"Today, it is not merely justice itself, but the idea of justice that is under attack." The words are those of Arundhati Roy, the Indian author and activist, but they could also be those of anyone trying to draw up a balance sheet of the first decade of Gitmo, as the US's concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay has come to be known.

Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) was the first legal organization to perceive the danger which the legal culture of Gitmo posed to the idea of justice and to take on cases on behalf of detainees. Gradually, other human rights organizations and, to their credit, many members of the legal establishment, joined a collective attempt to stem the tide of injustice, so that at one time CCR found itself coordinating the legal work of more than 500 pro bono "Gitmo lawyers." 

CCR's two most important victories came in two Supreme Court cases, Rasul (2004) and Boumedienne (2008). The former did away with two pernicious fictions: that, since Gitmo was located on Cuban territory, US law did not apply, and that "enemy combatants" were not entitled to habeas corpus. Congress attempted to undo Rasul by legislation, but the Supreme Court upheld it in Boumedienne, stating, "To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say 'what the law is.'"

Subsequent developments have given these victories a pyrrhic character. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where all of the Gitmo habeas cases have been brought, has refused to order the release of detainees, even those who have won their cases in the lower courts. And there are other ways in which the idea of justice has suffered in the first Gitmo decade.

More here.