NYT editorial: Tortured Justice

The nation’s courts continue to grapple with the abuses committed by President Bush’s administration in the name of fighting terrorism. The extent of the damage to American liberties, and how lasting it will be, will be told in part by the outcome of two cases that are to be heard by the federal courts.

On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that turns on Mr. Bush’s claim that he can order people living in the United States to be detained by the military indefinitely without charges. The case involves Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar who was in the United States legally. He was declared an enemy combatant in mid-2003 and has been held in a Navy brig since then.

The detention was upheld by an appeals court panel, which should be quickly and definitively reversed by the Supreme Court. This intolerable reading of the law would leave a president free to suspend the rights of anyone, including American citizens.

The other, equally notorious case is being heard on Tuesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan. It involves Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian with no ties to terrorism who became a victim of the Bush team’s lawless policy of “extraordinary rendition” — the outsourcing of interrogations to foreign governments known to torture prisoners.

(More here.)