Just how Shafiq Rasul and three friends from Tipton, England, ended up in the middle of the Afghanistan war a month after the 9/11 attacks remains, at best, murky. The British men say they had traveled to Pakistan, where one of them was to be married, and, at the urging of a Muslim cleric, crossed into Afghanistan--without passports--on a humanitarian mission.

"I had quite a bit of money on me, and I wanted to go and help the people," Rasul said in a phone interview last week. Though their road-to-Kabul scenario has its skeptics, there is little dispute about what happened next: Caught up in a fierce battle between the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance and Osama bin Laden's Taliban, three of the young men were captured, turned over to American forces, and flown to the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Their Gitmo story--a tale of two-plus years marked, they say, by beatings, solitary confinement, and no apparent legal recourse--is now being told in the movie The Road to Guantanamo, which dramatizes detainee life based on first-person accounts. The timing of the film's release this week couldn't be more provocative: It comes just after three detainees committed suicide--the firstrecorded at the prison--and within days of a long-anticipated U.S. Supreme Court decision that may determine the future of Guantanamo Bay as well as help define just how far an American president can go in expanding his wartime authority while battling an unconventional enemy.

Enemy combatants. President Bush created special military tribunals two months after 9/11 and has defended them as potentially more effective than civilian courts in bringing suspected Taliban and al Qaeda fighters to justice. He also has refused to give prisoner-of-war status to the approximately 450 suspects being held in Guantanamo, classifying them as "unlawful enemy combatants" not protected by the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva accord gives prisoners the right to a traditional court-martial and other legal protections. Though a poll in March by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed the public divided on whether the government should hold detainees at Gitmo with no charges or trial, a growing number of critics argue that Bush has taken his commander-in-chief authority too far.

"When you fight a war not against a country but against a concept, it could go on forever," says Charles Gardner Geyh, an Indiana University law professor. "The court may be waking up to the fact if you don't draw some lines, executive power could continue to accumulate unchecked."

The case that eight justices will decide before month's end (Chief Justice John Roberts recused himself because he participated in the appeals court ruling on the case) involves Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Gitmo detainee since 2002 who once served as bin Laden's driver. Hamdan, charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism and murder, is challenging Bush's system of military tribunals, the first since World War II. He had a tribunal hearing suspended in 2004 by a U.S. District Court judge, but that decision was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington. The tribunals allow unsworn statements in lieu of testimony, do not permit review outside the military, and can impose the death penalty.