An excellent post in the SCOTUS blog today about the US detention system… I recommend it:

The first civilian court review of the military’s four-year-old system seeking to justify detention of terrorism suspects produced a skeptical response to three of the government’s key legal defenses of that system. In a hearing on April 4 that ran considerably beyond the scheduled 40 minutes, the D.C. Circuit Court appeared to be harboring significnat doubts about basic elements of the Justice Department arguments. The transcript of that hearing has just become available; it can be downloaded here. (NOTE: The transcript does not always identify the judges by name, and this version represents only the public session held on April 4. The judges later held a closed-door session to consider information treated by the Pentagon as classified.)

In summary, the judges on the three-member Circuit Court panel reacted negatively to the government’s sweeping interpretation of the so-called 9/11 Resolution (the Authorization for Use of Military Force) that is one foundation of the Pentagon’s terrorism detention scheme. The judges also voiced concern that the government was trying to narrow the Circuit Court’s power to review that scheme. And they suggested that the government might be saying one thing to the Circuit Court and something quite different to the Supreme Court on what remedy a detainee could obtain with a successful challenge to a Pentagon detention ruling

Those were among the signfiicant developments when the panel last week heard Parhat v. Gates (Circuit dockekt 06-1397). As matters have turned out, the case of Huzaifa Parhat became the first to be heard of more than 130 pending detainee appeals in the Circuit Court. Those appeals challenge detention rulings by Combatant Status Review Tribunals, set up by the Pentagon in 2004 after the Supreme Court ruled that some military system for examining captures had to be set up. The first line of civilian court review, in the D.C. Circuit, was set up in 2005 by the Detainee Treatment Act — the DTA — passed by Congress.

Read the rest… here.