DC Appeals Court Rules Against Administration [w/poll]

Not sure if this has been diaried yet, but yet another federal court has just ruled against the Bush administration's detainee policies. And not just any court, but the ultra-conservative and supposedly Bush can do no wrong DC Circuit Court of Appeals, on which sit such Federalist Society luminaries as Douglas H. Ginsburg (who issued the ruling), David Sentelle (who voted to overturn the convictions of Oliver North and John Poindexter), Laurence Silberman (ditto), Brett Kavanaugh (who may well have lied to congress when he was confirmed last year), and the ever-popular Janice Rogers Brown, of "Gang of 14" fame.

This was a 3-judge panel, not the full court, so the administration can try to appeal the ruling to either the entire court or the Supreme Court. But the ruling basically ordered the government to turn over its information on Guantánamo detainees who are challenging their detention, and considering how conservative this court is, it seems pretty major to me, non-lawyer that I am.

I'm not really qualified to analyze or comment on the specific importance of this ruling (although any time that the DC appeals court rules against Bush is clearly an important and welcome development), so I'll just quote some excerpts and let everyone decide for themselves.

Court Tells U.S. to Reveal Data on Detainees at Guantánamo
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: July 21, 2007

A federal appeals court ordered the government yesterday to turn over virtually all its information on Guantánamo detainees who are challenging their detention, rejecting an effort by the Justice Department to limit disclosures and setting the stage for new legal battles over the government’s reasons for holding the men indefinitely.

The ruling, which came in one of the main court cases dealing with the fate of the detainees, effectively set the ground rules for scores of cases by detainees challenging the actions of Pentagon tribunals that decide whether terror suspects should be held as enemy combatants.

Ouch. Put another point on the board for the rule of law.

It was the latest of a series of stinging legal challenges to the administration’s detention policies that have amplified pressure on the Bush administration to find some alternative to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where about 360 men are now being held at the United States naval base.

A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington unanimously rejected a government effort to limit the information it must turn over to the court and lawyers for the detainees.

And check out this snark:

The court said meaningful review of the military tribunals would not be possible "without seeing all the evidence, any more than one can tell whether a fraction is more or less than half by looking only at the numerator and not the denominator."

One of the detainees' lawyers was quite happy with the ruling:

P. Sabin Willett, a Boston lawyer who argued the case for detainees, called the ruling "a resounding rejection of the government’s effort to hide the truth."

But it  did contain some wins for the administration:

The ruling also included significant victories for the government, including a decision allowing the Pentagon to limit the subjects that the lawyers can discuss with detainees and authorizing special Pentagon teams to read the lawyers’ mail and remove unauthorized comments.

The decision noted that Congress said the appeals court’s review of the combatant status hearings was limited to determining whether the Pentagon followed its own procedures, and whether an enemy-combatant finding was supported by a preponderance of the evidence.

But on the whole it sided with the detainees and precedent, not the administration's extraordinary claims of power:

But it rejected the Justice Department assertion that the court should be able to examine only the information included in the combatant status hearing, not the more expansive information the government might have collected on a detainee.

The ruling was written by Douglas H. Ginsburg, the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit..

"In order to review compliance with those procedures," Judge Ginsburg wrote, "the court must be able to view the government information."