The High Court has ruled that US intelligence documents containing details of the alleged torture of a former UK resident can be released.
Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed, 31, who spent four years in Guantanamo Bay, claims British authorities colluded in his torture while he was in Morocco.
The UK government denies allegations of collusion and says it will appeal against the court's judgement.
It had stopped judges publishing the claims on national security grounds.
The key document in the case is a summary of abuse allegations that US intelligence officers shared with their counterparts in London.
Any publication of the material will be delayed until an appeal takes place.
When the High Court gave its original judgement on the case last year, a seven paragraph summary of Mr Mohamed's torture claims was removed on the orders of Foreign Secretary David Miliband.
I HOPE AL QAEDA LOSES THE APPEAL.
WOULD THE COURTS HAVE AWARDED THE NAZIS HABEUS CORPUS IN WW2?
NO, THEY DIDN'T.
WOULD THE COURTS HAVE GIVEN THE NAZIS INTEL IN WW2?
NO.
WHY HAVE THINGS CHANGED?
THE LEFT IS IN CONTROL OF TH COURTS AND THE MEDIA.
WHICH IS WHY I HAVE LONG ARGUED THE FOLLOWING:
- TO DEFEAT THE JIHADISTS ABROAD WE MUST FIRST DEFEAT THE LEFTISTS AT HOME.
- TO MAKE JIHADISM HISTORY WE MUST MAKE LEFTISM HISTORY.
IT'S A TOUGH TASK, BUT DOING SO WILL ALSO YIELD TWO OTHER HUGE BENEFITS:
- IT WILL ELIMINATE CLIMATE ALARMISM, AND
- IT WILL ELIMINATE POVERTY.
GODSPEED.
NOTE: JUSTICE SCALIA WROTE A BRILLIANT DISSENT ABOUT THE IMPORTANT ISSUES RAISED WHEN WE GIVE ALIEN ENEMIES TOO MANY RIGHTS - IN THE BOUMEDIENE CASE:
EXCERPTS:
Today, for the first time in our Nation's history, the Court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war….
The writ of habeas corpus does not, and never has, run in favor of aliens abroad; the Suspension Clause thus has no application, and the Court's intervention in this military matter is entirely ultra vires.
The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us.
It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.
That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic.
But it is this Court's blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today.
The President relied on our settled precedent in Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950), when he established the prison at Guantanamo Bay for enemy aliens.
[I]n response [to the Court’s 2006 ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld], Congress, at the President's request, quickly enacted the Military Commissions Act, emphatically reasserting that it did not want these prisoners filing habeas petitions.
It is therefore clear that Congress and the Executive—both political branches—have determined that limiting the role of civilian courts in adjudicating whether prisoners captured abroad are properly detained is important to success in the war that some 190,000 of our men and women are now fighting….
... What competence does the Court have to second-guess the judgment of Congress and the President on such a point?
None whatever.
But the Court blunders in nonetheless.
Henceforth, as today's opinion makes unnervingly clear, how to handle enemy prisoners in this war will ultimately lie with the branch that knows least about the national security concerns that the subject entails.
What drives today's decision is neither the meaning of the Suspension Clause, nor the principles of our precedents, but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy.
The Court says that if the extraterritorial applicability of the Suspension Clause turned on formal notions of sovereignty, "it would be possible for the political branches to govern without legal constraint" in areas beyond the sovereign territory of the United States.
That cannot be, the Court says, because it is the duty of this Court to say what the law is. It would be difficult to imagine a more question-begging analysis.
… Our power "to say what the law is" is circumscribed by the limits of our statutorily and constitutionally conferred jurisdiction. And that is precisely the question in these cases: whether the Constitution confers habeas jurisdiction on federal courts to decide petitioners' claims.
It is both irrational and arrogant to say that the answer must be yes, because otherwise we would not be supreme.
Putting aside the conclusive precedent of Eisentrager, it is clear that the original understanding of the Suspension Clause was that habeas corpus was not available to aliens abroad, as Judge Randolph's thorough opinion for the court below detailed.
… It is entirely clear that, at English common law, the writ of habeas corpus did not extend beyond the sovereign territory of the Crown.
Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separation-of-powers principles to establish a manipulable "functional" test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus (and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well).
It blatantly misdescribes important precedents, most conspicuously Justice Jackson's opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager.
It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens abroad absent statutory authorization.
And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.
The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today.
THE COURTS HAVE NO BUSINESS DECIDING VITAL WAR ISSUES IN WAR-TIME.
GIVING OUR ENEMIES TOO MANY RIGHTS IS PLAYING RIGHT IN TO THEIR HANDS.
APPARENTLY, THE LEFTIST JUDGES ANS LAWYERS DON'T CARE.
LIKE OUR JIHADIST ENEMIES ABROAD, THE LEFTISTS AT HOME HAVE GREAT DISDAIN FOR OUR LEGAL TRADITIONS AND HAVE SOUGHT FOR DECADES - USING WHATEVER LEGAL MEANS AVAILABLE - TO SHACKLE POUR NATION AND OUR CONSTITUTION TO FOREIGN RULES WE HAVE NEVER RATIFIED OR VOTED ON AND WHICH DIMINISH OUR INALIENABLE RIGHTS AND OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS AND OUR ABILITY TO DEF ND OURSELVES.
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