WASHINGTON — For Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the Yemeni who was at the center of Thursday's Supreme Court ruling on military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, the future is a bit clearer: He must receive a trial with new, congressionally approved procedures.
But the landmark 5-3 decision may also have a significant impact on hundreds of other detainees at Guantanamo, as well as an unknown number picked up by U.S. forces and held in undisclosed locations around the world.
The high court's finding that the Geneva Convention covers terrorism detainees -- from young men who claim to have been mere cooks for anti-U.S. forces to Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Shaikh Mohammed -- could lead to sweeping changes in the way they are treated, according to legal experts and advocates for those held. The ruling could give Guantanamo prisoners a day in a U.S. court, and senior Al Qaeda operatives being held as U.S. captives visits from the Red Cross.
Administration lawyers argue this kind of interpretation is too broad, insisting the decision only applies to Hamdan and a limited group at Guantanamo: the nine other detainees who have been charged with war crimes and 40 to 80 more who are in the pipeline to face similar charges.
"Certainly, this court's decision is limited to the case before it," argued one senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with the rules of his job.
Others within the administration, however, have been more circumspect, declining to speculate on whether the Geneva Convention now applies to all detainees being held at Guantanamo and at other prisons overseas.
"That's something we're studying, and will be studying," said another senior administration official.
President Bush decided in February 2002 that Al Qaeda was not covered by the Geneva Convention and that Taliban fighters did not qualify as prisoners of war. Bush also determined that a Geneva Convention provision known as Common Article 3 -- which applies to conflicts such as civil wars where the adversaries are not recognized nations -- was invalid when it came to the global war on terrorism.
In the court's majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens found that Bush's rationale was erroneous.
While Common Article 3 provides fewer safeguards than other portions of the Geneva Convention, it does prohibit the "passing of sentences" without a judgment from "a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."
