detainees immediately said they would appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.”
For those interested in a nitty-gritty breakdown of the decision, Marty Lederman’s got your fix. “The only reason” [Gitmo detainees] are not entitled to habeas rights,” he writes on the majority opinion, “is that their U.S. captors chose to turn left and take them to the U.S.-run facility in GTMO, rather than turning right to go to a U.S. facility in say, South Carolina.”