Restore habeas rights.

Byline: The Register-Guard

As the new Democratic majority attempts to end President Bush's disastrous war in Iraq, it must not neglect the need to restore habeas corpus appeal rights to the foreign prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

That need was highlighted by two recent events: the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that it will not hear an appeal from Guantanamo Bay inmates until they have exhausted their legal actions, and last month's guilty plea by David Hicks, a detainee who has been held at Guantanamo for five years.

The court declined to review a challenge to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which outrageously stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus challenges filed by enemy combatants. The ruling isn't necessarily final. Justices John Paul Stevens and Anthony Kennedy left open the possibility that detainees could return after they had exhausted their limited appeals options under the president's system of military commissions.

In the Hicks case, the 31-year-old Australian citizen pleaded guilty to a single relatively minor charge. Hicks was the first Guantanamo detainee to be charged by a military tribunal in 2004 when he was accused of conspiring to commit multiple acts of terrorism, attempted murder and aiding the enemy.

After the executive order creating the military tribunals was rightly declared illegal by the Supreme Court, Congress last year passed the Military Commissions Act, perversely authorizing the same kangaroo courts. Hicks was then charged again, this time with a single count of providing material support to al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan.

Hicks' trial illustrates the glaring flaws in the military commission system. He was declared an enemy combatant by a tribunal created for the express purpose of rubber stamping that designation on detainees who had been given the label five years earlier without a shred of legal process. He was denied the lawyers of his choosing, and he was forbidden from pursuing abuse allegations against his captors.

While a jury of senior military officers sentenced Hicks to seven years in prison, Hicks will go free after serving nine months, most of it in Australia. That's the result of a plea deal in which Hicks agreed to renounce earlier allegations of abuse and not to speak to the media for a year.

Let's review: The Bush administration pressures Congress into approving a military commissions system on the basis that Guantanamo is filled with supremely dangerous terrorists who cannot safely or practically be prosecuted in U.S. courts. Then a commission agrees to allow Hicks, one of a group that former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld once declared "the worst of the worst," to become the first enemy combatant to plea bargain his way out of the concentration camp at Guantanamo.

It gets even worse: Turns out that the guilty plea, approved by a Bush political appointee who oversees the commissions, conveniently will send Hicks home before Australian Prime Minister John Howard's re-election bid. A strong ally of Bush, Howard has been criticized widely in his country for failing to secure Hicks' release.

This is not justice. This is not the rule of law. It's a political sham. If Hicks were the dangerous terrorist that the Bush administration once insisted he was, then he shouldn't be set free before the end of the year. If, as seems more likely, he was the bumbling "wannabe" that his lawyers described him as, then he should never have been allowed to rot for five years at Guantanamo.

It's little wonder that Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently testified before Congress that Guantanamo is a "taint" that has tarnished this nation's moral authority and that the trials there lack international credibility.

The Bush administration should heed Gates' advice and shut down Guantanamo, and Congress should move swiftly to restore habeas corpus rights to all foreign prisoners.