The final briefs have begun to arrive at the US Supreme Court on an appeal from a Yemeni detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, named Salim Ahmed Hamdan.

But a new issue has surfaced which legal experts say could provide a 'nightmare scenario'. The New York Times reports the case is an important test of the limits of presidential authority to conduct the war on terror. But also at issue now is whether the court has jurisdiction to proceed or whether Congress, in a measure that President George W Bush supported and signed into law on December. 30, has succeeded in shutting the federal courthouse doors on Hamdan and 150 other Guantánamo detainees whose cases are pending at various levels of the federal court system. In a brief, a group of prominent law professors told the Supreme Court 'the keys to the courthouse will be placed in the exclusive control of the executive', if that is the case. A section of the new law, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, provides that 'no court, justice or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider' habeas corpus petitions or 'any other action' that relates to 'any aspect of the detention' of individuals in military custody at the Navy base at Guantánamo Bay.
Full report in The New York Times