An Empty Judgment

Yesterday's welcome US supreme court ruling that prisoners in Guantánamo have the right to bring their cases to civilian courts in America, comes four years after the supreme court previously made that decision. The men in Guantánamo are unlikely therefore to greet it with the enthusiasm of the civil rights campaigners and lawyers who have fought so hard for it.

These prisoners have seen too much of US "justice" over six years to have a shred of hope that this decision will mean any speedy arrival in a court where evidence against them will be revealed and weighed, and witnesses for and against be brought.

Books, academic articles, and tens of thousands of pages of legal arguments have been written since the June 2004 ruling which was hailed then as landmark for justice. The Bush administration created kangaroo courts in Guantánamo, while lower level courts in the US successfully contested every attempt to follow the supreme court ruling by bringing cases into federal courts.

In 2005 the Detainee Treatment Act gave prisoners permission to appeal decisions of military tribunals to the District of Columbia circuit, but under procedures designed to make it impossible. Then the shameful 2006 Military Commissions Act stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions for the prisoners. That was upheld by the court of appeals for the District of Columbia in February 2007.

As these complex political and legal procedures consumed the time and energy of battalions of lawyers on both sides, the prisoners, not surprisingly, lost the hopes which at least some had had in 2004.

The very particular cases in this supreme court hearing underline the grotesque folly of the whole enterprise. Lakhdar Boumediene and five other Bosnian nationals originally from Algeria were arrested in Sarajevo shortly after September 11 2001, at the request of the US, on suspicion of planning to attack the US embassy there. They were tried by the supreme court of Bosnia, found not guilty, and released. They were then kidnapped by masked men outside the courthouse, in sight of their relatives, and taken to Guantánamo.

Back in 2002 in the early days of Guantánamo, Donald Rumsfeld was perhaps largely taken on trust when he described the men held as "the worst of the worst". As recently as June 2005, he still maintained, despite a mass of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, "If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama bin Laden's] bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker." By now who believes any of that?

In Britain alone, a dozen people once tagged as "enemy combatants" have finally been returned from Guantánamo, and not one of them has even a single charge against them.Among the 270 men still held, Guantánamo has plenty more well-documented innocents, like the Bosnians, or like the Kuwaiti student Fawzi al-Awda, sold in Pakistan, and whose name headed the first supreme court case against George Bush. After these men's six years of physical and psychological pain, which no outsider will ever truly comprehend, it is the great injustice done to them by America that will make the name of Guantánamo resonate for many years to come.