WASHINGTON - A federal court judge who is hearing a historic case involving Guantanamo Bay detainees lashed out yesterday at Congress and the Supreme Court for not defining "enemy combatant," a label that can trigger a suspect's detention without charge for the duration of a war.
In a rare public hearing, US District Judge Richard J. Leon said that question remains unresolved more than six years after suspects were first brought to Guantanamo Bay. "We are here today, much to my dismay, I might add, to deal with a legal question that in my judgment should have been resolved a long time ago," Leon said.
"I don't understand, I really don't, how the Supreme Court made the decision it made and left that question open. . . .I don't understand how the Congress could let it go this long without resolving" it, Leon said.
Leon spoke before lawyers representing six Algeria-Bosnian suspects who argued that their clients should not be considered enemy combatants because they were not captured on the battlefield and are no longer accused of a specific terrorist plot.
Lawyers representing the US government argued that the men should be considered enemy combatants because they showed an intent to support anti-American fighters in Afghanistan.
The detainees won the right to petition Leon for their release in June, after the Supreme Court ruled that they have a constitutional right to a hearing.
Leon said that he would issue a ruling Monday as to whether the men were enemy combatants before beginning a series of closed-door hearings evaluating the evidence against them. The detainees' case, brought pro bono by the Boston law firm WilmerHale, is the first to reach the trial stage.
FARAH STOCKMAN
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
On Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States directed an appeals court to reconsider its ruling concerning the claims of four former British Guantanamo captives. The lower court had ruled that the four men were not entitled to bring senior Bush Presidency officials to court, because they were not citizens, and were not detained within the United States, they had no recourse under the United States Constitution.

In its direction, the Supreme Court pointed out that in its landmark ruling in Boumediene v. Bush it ruled that overseas captives were entitled to Constitutional protection. Following its ruling on June 12, 2008 all the current Guantanamo captives were entitled to re-initiate their habeas corpus petitions, which had been stayed following the United States Congress passing the Military Commissions Act.

United States District Court Judge Thomas F. Hogan, the judge in charge of setting the rules of procedure for captives' habeas petitions has explicitly allowed former captives to seek relief in the US court system. This is the first instance of former captives whose cases had already been turned down being given renewed access.

The four British former captives were Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal al-Harith. All four men claimed they were captured by bounty hunters who falsely claimed the four men were Mujahideen.    

Al-Harith claimed he was attending a religious retreat in Pakistan when he was captured.
Rasul, Iqbal and Ahmed, childhood friends from Tipton, said they had traveled to Afghanistan to render humanitarian assistance, when the war broke out during a trip they made to Pakistan.

The men reported that they were bound, naked, in painful "stress positions", and bombarded with loud music, which they described as a form of religious persecution.

The four men all claimed that, during their captivity, they observed a copy of the Koran being thrown into a latrine.

The four men were repatriated to the United Kingdom in early 2004, where they were set free.