Originally Posted by
Kathianne
Got some links?
Try this, the detainees never had any rights until the US Supreme Court gave them to them through a reversal of established law.
The court reversed the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which had held that
the Supreme Court's 1950 decision in Johnson v. Eisentrager barred Guantanamo detainees from bringing actions challenging their detentions in U.S. courts because they were foreign nationals outside U.S. sovereign territory.
Eisentrager involved German nationals who, in the closing days of World War II, violated the terms of Germany's surrender by continuing to wage war against the allies in the Pacific theater. The Eisentrager plaintiffs had been tried and convicted by a military commission (with some of their alleged confederates acquitted), and imprisoned at a U.S. military base in Germany. Eisentrager was an arguably tangled opinion
in which the Supreme Court purportedly declined to recognize petitioners' right for habeas corpus review, only in fact to review the facts of their case. It set out elements detailing why the Eisentrager petitioners were not entitled to further threshold procedural steps such as habeas corpus, finding among other things that they were enemy aliens duly charged and convicted for violating the laws of war by a lawfully constituted tribunal.
http://www.cdi.org/news/law/gtmo-sct-decision.cfm
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."
---Thomas Jefferson (or as Al Sharpton calls him: Grandpappy)