Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: who are Fawzi al-Odah and Lakhdar Boumediene?
This article, following on from yesterday’s article Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history, which analyzed the legal history of the detainees’ demands for habeas corpus rights, looks at the stories of the lead Petitioners in the cases that will be considered by the Supreme Court today. It’s a version of an article that I wrote for the BBC, which was published on the BBC News website. Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, unearths details about the two men challenging the US’s right to detain them, in a case at the Supreme Court. The cases were filed by US lawyers on behalf of Kuwaiti Fawzi al-Odah and 11 other Kuwaiti detainees, and Algerian-born Bosnian Lakhdar Boumediene and five other Bosnian detainees. At issue is the 2006 Military Commissions Act, passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush. It stripped the Guantánamo detainees of the right to
