What impact will the ruling have on detainees being held in other American-run prisons overseas?
The United States houses terrorism detainees at other prison camps around the world, such as Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The Bush administration asserts the right to detain those detainees indefinitely without giving them any court access. The Supreme Court did not address what legal framework applies to those detainees. On the legal Web site Balkinization, Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman suggests that “the question will in each case be determined by a ‘functional approach’ involving multiple factors and, especially, ‘practical concerns,’ rather than by any formalist rules.
