Seven years ago, on June 28, 2004, the Supreme Court issued a
historically important ruling in Rasul v. Bush, establishing
that foreign nationals held at the Bush administration’s “War on
Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had habeas corpus
rights; in other words, the right, under the “Great Writ,” first
established in England in 1215, to ask an impartial judge to
rule on whether there were grounds for their detention. A
bulwark against arbitrary imprisonment, habeas corpus was
essential for the prisoners at Guantánamo, who, for the previous
two and a half years, had been held in what Lord Steyn, a
British law lord, described as a “legal black hole” in a speech
in November 2003, unable to seek any redress whatsoever if, as
many of them claimed, they had been seized by mistake. With
breathtaking arrogance, the Bush administration had refused to
screen those it captured through Article 5 competent tribunals.
Also known as battlefield tribunals, these are part of the
Geneva Conventions, designed to screen p