WASHINGTON -- Revelations about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison understandably consumed the attention of Congress last week. But how is the scandal being viewed by members of the third branch of the federal government -- the judiciary?

		Michael McGough is an editor at large in the PG's National Bureau (mmcgough@ nationalpress.com).

Specifically, could lurid photographs of hooded and humiliated Iraqi prisoners undermine the administration's position with the U.S. Supreme Court, which is preparing rulings in two cases challenging the detention of "enemy combatants"? The possibility of such a ripple effect was the talk of the press room at the Supreme Court last week, and reportedly also worries the White House.

On April 20, the justices heard oral arguments in a case brought by the families of foreign detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. On April 28 -- eight hours before CBS aired a report about the prison abuses -- the court heard arguments over the detention as enemy combatants in this country of two U.S. citizens suspected of ties to terrorists.

In judges' parlance, one case is "on all fours" with another when it raises identical legal issues. At best, any comparison of the situation at the Abu Ghraib prison with the cases pending at the court has only one leg to stand on, but it could be an important one. In both of the enemy combatant cases argued last month, the Supreme Court was asked by the U.S. government to give it the benefit of the doubt -- in legalese, the "presumption of regularity."

Before the publication of the photographs from Abu Ghraib, a similar benefit of the doubt was accorded to the U.S. military when it came to the treatment of Iraqi prisoners (even though the U.S. Central Command issued a press release on Jan. 16 saying that an investigation into alleged abuses was under way). Will the shattering of that presumption of regularity make the justices more receptive to the argument in the two enemy combatant cases that the executive branch does not deserve a blank check?

At the April 28 argument, Frank W. Dunham Jr., the lawyer for Yaser Hamdi (one of the U.S. citizens held without charge as enemy combatants), paid a left-handed compliment to his courtroom adversary, Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement.

"Mr. Clement is a worthy advocate and he can stand up here and make the unreasonable sound reasonable." Dunham said. "But when you take his argument at core, it is 'Trust us.' And who is saying trust us? The executive branch." It was that same executive branch that was issuing apologies last week for what President Bush called "a stain on our country's honor and our country's reputation."

James F. Fitzpatrick is a Washington lawyer who filed friend-of-the-court briefs for a human rights group in Hamdi's case and that of Jose Padilla, the other U.S. citizen detained as an enemy combatant. In a letter published in Friday's Washington Post, Fitzpatrick noted that Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had asked CBS to delay for two weeks its report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

In doing so, Fitzpatrick said, Myers "deprived the country of a full and forthright oral argument before the Supreme Court on the rights of U.S. citizens whom the government has detained as 'enemy combatants.' ''

"As it happened," Fitzpatrick pointed out, "the justices asked [Clement] what in the law would check the executive branch from torturing prisoners. He responded that the government would honor its obligations under the 'convention to prohibit torture and that sort of thing.' "

Obviously the justices in deciding the two Sept. 11-related cases will look to the specific legal points raised by the parties. For example, whether the Guatanamo detainees are entitled to challenge their confinement in court may depend on whether the justices conclude that the U.S. naval base there is "de facto U.S. territory." Likewise, the fate of Hamdi and Padilla might hang on the court's interpretation of an obscure statute that applies only to the detention of U.S. citizens.

Harry Litman, the former U.S. attorney in Western Pennsylvania who served as a law clerk at the Supreme Court, offers another reason why there may be no ripple effect.

"The cases are really about whether the federal courts can ever step in when abuses occur, so in that sense they already require the court to assume the worst," Litman said.

"Certainly there's a difference between assuming the worst for purposes of argument and seeing the worst in vivid and sickening detail, as in the pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison," Litman added. "But the court is pretty accustomed to looking past the nightly news to the long-term legal implications of its holdings, and I wouldn't expect the gruesome revelations to affect the court's decisions here."

But others familiar with the workings of the Supreme Court think that the Abu Ghraib revelations could make a difference -- if not in the outcome of the cases argued last month then in the way a majority opinion might be worded. Mr. Dooley, the creation of satirist Finley Peter Dunne, famously observed that "th' Supreme Court follows th' illiction returns." The question posed by the Iraqi abuse scandal is whether the court also follows CNN.