Bump and Update:

You can listen to the oral arguments here.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases today involving so-called "enemy combatants" held at Guantanamo Bay. The core question:

Can these foreign-born prisoners, held outside U.S. borders, use U.S. courts to try win their freedom?

Georgetown Law Prof and civil liberties expert David Cole, writing in the New York Times, says:

These suggestions that noncitizens have less right to be free than citizens are ill advised. Some provisions of the Constitution do explicitly limit their protections to United States citizens — the right to vote and the right to run for Congress or president, for example. The Bill of Rights, however, does not distinguish between citizens and noncitizens. It extends its protections in universal language, to "persons," "people" or "the accused." The framers considered these rights to be God-given natural rights, and God didn't give them only to persons holding American passports.

When one considers the specific right at issue in the enemy combatant cases — the right not to be locked up without a fair process — there is also no good reason to differentiate between citizens and foreigners. From the prisoner's standpoint, every human being has the same interest in not being locked up erroneously or arbitrarily. And from the government's perspective, the security interest in detaining terrorists is the same whether they are citizens or not.