The Freedom Tower

The America’s highest court has thwarted the single-most effective way the United States had planned to try terrorists — by putting them on trial using secret court-systems.

In Washington, press reports said the Supreme Court dealt the Bush administration a stunning setback yesterday, ruling that terrorist suspects imprisoned at Guantanamo can fight for their rights in U.S. courts and likely sounding a death knell for the controversial offshore war-crimes trials.

The ruling “stripped Guantanamo of its reason for being, a law-free zone where prisoners can’t challenge their detention,” said Kenneth Roth, executive-director at Human Rights Watch.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy delivered a harsh rebuke of the Bush administration’s efforts to craft war-crimes trials beyond the reach of American justice. “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” he wrote.

Yesterday’s ruling was the third straight judgment against the Bush administration concerning the rights of Guantanamo prisoners.

It cast a cloud over the entire process. Not only do Guantanamo detainees have the explicit right to challenge, in U.S. federal courts, their continued imprisonment, but the court also ruled that the process by which detainees are classified as “enemy combatants” may also be challenged.

The sweeping ruling, certain to set off a blizzard of court filings, seems likely to derail the handful of trials under way, including that of Omar Khadr, the Canadian accused of murdering a U.S. soldier, and may finish President George W. Bush’s hope of putting al-Qaeda leaders on trial before he leaves office in January.

With only few months remaining in the term of a deeply unpopular, lame-duck President and with Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, the prospects for new laws to create, for the third time, another Bush administration war-crimes tribunal seem remote.

Mr. Khadr’s case, scheduled to resume next week before a new military judge after the last one was removed or retired, may be the first affected by yesterday’s ruling.

But the full scope of the court’s decision may take months of litigation and perhaps new legislation before the fate of the war-crimes trials is concluded.

Mr. Bush decried the 5-4 split decision in which the court’s liberal members prevailed.

“We’ll abide by the court’s decision,” the President said in Rome. “That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.”

The President said he wanted Congress to write new laws to restore the controversial military war-crimes tribunals currently held in a makeshift courtroom on a disused airport at a U.S. naval base in Cuba, a set-up designed from its inception to be beyond the reach of U.S. law and the Constitution.

Dissenting judges, including Chief Justice John Roberts, stridently denounced the majority ruling. The Guantanamo process offers “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants,” Chief Justice Roberts said.

Another conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia darkly warned that America “will live to regret what the court has done today,” adding that al-Qaeda will strike. Giving Guantanamo’s 280 terrorist suspects access to U.S. courts to challenge their incarceration and the legitimacy of the tribunals “will almost certainly cause more Americans to get killed.”