Guantanamo and the ACLU

In 2004 the Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush that "detainees in Guantanamo could file petitions for habeas corpus to challenge the legality of their detention". Following this ruling the ACLU of NJ represented Murat Kurnaz "a German resident of Turkish descent" who was "sold to the US for a bounty" after being taken in Pakistan. He was at the time a member of a "peaceful missionary group". He was held for 4 years at Gitmo before being released "cleared of terrorism charges", two of those years "incommunicado". The US gov't admits to "offering enormous bounties to warlords and the Pakistani gov't to turn in anyone to US forces". Seton Hall University study reports that only 18 % "of detainees have an association to Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

(Source: "ACLU-NJ Board Trustee fights for Human Rights and Due Process at Gitmo" by Baher Azmy. Civil Rights Reporter and ACLU of NJ. 2nd quarter of 2007).

Detainees have the right "to challenge their indefinite detention in federal court" said the Supreme Court case of Boumediene v. Bush in June of 2008. The military commission system is a point of debate. The ACLU is representing the detainees and is calling it the John Adams Project acknowledging the role played by the 2nd US President in defending British soldiers involved in the "Boston Massacre" in 1770. The ACLU argues that the military commission system "allows the use of torture, hearsay evidence, or coerced confessions" in trials of these detainees. Prior of 2006 the Supreme Court ruled in Hamden v. Rumsfeld that the military commissions were unconstitutional and "inconsistent with the Geneva Conventions. That ruling was addressed by Congress in 2006 with the Military Commissions Act that allows the use of the commissions to prosecute detainees w/o many of our constitutional protections. (This info is 7 or 8 months old and does not include any further developments on this issue. It is not the intention of this writer to defend the ACLU's position but mearly to report on the law as I know it. The source, however, is the ACLU, thus one-sided).

(Source: "Fighting for Justice at Guantanamo" by Anthony D. Romero. Civil Liberties: The American Civil Liberties Union National Newsletter dated Summer 2008).