After 2001 and the launch of war in Afghanistan, the Bush administration sent hundreds of foreign prisoners from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Mideast to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, believing they could be held there and questioned out of reach of lawyers or courts.
But lawyers went to the Supreme Court arguing that long-term prisoners had a right to plead their innocence before an independent judge. They decried Guantanamo as a "law-free zone."
They won a series of victories at the Supreme Court, including a 5-4 ruling in 2008 that said the Constitution gave these prisoners a right to habeas corpus because Guantanamo was thousands of miles from a battlefield and had been occupied as sovereign U.S. territory for a century. At the same time, the justices said this right to a court hearing did not extend to battlefields or war zones.
Afterward, the Bush administration insisted the right to habeas corpus did not extend to Iraq or Afghanistan. And in 2009, the Obama administration adopted the same view.
A federal judge in Washington ruled that prisoners who were shipped to the Bagram prison from other countries had a right to challenge their detention, just like the prisoners who were sent to Guantanamo.
The Obama administration appealed and won a reversal in Friday's decision. In its opinion, the appeals court acknowledged the administration could "evade judicial review of executive detention decisions by transferring detainees into active conflict zones."
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