Court: No habeas for Guantánamo captives (Carol Rosenberg)

  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia handed the White House a key victory as it moves forward with plans to hold war-crimes trials for at least three Guantánamo captives at the remote Navy base in southeast Cuba.

  BY CAROL ROSENBERG -- Miami Herald

  Feb. 20, 2007 -- The federal appeals panel in Washington, D.C., sided 2-1 with the Bush administration today, upholding an act of Congress that stripped Guantánamo Bay captives of the right to challenge their detention in lower federal courts.

  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia handed the White House a key victory as it moves forward with plans to hold war-crimes trials for at least three Guantánamo captives at the remote Navy base in southeast Cuba.

  It also sets the stage for an early decision on whether to intervene by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has twice before sided with the detainees.

  Currently, three captives who have never been charged with crimes -- a Yemeni, a Pakistani and a Chinese citizen of the Uighur minority -- are asking the justices to consider their unlawful detention lawsuits.

  ''Federal courts have no jurisdiction in these cases,'' declared Judge A. Raymond Randolph for himself and Judge David B. Sentelle. Two successive acts of Congress, they said, had sufficiently stripped detainees of traditional recourse to the writ of habeas corpus.

  ''The arguments are creative but not cogent. To accept them would be to defy the will of Congress,'' Randolph wrote for the two men, who were appointed to the court by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

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