Habeas Corpus

The Military Comission Act of 2006 removes the right of habeas corpus for aliens detained at Guantanamo. It's constitutionality is being tested in the Courts. It is helpful to review the role of habeas corpus in understanding its importance to the US legal system.

In the 1600’s in England, active Puritan congregations bent on reforming the world were ready to defy the highest powers of church and state. They resisted injustice on grounds of individual conscience, natural law (as reflected in the Bible), the Magna Carta, and other precedents in English legal history. Puritans such as John Hampden, John Lilburne, Walter Udall, William Penn, and hundreds of others, by their open disobedience to existing law, laid a foundation for the future of civil liberties, both in England and in America.
“Freeborn” John Lilburne printed and distributed unlicensed Puritan books and pamphlets in London, for which he was arrested in December 1637 and brought before the Court of Star Chamber. The Star Chamber was an infamous inquisitional court which required an oath in advance of any charges being made. Lilburne refused to take the oath, asserting that swearing an oath violated his sacred obligation and further, that he should not required to be a witness against himself. His sentence was to be whipped at the cart-tail from the Fleet prison to the Palace Yard, Westminster,[1] where he was to stand in the pillory, then to be imprisoned until he conformed and admitted his guilt. The sentence was carried out on 18 April 1638 with Lilburne loudly declaring that he had committed no crime against the law or the state, but that he was a victim of the bishops' cruelty. Lilburne's punishment turned into an anti-government demonstration, with cheering crowds supporting him.
Lilburne was kept in prison for nearly three years. During his imprisonment, he wrote many pamphlets that publicized the injustices committed against him. In November 1640, King Charles reluctantly summoned the Parliament. Within a week of its meeting, Oliver Cromwell drew attention to Lilburne's case in a passionate speech denouncing the tyranny of the bishops, and Parliament ordered his release. Lilburne was later paid reparations by the House of Lords in recompense for his internment, and in 1641 the jurisdiction of the Star Chamber was abolished by statute. Lilburne’s case was emblematic of the Puritans’ use of the writ of habeas corpus to oppose the oppression of the Crown. The case was also the seminal event in the establishment of the United States’ Fifth Amendment constitutional right against self-incrimination.

Why is the right of an alien to challange the legality his custody important to a US citizen?

[1] Cart-tailing involved being dragged behind a cart while state agents and onlookers flogged the prisoner en route to the prison.