Back To The Courts

Let's hope this time it is definitively established Bushco is violating the Constitution.

Lawyers for dozens of Guantanamo Bay detainees asked a federal appeals court Wednesday to declare a key part of President Bush's new military trials law unconstitutional.

The detainees' lawyers challenged the military's authority to arrest people overseas and detain them indefinitely without allowing them to use the U.S. courts to contest their detention.

Bush gave the military that authority last month when he signed a law that sets up special commissions to hold trials for foreigners designated as "enemy combatants." Bush hailed the law as a crucial tool in the war on terrorism and said it would allow prosecution of several high-level terror suspects.

In written arguments, attorneys for more than 100 detainees who would be locked out of the regular judicial system asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to let the detainees keep their legal challenges going in civilian courts.

The framers of the Constitution never would have permitted the government to hold people indefinitely without charges, the lawyers wrote.

"Persons imprisoned without charge must retain the right to obtain a court inquiry into the factual and legal bases for their imprisonment," they wrote.

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