Hearings test Bush administration policy regarding Guantanamo Bay detainees

Future cases will deal with the rights of Americans declared enemy combatants.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States has created a "lawless enclave" at a military base in Cuba where more than 600 men from 44 countries are being held without access to American courts, a lawyer for the men told the Supreme Court today.
Attorney John Gibbons said "it's been plain for 215 years" that people in federal detention may file petitions in U.S. courts.
The prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were mostly picked up in the fighting that toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Their appeal, the first major challenge arising from the U.S. war on terrorism to reach the high court, asks a basic legal question: Can foreign-born prisoners picked up overseas and held outside U.S. borders use American courts to try to win their freedom?
Justices' comments
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist noted that the detainees are not on American soil, and asked how a judge in Washington is to deal with a case from Cuba.
Gibbons said the men should be treated just as prisoners in the United States are.
"No other law applies there. Cuban law doesn't apply there," he said.
Justice Antonin Scalia said that if the courts are opened to cases from foreign combatants, battlefield detainees would try to use American courts.
In addition to that jurisdictional issue, the court takes up two related cases next week about the rights of American citizens labeled enemy combatants and held under similar restrictions.
The most important theme in all the cases is the power of the president to conduct a new kind of war as he sees fit.
Some spectators for today's arguments camped out overnight, and a line of several hundred people snaked around the building.
"It's not acceptable to detain people without recourse. I think they should have at least a fair hearing to prove their innocence, if they are innocent," said Justin Briggs, 25, of Gaithersburg, Md. "It damages the credibility of the U.S. throughout the world."
Administration argument
In the Guantanamo case, the Bush administration's top Supreme Court lawyer argued in court filings that allowing the prisoners to go to court would "place the federal courts in the unprecedented position of micromanaging the executive's handling of captured enemy combatants from a distant zone."
The Bush administration asserts the right to hold and interrogate the men as long as necessary, without formal charges or the guarantee of a trial or access to a lawyer. The administration also asserts the men are not traditional prisoners of war, who would have guaranteed rights under the Geneva Convention.
The lawsuit before the high court was brought by lawyers who had not met their clients. Since then, a few Guantanamo detainees have been granted access to attorneys.
The lawyers say the men are in a nightmarish legal limbo. Furthermore, they say their clients had nothing to do with Sept. 11 and have never harmed Americans.
"They maintain today, as they have throughout this litigation, that they are innocent of wrongdoing, and the United States has never presented evidence to the contrary," lawyers for British and Australian citizens argued in a court filing.
Supporters of sides
Organizations and individuals as varied as British members of Parliament, retired military officers and former American diplomats support the prisoners.
"History teaches that we tend to sacrifice civil liberties too quickly based on claims of military necessity and national security, only to discover later that those claims were overstated from the start," said a friend-of-the-court filing from former Japanese-American internee Fred Korematsu.
It was Korematsu's challenge to the World War II internment camps for Japanese-Americans that led the Supreme Court to uphold that wartime detention in 1944.
Arrayed on the other side are former U.S. attorneys general, other former military officers and Medal of Honor winners, and conservative legal scholars and lawyers, including failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, a former federal appeals court judge.
"If the court, for the first time in history, interposes the federal judiciary between our armed forces and enemy belligerents held abroad, the court will effect a dangerous and unprecedented revolution in the separation of powers and undermine the ability of the U.S. military to protect our citizens from attack," the Bork group wrote in a friend-of-the-court filing.
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