Free Republic

Suspending Habeas Corpus by William Norman Grigg The Bush administration claims the power to detain "enemy combatants" indefinitely without trial, a suspension of the Habeas Corpus guarantee on which our justice system is founded. Some things are true even if the Washington Post says them. Reviewing the Bush administration’s conduct in the case of accused terrorist Yaser Esam Hamdi, a June 20th Post editorial concluded that under the powers claimed by the administration, "any American could be locked up indefinitely, without a lawyer, on the president’s say-so." Hamdi was among the Taliban and al-Qaeda personnel captured by U.S. forces in...

Scroll down the list of sobriquet-worthy terror suspects captured by the United States in recent months, and you will find no clear legal pattern. John Walker Lindh (the "American Taliban"), Richard Reid (the "shoe bomber") and Zacarias Moussaoui (the "20th hijacker") have all been charged with federal crimes. But another suspect, Jose Padilla (the "dirty bomber"), has instead been designated an "unlawful combatant," and is holed up in a military brig. Ditto the second "American Taliban," Yasser Hamdi. Whatever one thinks of the war on terrorism, it is legitimate to be concerned by these seemingly arbitrary classifications. Mr. Hamdi and...

Yaser Hamdi, once a hapless Taliban soldier, has made the trajectory from capture in Afghanistan to captivity in Guantanamo to legal celebrity in the Norfolk Navy brig where he now resides. With any luck, Hamdi, like the small-time thug immortalized in the "Miranda rights," may soon ascend to the status of legal adjective.

U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals HAMDI v RUMSFELD PUBLISHED UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT No. 02-6895 YASER ESAM HAMDI; ESAM FOUAD HAMDI, as next friend of Yaser Esam Hamdi, Petitioners - Appellees, versus DONALD RUMSFELD; W. R. PAULETTE, Commander, Respondents - Appellants. Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, at Norfolk. Robert G. Doumar, Senior District Judge. (CA-02-439- 2) Argued: June 25, 2002 Decided: July 12, 2002 Before WILKINSON, Chief Judge, and WILKINS and TRAXLER, Circuit Judges. Reversed and remanded by published opinion. Chief Judge Wilkinson wrote the opinion,...

<p>RICHMOND, Va. (AP) --  A federal appeals court ruled Friday that a suspected American-born Taliban fighter cannot meet with his lawyers because the judge who ordered the meetings did not adequately consider the government's position that the prisoner is an enemy combatant.</p>

It's too early to call it an avalanche of momentum or even a trend, but it is slowly becoming clear that the federal courts are backing the Bush administration in the legal war on terror. On Friday, the Supreme Court gave the Justice Department two minor victories in the area of immigration detention. The justices agreed to hear two important cases next term. Earlier in the week, a federal appeals court sided with the administration in the case of Yassir Esam Hamdi, an American citizen now currently held incommunicado as an "enemy combatant." Combine those recent rulings with the government's...

WASHINGTON, Apr 09, 2002 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The U.S. government's options for handling American-born prisoner Yasser Esam Hamdi include sending him to Saudi Arabia, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said. Hamdi is the only prisoner to be taken from the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United States, Rumsfeld said Monday. Hamdi, 22, was transferred Friday to a prison at the Norfolk Naval Station in Virginia. Rumsfeld said Hamdi - who was born in Baton Rouge, La., to Saudi Arabian parents in 1979 - probably has dual U.S. and Saudi citizenship. Hamdi's parents returned to...