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GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) - Plans to close Guantanamo are not sitting well with the Sept. 11 victims' relatives who sat stunned while two alleged terrorists declared they were proud of their role in the plot.

May 15, 2009 Note: The following text is a quote: United States Transfers Lakhdar Boumediene to France Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian national who had been held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility since 2002, has been transferred to France. As directed by the President’s Jan. 22, 2009, Executive Order, the interagency Guantanamo Review Task Force conducted a comprehensive review of Boumediene’s case. As a result of that review, Boumediene was approved for transfer to France, which was carried out today pursuant to an arrangement between the United States and France. Boumediene was involved in the Supreme Court case, Boumediene v....

SNIPPET: “WASHINGTON: The family of an Algerian national held at the US prison camp in Guantanamo for seven years is delighted he is due to arrive in France next week to start a new life. Lakhdar Boumediene, 42, would be the first non-French citizen from Guantanamo to be taken in by France since President Barack Obama pledged to shut down the prison camp when he took office in January. “I cannot hide the fact I am really happy. Soon, he is going to be freed,” his wife Abassia Bouadjimi told AFP Wednesday from Algeria. “He really is keen to be...

Helen Thomas: Why is the president blocking habeas corpus from prisoners at Bagram? I thought he taught constitutional law. And these prisoners have been there... Robert Gibbs: You're incorrect that he taught on constitutional law. You know we live in interesting times when Helen Thomas is going after Barack Obama. Miss Thomas was asking the White House press secretary last week why detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan should not have the same right to challenge their detention in federal court that last year's Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush gave to Guantanamo's detainees. All Mr. Gibbs could...

April 03, 2009, 2:00 p.m. Imperial Judiciary Goes GlobalBy the Editors In 2004, the Supreme Court sowed the seeds for a national-security upheaval when it ruled, in Rasul v. Bush, that war prisoners held outside the United States had a right to challenge their detentions in federal court. Last year, in Boumediene v. Bush, the justices continued the seismic shift, holding that the right they had invented in Rasul — a right extended to aliens whose only connection to the United States is in waging war against it — was somehow rooted in our Constitution. Thursday, the inevitable earthquake...

Department of Justice Withdraws “Enemy Combatant” Definition for Guantanamo Detainees In a filing today with the federal District Court for the District of Columbia, the Department of Justice submitted a new standard for the government’s authority to hold detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility. The definition does not rely on the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief independent of Congress’s specific authorization. It draws on the international laws of war to inform the statutory authority conferred by Congress. It provides that individuals who supported al Qaeda or the Taliban are detainable only if the support was substantial. And it does not...

The war is over. Our peerless armed forces took Tora Bora and, when we finally let them, Fallujah. But al-Qaeda won in Washington, and that has made all the difference. The War on Terror has radically altered the compact between the American people and their government by dramatically changing the nature of the U.S. courts. Until this new, unaccountable monster is caged, it will continue to devour our political community’s capacity to wage war and to defend itself. And that caging had better happen soon, because the word “war” in this context refers only to our nation’s forcible military response...

Last Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dealt a crushing blow to national defense. The three-judge panel’s ruling in al Odah v. United States has gotten scarce media attention. Perhaps that’s understandable: It’s a mind-numbing technical dispute over “discovery” in litigation, vying for attention against the socializing of our economy and the consequent collapse of the stock market. But the discovery in question is the most vital kind, namely, that of classified national-defense information. What is in dispute is how much sensitive intelligence we must share with enemies bent on annihilating Americans ... It is one...

“The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things - bread and circuses.” - Juvenal, Satire X Of all the Supreme Court decisions of recent months, the one I find most interesting is Boumediene v. Bush, the case in which, by 5-4 decision, the court extended habeas corpus rights to prisoners being held at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, included in his argument a fascinating summary of English constitutional history, covering everything from Magna Carta to the adoption of...

Recently the Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 decision, extended constitutional rights to enemy aliens captured on the battlefield and held outside the United States. As a result of this case, Guantanamo Bay detainees now have more rights than do prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. This has never before been the policy of the United States, nor has the court ever before granted such rights to those detained outside of U.S. jurisdiction. The activities of a released prisoner, Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi, discussed in the following report written by the sister of the pilot killed on Flight 77...

Captive Miranda, Lord knows I have not given a thought to the paperwork you sent me. Let me tell you, Captive, that our release is not in the hands of the lawyers or the hands of America. Our release is in the hands of He who created us. The poem, "To My Captive Lawyer, Miranda," was written by Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi while he was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. No doubt, it would have given the former detainee, who was released in 2005, immense satisfaction to know that his last earthly deed was referenced in Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting...

After reading through Boumediene v. Bush, I cannot help but feel that it is simply about the judiciary expanding its own power by usurping the clearly defined constitutional powers of Congress and the president. In essence, the Supreme Court ruled in this case that when Congress and the president followed the decisions the court itself made in crafting law regarding enemy combatants, they did not act within the bounds of our Constitution. As Chief Justice Roberts noted in his dissent, “The DTA [Detainee Treatment Act] system of military tribunal hearings followed by Article III review looks a lot like the...

Suspend the Writ. Those are both my words and the title of commentary this morning by Andrew C. McCarthy, the now former federal prosecutor who led the investigation and related prosecutions of the Landmark bomb plotters, as well as of those who conducted the first attack upon the World Trade Center: For the protection of our troops on the battlefield and the security of all Americans, Congress needs, right now, to take action to reverse Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision granting constitutional habeas-corpus rights to alien enemy combatants. It’s time to suspend the writ of habeas corpus....

Federal District judges in Washington, D.C., who will handle scores of pending and likely future challenges by Guantanamo Bay detainees to their confinement, decided on Monday to shift them temporarily to one judge to work on ways to coordinate the courts’ response. Attorneys for detainees began receiving notices Tuesday that the judges, in a closed-door session earlier in the day, had agreed that District Judge Thomas F. Hogan would handle “coordination and management” issues. The underlying cases will remain with the individual judges for future action on the merits. The judges acted after holding two meetings with lawyers for the...

For those who were perhaps backpacking in ANWR or following Tiger Woods rather than developments in Constitutional law, the latest Supreme Court Guantanamo detainee ruling, [1] Boumediene, was handed down last week.The key holding extends the right of habeas corpus to alien detainees held by the executive as “enemy combatants” incident to the “global war on terror,” at a U.S. military base on foreign territory, Guantanamo.Habeas corpus is the right to have an independent court of law review the legality of a person’s detention by the sovereign. It is an ancient right of common law, the Great Writ, imported...

Here we go. The Los Angeles Times and Voice of America report that a federal appeals court in Washington has presumed to invalidate the commander-in-chief’s determination that a wartime detainee held by the military at the Guantanamo Bay naval base is an alien enemy combatant. The detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, is a Chinese Muslim, one of nearly two dozen Uighurs captured in Afghanistan by American and allied forces after the September 11 attacks. Seventeen Uighurs are still being detained. The appeals court (which announced its ruling but has not yet released the formal decision because it contains classified information), ordered that...

    Boumediene: A Supremely Problematic Court DecisionJune 22, 2008 - by Fred Thompson As [1] I pointed out last week, and as legal scholar [2] John Yoo did earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, the “Boumediene Five” have done our nation and our Constitution no great service. But beyond the rhetoric, we really need to understand the real world impact of this ruling on the war we are waging against our enemies. In Boumediene v Bush, besides, for the first time in history conferring habeas corpus rights on alien enemies detained abroad by our military during a...

Michael Ratner (above, holding document) of the Center for Constitutional Rights rants against the country he hates most: the United States.* * * * * Much has already been written of the U.S. Supreme Court's lawless, nonsensical decision in Boumediene v. Bush that gives America's terrorist enemies unprecedented access to our civilian court system, but little has been written about the aggressively anti-American public interest law firm that helped to make it happen.* The nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, which acted as co-counsel in the case, is deeply enmeshed in the politics of terrorism (take one guess on whose side)...

The recent Supreme Court decision of Boumediene v. Bush concerning the habeas corpus rights of enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Naval Base illustrates the need for a president who will nominate jurists that follow the Constitution and not their own political ideology. For the first time, the Court has now extended U.S. constitutional rights to foreign nationals residing outside the country. What’s all the more galling is that the recipients of this right were engaged in killing U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Now, this same court has agreed to hear the petition of a deported Pakistani national...

As I pointed out last week, and as legal scholar John Yoo did earlier this week in The Wall Street Journal, the “Boumediene Five” have done our nation and our Constitution no great service. But beyond the rhetoric, we really need to understand the real world impact of this ruling on the war we are waging against our enemies. ... Look, this issue isn’t going to go away, so consider these things the next time you hear someone defend the Supreme Court’s majority opinion as an attempt at “basic fairness” and to help prevent an innocent sheepherder from being improperly...