I always wondered how the United States got away with establishing a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That's Cuba! Enemy territory! I can understand why the United States wants a base there. Our government has bases everywhere. But why does Cuba put up with it? Maybe because the country that has tried to kill Fidel Castro many times has the muscle to put bases and detention centers wherever it pleases.

But all the military might in the world can't stop the Constitution from applying to Guantanamo Bay. That's because the Executive Branch, where the President does his business, was reigned in on Thursday by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that even enemy combatants and detainees can challenge their detention under the Habeas Corpus rules which protect everyone else in U.S. territory.

Habeas Corpus is a latin phrase which means that you can ask a court to review the legality of your detention. It's one of the oldest legal concepts in Western Civilization. It's what separates the free from the oppressed, and when I say oppressed, I mean OPPRESSED, those who live under totalitarian regimes and can be swept off the streets for no reason and without any recourse. Without Habeas Corpus you can spend years in jail simply because you held different political views, or some other frivolous reason. No matter how bad the Bush administration or any other tyrant abuses power in the American political system, there's always Habeas Corpus.

Here is a summary of the ruling by the New York Times' excellent Supreme Court reporter, Linda Greenhouse:

The Supreme Court on Thursday delivered its third consecutive rebuff to the Bush administration’s handling of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, ruling 5 to 4 that the prisoners there have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention.

The court declared unconstitutional a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which, at the administration’s behest, stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from the detainees seeking to challenge their designation as enemy combatants.

Congress and the administration had passed a shortened alternative to a habeas procedure for the prisoners in the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said that procedure “falls short of being a constitutionally adequate substitute” because it failed to offer “the fundamental procedural protections of habeas corpus.”

Justice Kennedy declared: “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

The decision . . . was categorical in its rejection of the administration’s basic arguments. Indeed, the court repudiated the fundamental legal basis for the administration’s strategy, adopted in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, of housing prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere at the United States Naval base in Cuba, where Justice Department lawyers advised the White House that domestic law would never reach.

Here's the opinion, for those who care to muddle through the legal jargon.

For international human rights lawyers, the decision handed down by the Supreme Court is groundbreaking, like Roe v. Wade for abortion rights activists or Brown v. Board of Education for domestic civil rights lawyers. What's most interesting is that the Court sees right through the justification for locating the detention center in another country. That tactic does not mean that the U.S. Constitutional protections of Habeas Corpus cannot apply.

The Supreme Court is consistently striking down the Bush administration's contorted legal rationales for the treatment of detainees in the War on Terror. This brings us back to Civics 101: separation of powers, a concept we all learned about but never really paid attention to. In fact, we would laugh at the concept that one branch is not allowed to get too powerful and that each branch of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) serves as a check on each other. It all seemed so quaint. Schoolkids got the point, but was this rock-paper-scissors theory really useful in real life? It is now. As one commentator notes in quoting from the opinion, "Even though the two political branches — the President and Congress — had agreed to take away the detainees’ habeas rights, [Justice] Kennedy said those branches do not have 'the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.'"

The moral of the story is that the Bush presidency is out of control, and has done whatever it pleased in the name of security and, of course, politics. Separation of powers is no longer a cute theory of government. It prevents this country from falling into the abyss completely.