A Blow Against Tyranny

"Congress responded the next year, in the Detainee Treatment Act, by amending the statute to remove jurisdiction, and it did so again in the Military Commissions Act to make clear that it wanted the removal to apply to cases already in the pipeline."

Farah Stockman writes in the Boston Globe: "Many legal specialists said the language of yesterday's ruling left Bush with few options and had a finality that two previous Supreme Court decisions on the issue lacked.

"High court rulings in 2004 and 2006 that affirmed a detainee's right to a fair hearing cited federal statutes that the Republican-majority Congress then amended. But yesterday's decision in favor of Lakhdar Boumediene of Bosnia and Fawzi al-Odah of Kuwait cited the Constitution itself, establishing for the first time that noncitizens held at Guantanamo Bay have fundamental rights, even though they are not being held on US soil."

What's Next?

William Glaberson writes in the New York Times: "The Guantánamo Bay detention center will not close today or any day soon.

"But the Supreme Court's decision Thursday stripped away the legal premise for the remote prison camp. . . .

"'To the extent that Guantánamo exists to hold detainees beyond the reach of U.S. courts, this blows a hole in its reason for being,' said Matthew Waxman, a former detainee affairs official at the Defense Department. . . .

"Mr. Bush on Thursday appeared to hold open the possibility of a new legislative effort to alter the decision's result. But for the moment, the administration seemed tangled in a dilemma of its own making."

Michael Abramowitz writes in The Washington Post: "The ruling throws into disarray the administration's detention strategy, almost certainly leaving to Bush's successor and the next Congress the dilemma of what to do with the Guantanamo Bay detainees. . . .

"[A]dministration officials are uncertain about their next steps, and their surrogates were bitterly blaming the Supreme Court for seizing policy that they say the White House and Congress should set."

Josh White and Del Quentin Wilber write in The Washington Post: "The decision could force the U.S. government to show why individual detainees must be held, something U.S. officials have fought for years. As many as 130 detainees have been deemed dangerous but are unlikely to ever face criminal charges, according to prosecutors, and now government officials could have to argue for indefinite detention even if the evidence is flimsy or nonexistent.

"'We're going to see a high number of people the government is going to have to release,' said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented Guantanamo Bay detainees since 2002."

On ABC, Martha Raddatz reported: "This is a real mess for the Bush administration. They expected, they say, a reversal -- but certainly not the scope of this. . . .