In a far-reaching setback to the Bush administration's "war on terror", a senior US judge in Washington has ruled that special military tribunals set up to try hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay are unconstitutional. Judge Joyce Hens Green of the DC District Court said the detentions "violate the petitioners' rights to due process of law" guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment to the US constitution, writes Conor O'Clery in New York
The ruling, the latest in a series of embarrassing judgments against US detention policies, leaves in doubt the fate of 540 detainees from 42 countries held incommunicado at the US base in Cuba.
The White House maintains that Guantanamo inmates have no constitutional rights and a spokesman for President Bush said last night, "We respectfully disagree with the decision."
Yesterday's ruling, which US officials will likely appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, challenges the action of Deputy Defence Secretary Mr Paul Wolfowitz last July in creating the military courts, known as Combatant Status Review tribunals.
He did so in response to a US Supreme Court decision in June, which the administration is appealing, that the detainees are entitled to have their cases heard by a non-government tribunal.
"Of course, it would be far easier for the government to prosecute the war on terrorism if it could imprison all suspected 'enemy combatants' at Guantanamo Bay without having to acknowledge and respect any constitutional rights of detainees," Judge Green said.
But while the President had to protect Americans, "that necessity cannot negate the existence of the most basic fundamental rights for which the people of this country have fought and died for well over 200 years."
The US constitution states that no one under US jurisdiction can "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
A group of American lawyers representing the detainees praised the ruling as a "smashing defeat for the Bush administration" and "a momentous victory for the rule of law, for human rights, and for our democracy."
Two weeks ago in the same court, Judge Richard Leon dismissed a lawsuit brought on behalf of seven detainees, ruling that foreign nationals captured and detained outside the US had no rights under the US constitution.
In her 75-page opinion on 11 cases involving Guantanamo prisoners, Judge Green also noted that the military tribunals failed to give the detainees access to material evidence or allowed lawyers to advise them.
The judge found, moreover, that the detainees had valid claims against their continued detention under the Geneva Conventions, despite administration claims that the suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda members arrested in Afghanistan, who make up the bulk of prisoners held in Cuba, are not entitled to the rights of prisoners of war.
Judge Green, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter and was promoted to president of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court under President George H. W. Bush in 1990, also found that confessions from detainees on which the government relied were cast in doubt by widespread allegations of abuse.
A US army general is currently investigating accounts of brutal treatment of detainees witnessed by FBI agents last summer at Guantanamo Bay, condemned as an "icon of lawlessness" by Amnesty International.
Before they were suspended in November, the tribunals had reviewed just over 400 cases but only two detainees were released.
The process was stalled when US District Judge James Robertson ruled in the case of Mr Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, that a detainee could not be tried there unless a proper court decided he was not entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions.
The FBI witnesses reported incidents where a prisoner was shackled and forced to lie in his own faeces and others where prisoners were chained to the floor in bare cells and threatened with dogs.
The Red Cross reportedly told the US government that the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo involved psychological and physical coercion "tantamount to torture".
Last week, four British detainees were handed over to British authorities and released.