Goodbye, Gitmo.

• Author: Balko, Radley
• Position: Follow-Up - Closure of Guantanamo naval base

In "Civil Liberties and Enemy Combatants" (January 2005), attorney Harvey Silverglate took a critical look at the Supreme Court's 2004 rulings hashing out the legal rights of suspected terrorists held in the United States and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Silverglate warned that the Court's decisions would not adequately protect the right to due process. Shortly after Election Day, President Barack Obama told 60 Minutes: "I have said repeatedly that l intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that." After his inauguration he pledged to close the base within a year, which suggests that Gitmo will be shut down before all the legal issues concerning habeas corpus, due process, and the separation of powers are fully resolved.

During the Bush administration, the most significant legal case affecting Guantanamo detainees was Boumediene v. Bush, decided in July. The Court ruled that the detainees had a constitutional right to file habeas corpus petitions in U.S. courts. That decision sent the Boumediene petitioners, six Algerians who were detained at Guantanamo after being captured in Bosnia, backto the district court. In November U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ordered five of them released, finding that the case against them rested "exclusively on the information contained in a classified document from an unnamed source" and that "to allow enemy combatancy to rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court's obligation." Leon took...