Guantanamo prisoner gets a hearing

The Supreme Court granted new legal rights to detainees last month.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- For the first time in the nearly three years since the Sept. 11 attacks, a prisoner picked up as a potential terrorist and held nearly incommunicado at a U.S. prison in Cuba got a chance Friday to convince his jailers that he should go free.
The hearing at the Navy prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is the government's most visible response since a Supreme Court ruling last month granted new legal rights to about 600 foreign-born men held at the U.S. base on Cuba's southeastern tip.
Separately Friday, the Justice Department filed its first detailed response to lawsuits from Guantanamo detainees. The detainees have no constitutional rights, including the right to see a lawyer, the government said in federal court filings.
Means to challenge detention
The Supreme Court's ruling gave the Guantanamo prisoners a means to challenge their captivity in federal court, and the government will allow outside lawyers to help them, but that does not mean that wider constitutional protections apply, government lawyers wrote.
The day's events moved into high relief what had been a slow and complex back-and-forth among the military, defense lawyers and government lawyers over how to comply with the high court's ruling.
At the Pentagon, Navy Secretary Gordon England said the hearing into whether the Navy is properly holding an unidentified prisoner as an enemy combatant is the first of some 600 to be held over the coming one to four months.
Pentagon spokeswoman Cmdr. Beci Brenton said there was no immediate decision on the prisoner's fate.
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