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Starting in January 2002, four foreign prisoners—two British (or as some records show, one British and one Kuwaiti) and two Australian citizens—were received in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp after being turned over to U.S. authorities; they had been captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The detention camp is located at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on a U.S. naval base. The camp, which was situated on land that has been leased by the United States since about 1900, was being used to hold suspected terrorists after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Most of the prisoners who were being sent to the detention center were Muslim and also captured in Afghanistan or Iraq. They, too, had been suspected terrorists but no crime had been charged against them by the United States.

When the Supreme Court defined the relationship between the military and the Court in the mid-nineteenth century, it recognized the military as a legally separate sphere that looks primarily to the Congress and the president for protection and governance rather than to the courts and the Constitution. In Dynes v. Hoover (1858), the Court recognized that the power to provide for a system of military justice arose from Article I, clause 14 of the Constitution, which permits Congress to make rules to govern and regulate the armed forces and not Article III, which gives Congress the authority to create a system of federal courts.