In a unanimous decision, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled today that civilian courts do not have authority to hear the cases of three detainees imprisoned at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. The ruling is a win for both Bush and Obama administration policies in the War on Terror.

Continued...

A little background:

In 2004, the Supreme Court of the United States established for the first time that detainees held at Guantanamo Bay are entitled to challenge the legality of their military detention. In Rasul v. Bush Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent that, "From this point forward, federal courts will entertain petitions from these prisoners, and others like them around the world, challenging actions and events far away, and forcing courts to oversee one aspect of the executive's conduct of a foreign war." In the aftermath of Rasul, the Bush administration stopped sending detainees to Guantanamo started routing them to Bagram, where they were held and interrogated without judicial scrutiny. (source)

When the Obama administration came to power, they were given the opportunity to reverse or at least tweak the Bush administration's position but in a two-sentence court filing, the Obama Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. Needless to say, many Obama supporters were shocked. "The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we'd hoped," said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram Airfield. "We all expected better." (source)

Since that decision, three detainees being held at Bagram petitioned US courts seeking relief from their confinement and today's appeals court ruling states the US district judge should have thrown out their petitions. No doubt this case will now proceed further up the judicial process and Justice Scalia and his robed co-workers will get another shot at the issue.

But for now, President Barack Obama and US Attorney General Eric Holder agreed with the Bush administration and Justice Scalia and they were all being backed up by a federal court of appeals. Who'd have thunk it?