High court to consider jailed Americans in Iraq

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear the appeal of an American citizen held in U.S. custody in Iraq who faces an Iraqi death sentence, deepening its examination of the rights of military detainees.

Mohammad Munaf, an Iraqi-American with dual citizenship, was convicted in Iraq for his suspected role in the 2005 kidnapping of three Romanian journalists.

The highest U.S. court has combined Munaf's case with a similar one involving a Jordanian-American being held for the Iraqi government by the U.S.-led military coalition in Iraq.

This week, the Supreme Court also heard arguments on behalf of a group of terrorism suspects detained at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

That case also concerns the authority of U.S. courts over detainees held outside U.S. borders.

The United States has about 160,000 troops in Iraq after it led an invasion in 2003. The U.S. government is criticized by European allies and human rights groups for holding terrorism suspects for years without charge at Guantanamo and other locations.

The Supreme Court has twice ruled against the Bush administration's policies on Guantanamo prisoners, but Congress then passed laws to keep the cases out of U.S. courts.

Munaf says he was kidnapped in Iraq along with the three Romanian journalists, for whom he worked as a translator. He was detained after a U.S. military raid freed the group and taken to an Iraqi court, which sentenced him to death on the kidnapping charges.

Munaf, who is appealing the conviction in Iraqi courts, is seeking through U.S. courts to keep from being transferred to Iraqi custody. He is being held at U.S. Camp Cropper in Iraq.

His appeal characterized lower courts as allowing the U.S. military to "detain an American citizen in an overseas American prison indefinitely, or dispatch him to his death ... with no obligation to demonstrate the lawfulness of either his imprisonment or his threatened transfer."

The U.S. government said U.S. courts have no say because Munaf is held as part of a multinational coalition and because U.S. courts have no authority to challenge the Iraqi court's ruling in a crime committed in Iraq by a dual Iraqi citizen.

The court agreed on Friday to consider five other cases, including:

-- Whether Ahmed Ressam, accused of plotting to blow up the Los Angeles international airport in 1999, was properly convicted on one of the nine charges on which he was found guilty.

-- Whether a Wal-Mart Stores employee who became disabled should automatically be reassigned to an equivalent position or whether U.S. disability law only grants her the right to compete with other applicants for the job.

-- Whether a schizophrenic man who was found competent to stand trial in a criminal case can be denied the right to act as his own attorney on the grounds of mental illness.

(Editing by John O'Callaghan)