Enemy Combatant

When the news broke last week that the United States had tried to prevent Binyam Mohamed from suing the U.S. government — or even talking about his treatment at the hands of U.S. authorities before they would allow him to return to the United Kingdom — I wondered how many more former detainees deemed “enemy [...]

“Has the Obama administration changed the legal rules for detaining suspects in the war on terrorism,” asked Harvard law professor Noah Feldman in an op-ed in The New York Times today, “or is it continuing in the footsteps of the Bush administration?”
As I wrote when the administration first announced it would stop using the term [...]

Lawyers and court-watchers have been eagerly waiting to see how the Obama Department of Justice will define an “enemy combatant” — and wondering whether the new administration will continue to insist that the Pentagon has the right to hold people it suspects of assisting al-Qaeda or the Taliban indefinitely without charge or trial.
Well, today we [...]

Well, he doesn’t get to go free, but Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri — the last remaining “enemy combatant” who was picked up and held for the past six years without charge on U.S. soil — will finally have the privilege of being transferred to a real federal prison (from a South Carolina Navy brig) and [...]

Following up on Spencer’s post, The Los Angeles Times today makes much of the fact that Solicitor General nominee Elena Kagan Tuesday told senators that she believes that “enemy combatants” can be detained without criminal charge or trial.
Well, as much as civil liberties advocates might prefer that the new administration choose not to do that, [...]

Turns out that even conservatives can’t stomach the indefinite detention of a lawful U.S. resident, without charge, in an American prison.
In an amicus brief filed today in federal court, the libertarian Cato Institute and the conservative Rutherford Institute, along with the bipartisan Constitution Project, are urging the Obama administration to reverse course on the case [...]

By now you’ve probably heard that the Supreme Court has decided to hear the case of the sole legal U.S. resident detained indefinitely — yes, that means potentially forever — without charges, right here on U.S. soil.  All because President Bush decided on his own authority, that this 28-year-old father of five, who was then [...]