From the slippery slope dept.

A federal appeals court agreed to strip allegedly foreign prisoners of their right to challenge their detention at Guantanamo Bay:

A divided federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a new law stripping federal judges of authority to review [alleged] foreign prisoners’ challenges to their detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba...

That law, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, was signed by President Bush last October. Its enactment followed the Supreme Court’s rejection of his administration’s earlier arguments that the right of habeas corpus — the fundamental right, centuries old, to ask a judge for release from unjust imprisonment — did not apply to [alleged] foreigners being held outside the United States as enemy combatants.

The new law explicitly eliminated the federal courts’ jurisdiction over habeas challenges by such prisoners. It instead set up military panels to review the justification of detention in individual cases, with limited right of appeal to the courts afterward.

This blog will continue to uphold the principle of innocent until proven guilty, even if the three branches of the federal government do not. And I still think this opens the door to U.S. citizens being locked up in Gitmo. How do you prove you're a citizen if you can't dispute your detention in court? Paranoid? Just ask Jose Padilla.

L.A. angle? You could be next...