Source: https://www.lawfareblog.com/former-guantanamo-detainee-petitions-certiorari-seeking-redress-alleged-torture
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 06:40:56+00:00

Document:
In late 2002, Afghan officials arrested Mohammed Jawad and transferred him to American officials. During his six-year stay at Guantanamo, Jawad alleges that he was tortured. Upon being released from federal custody and repatriated to Afghanistan, Jawad sued the government in 2014. Last year on Lawfare, Helen Klein Murillo described the D.C. District Court’s opinion dismissing the suit, including the underlying laws in question and the merits of his case, as well as Jawad’s appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. In August, the D.C. Circuit affirmed the District Court’s ruling. Below, I review the relevant background, outline the Court of Appeals’ decision, and summarize Jawad’s petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court.
In 2004, a Combatant Status Review Tribunal determined that Jawad was properly detained as an enemy combatant. In 2005 and 2006, Administrative Review Boards concluded that there was sufficient reason to continue his detention. By 2009, given a lack of evidence supporting Jawad’s continued internment, the government determined Jawad’s further detention was no longer lawful and repatriated him.
Upon returning to his native Afghanistan, Jawad filed suit against several individuals in charge of the Guantanamo program in the D.C. District Court, asserting six claims: three violations under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) and the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), a violation the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA), and the Fifth and Eighth Amendments. Judge Huvelle dismissed all six claims for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. As Lawfare previously described, the court’s opinion is “relatively dense, and includes complicated issues of tort law, agency law, and sovereign immunity,” but a brief summary of the analysis’ conclusions is nevertheless in order.
[N]o court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any [non-habeas] action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien who is or was detained by the United States and has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.
Because, Judge Thomas Griffith penned, “[b]y its clear terms, this provision strips federal courts of jurisdiction to hear most claims against the United States arising out of the detention of aliens like Jawad captured during the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan,” and because the CSRT satisfied §7(a), the court could not intervene.
Jawad’s arguments to the contrary were unpersuasive. First, Jawad claimed that his 2009 release and repatriation is evidence that his original detention was improper. Judge Griffith disagrees, stating “[the release] never said that Jawad was not properly detained, only that the United States would no longer treat him as such.” The distinction foreclosed Jawad’s argument: such a claim would have to be accompanied by a full revocation of the CSRT’s original determination, which did not occur.
Finally, the Court noted and dismissed “several meritless constitutional claims” Jawad raises, included damages for “unconstitutional trespasses by the United States” as well as facial challenges to §7(a) as “inconsistent with the plain language of Article III of the Constitution” and violating the Bill of Attainder Clause, with long-standing precedent and textual support.
Late last year, Jawad petitioned the Supreme Court for certiorari. Abandoning his claims regarding the Westfall Act and individual liability, the thrust of the petition is twofold: the “Court should not permit the court of appeals’ decision to stand . . . relating to the government’s unlawful detention and torture of a juvenile,” and that, more broadly, “the important question of whether juveniles detained and charged at Guantanamo Bay are barred from filing a damages actions[sic] in federal court has not been, but should be, settled by [the] Court.” Jawad rehashes much of his arguments from his lower court appellate brief relating to the text of the MCA’s jurisdictional bar, the Optional Protocol, and the FJDA, though adds additional arguments as to why the Court ought to hear his case. I address each in turn.
First, Jawad again confronts the jurisdictional bar. He argues that “[t]he United States did not have jurisdiction to detain and charge [him],” which would prohibit invoking the §7 jurisdictional bar and allow the suit to continue. To support his claim, Jawad begins by citing Hamdan v. Rumsfeld for the proposition that military tribunals must comply with the entirety of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Because, under Blanton, juveniles cannot be tried in courts martial, neither can they be tried in military commissions. This, Jawad asserts, “requires a finding that [the government] failed to comply with the UCMJ’s conditions on the use of military commissions concerning the detention . . . of juveniles.” Such a finding would thus invalidate the initial CSRT, undermining the MCA’s jurisdictional bar on courts to hear such cases.
In light of the recently-decided Al Shimari v. Caci Premier Tech., Inc., Jawad poses a new argument: the D.C. Circuit Court erred in light of Al Shimari’s determination that “the justiciable doctrine does not bar torture claims.” In that case, the Fourth Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a claim as non-justiciable because “district court erred in failing to draw a distinction between unlawful conduct and discretionary acts that were not unlawful when committed.” Jawad then links this reversal to his case’s justiciability and the MCA’s jurisdictional bar: “As the justiciability doctrine could not bar the plaintiffs’ torture claims in Al Shimari, MCA Section 7 should not bar Petitioner’s torture claims.” Because the alleged torture was performed on Jawad before his CSRT, the petition states, the Court should intervene to determine whether the government is barred from using the tainted CSRT in support of the jurisdictional bar.
Jawad’s final argument raises his earlier argument stemming from Boumediene v. Bush. In Boumediene, the petition notes, the “Court explained the high risk for error in determining the accused’s status in the CSRT process and . . . recognized the meaningful opportunity for a detainee to demonstrate he is being unlawfully held and argue that his CSRT determination was unlawful.” Given the spirit of the holding, Jawad reasserts his argument that because he was later released, he could not have been properly detained at the outset.
The main argument put forward is based in the text of §2241(e)(2): the provision, the government claims, “does not open [one’s] detention decision to after-the-fact review when a ‘court, justice, or judge’ determines whether it has jurisdiction over a subsequent non-habeas-corpus action.” The government asserts that this provision alone forecloses further review.
But, arguendo, the brief addresses each one of Jawad’s arguments that the CSRT determination should be overturned if improperly reviewed. The government counters Jawad’s assertion that military commissions don’t permit trying juveniles by reverting back to the Circuit Court’s opinion, stating that the claim “‘ha[s] no relevance here because [Jawad] is not being tried by any military court.’” The government also parries Jawad’s claims relating to the Optional Protocol by arguing that “nothing in the Protocol prevents the United States Armed Forces from detaining the juvenile and determining his status as an enemy combatant.” Finally, the brief similarly dismisses Jawad’s FJDA assertion: “That Act provides a procedural alternative in federal district court to a normal criminal prosecution for juveniles who violate federal criminal prohibitions. . . . It has no relevant to the detention of alien enemy combatants apprehended abroad,” rendering it “immaterial” to the case at bar.
The government turns finally to Jawad’s claim that his release necessitates that his original determination was improper. Like the lower court, the government claims Jawad’s argument is incorrect based on the military determination that Jawad could no longer be held was based on the text of the notice, reading that what was left in the record “after other evidence was suppressed” was “‘no longer [sufficient to] treat [Jawad] as detainable.’” The government adds that the Attorney General’s ordering of further investigation into Jawad’s case “in light of the multiple eyewitness accounts that were not previously available for inclusion in the record—including videotaped interviews” bolster the conclusion that the later determination that Jawad was no longer legally detainable does not bear on the accuracy of the initial CSRT in question.
Jawad has filed his reply brief, though it hasn’t yet been released.
Russell Spivak is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has previously interned in the Office of the Chief Prosecutor in the Office of Military Commissions.
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