Free Republic

A federal judge was aghast over the Trump administration’s assertion it could indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant without providing access to a lawyer, saying the Justice Department’s defense of the practice amounted to “an end run” around the man’s Constitutional rights. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is weighing a request by the American Civil Liberties Union to allow the group access to the man in order to provide him legal representation. “He wants counsel, which is an assertion and a request that I don’t think I can ignore,” Judge Chutkan said Monday, adding that she plans...

An American citizen detained overseas by the U.S. military has asked the American Civil Liberties Union to sue the Trump administration for holding him as an enemy combatant. The unidentified man spoke with ACLU attorneys this week and said they could challenge his detention in federal court, the ACLU wrote in a court filing entered Friday. “The Trump administration illegally denied an American his rights to access a lawyer and a court for nearly four months, but those efforts have finally failed,” said ACLU attorney Jonathan Hafetz. “Now that our client has secured the judicial review that the government attempted...

Lawyers for an American citizen facing execution in Iraq appealed Friday in U.S. federal court to keep the man in American custody — preventing his death — while another case is being appealed. The citizen, Mohammad Munaf, was convicted and sentenced to death by an Iraqi judge earlier this week on charges he helped in the 2005 kidnapping of three Romanian journalists in Baghdad, court papers show. Iraqi-born Munaf, a naturalized U.S. citizen since 2000, was working as their translator and guide. He maintains his innocence. In an emergency request filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Washington, Munaf's attorneys...