The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-3 decision on June 29, 2006, brought a halt to military commissions at the Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) prison and interrogation camp with its decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. 

[click here for the 185-page pdf of the opinion, and check back with this web site for more in-depth analysis]

It appears the crux of the decision focused on whether the operation of the military commissions conformed to requirements of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of 1949.  In the bench opinion, writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens reportedly declared: “We conclude that the military commission convened to try [Salim Ahmed] Hamdan lacks power to proceed because its structure and procedures violate” the international agreement on the treatment of prisoners of war and U.S. military laws.[1]

Chief Justice John Roberts, who had voted to uphold the commissions while sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, even before the commissions were approved after-the-fact by the Graham-Levin amendment to the fiscal year (FY) 2006 Defense Authorization bill, recused himself from the case, or the vote conceivably might have been 5-4.

The military commissions were intended to prosecute detainees for war crimes.  If convicted, a detainee’s status would be converted from something akin to enemy prisoner of war to something quite different, a convicted criminal, subject to incarceration or execution as a punitive measure, i.e., as punishment for a crime, as opposed to the concept of removing a combatant from hostilities and attempting to interrogate him. 

The Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) prison and interrogation camp is operated by  Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) at the U.S. Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  It has been the subject of controversy over questions of detainee treatment, interrogation methods, and the legal frameworks governing the detentions.  The Hamdan case addresses only military commissions, and not the detentions generally or the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT), which are used to determine whether a detainee is an enemy combatant, or Administrative Review Boards (ARB), used to revisit whether an alleged enemy combatant continues to pose a threat or offers intelligence value.

The Supreme Court in the Rasul v. Bush decision of June 28, 2004, held 5-4, with different membership, that GTMO detainees had habeas corpus rights to challenge their detentions in civilian federal court, but Congress acted with the Graham-Levin amendment to amend the habeas corpus statute to attempt to supersede the Rasul decision, which would have forced the Supreme Court to revisit the matter on solely constitutional grounds.

[Check back with this web site for more in-depth analysis.]