Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in a July 7 order, established a “Combatant Status Review Tribunal” to hold summary hearings for 594 men from 40 countries who have been imprisoned for as long as two-and-a-half years at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. The action responds to two Supreme Court rulings issued June 28: Rasul v. Bush, in which a majority of justices ruled that the Guantánamo prisoners can challenge the legality of their confinement by filing habeas corpus petitions in US courts, and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, a fractured decision mandating that prisoners detained by the Bush administration as “enemy combatants” in the “war on terror” must be given some form of due process, including a hearing before a “neutral party.”
Please click the photo of prisoners en route to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba and then continue ...