Reply #22: According to the London Guardian

[dflprincess]

the prisoners already at Gitmo. (I posted this on another thread, sorry for the repeat if you've already seen it)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1884351,00.html#...

However, lawyers for the 460 detainees at Guantánamo say they intend to launch legal challenges to what they described as a broad assault on fundamental human rights. "The fact that they are denying the right of habeas corpus is so unlawful and unconstitutional that it throws us back to before King John and the Magna Carta," said Michael Ratner, president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents many of the Guantánamo detainees.

The first cases to go before the courts are expected to be challenges to the senate's denial of the right of habeas corpus to inmates at Guantánamo, some of whom have been held for five years without charge. Despite impassioned pleas from human rights advocates - and even some Republican senators - legislators voted 51 to 48 on Thursday night to bar detainees from challenging their detention in the US courts.

The measure goes even further than legislation enacted last December that would bar future habeas corpus challenges, because it would bar even those cases already before the courts from being heard. "No court, justice or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States has been determined ... to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant," the legislation says.....

Detainees' lawyers are expected to challenge other controversial provisions of the senate bill, such as the granting of a retroactive amnesty to interrogators at the CIA's network of secret prisons against prosecution for torture and other war crimes.