Enemy Combatants

It appears to be the beginning of the end of Jose Padilla's odyssey. Mr. Padilla is the U.S. citizen whom the Defense Department has detained in the Charleston, S.C., Navy brig since June 2002, when President Bush designated him an "enemy combatant," accusing him of plotting to plant a radiological "dirty bomb" on American soil. He was not charged with a crime. On Dec. 21, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rebuked the government and emphatically rejected its arguments. The government contended that Mr. Padilla's Supreme Court appeal was moot because it had indicted him on terrorism conspiracy charges in Miami in November.

A 19-year-old naturalized American citizen is accused of committing a crime of violence in the United States, and a gaggle of elected officials are urging for him to be treated as an enemy combatant and placed in the hands of the military. Not just the usual right-wing suspects but Rep. Peter King, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. John McCain are leading the chorus. Thankfully, President Barack Obama did not listen, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was charged in his hospital bed today by federal officials with using a weapon of mass destruction and malicious destruction of property.

WASHINGTON -- With the recent transfer of terror suspect Jose Padilla to a Miami prison to await trial, the sole remaining "enemy combatant" in the United States, Ali Saleh Kahlab al-Marri, still sits in the Charleston Naval Brig, awaiting the outcome of a slow legal battle over how to dispense justice when a terrorism suspect is a legal alien. In the eyes of the government, al-Marri is an al-Qaida sleeper agent sent to the U.S. heartland to help the terrorist network's operatives get settled here for follow-up attacks after Sept.

I n a recent New York Times op-ed, journalist Michael Kinsley suggests a system for deciding how to try people like the alleged Christmas Day underpants bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Mr. Kinsley suggests that our national border is the "bright line" that alone should determine whether suspects like Mr. Abdulmutallab are tried in U.S. criminal courts or in military courts. He argues that people captured within the U.S., regardless of their citizenship status, should be tried in U.S. courts with the same rights as U.S. citizens.

In their first decisions, military tribunals considering the status of the people held at the United States naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ruled yesterday that four detainees had properly been designated as enemy combatants who may be held there indefinitely. The tribunals, which opened for business on July 30 and which resemble courts only in broad outline, will ultimately consider the status of all of the nearly 600 people held at Guantanamo. Their rulings yesterday were more surprising for their speed than their substance.

I n a recent New York Times op-ed, journalist Michael Kinsley suggests a system for deciding how to try people like the alleged Christmas Day underpants bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Mr. Kinsley suggests that our national border is the "bright line" that alone should determine whether suspects like Mr. Abdulmutallab are tried in U.S. criminal courts or in military courts. He argues that people captured within the U.S., regardless of their citizenship status, should be tried in U.S. courts with the same rights as U.S. citizens.

WASHINGTON - Taking up what could be the most significant wartime civil liberties case since World War II, the Supreme Court announced yesterday that it would decide whether the government can indefinitely detain U.S. citizens it labels "enemy combatants" without giving them access to a lawyer or charging them with a crime. Setting up a potential showdown with the Bush administration over its tactics in fighting the war on terrorism, the court said it would decide by July whether the government could keep American Yasser Hamdi in custody as an enemy combatant after his 2001 capture on the battlefield in Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration yesterday abandoned an effort to hold on to a U.S. citizen captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan after spending nearly three years fighting to keep him in custody. Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said the military will release Louisiana-born Yaser Hamdi, 23, from the Consolidated Naval Brig in South Carolina as soon as they can arrange transportation and send him back to Saudi Arabia where he has lived since he was a toddler. "The United States has no interest in detaining enemy combatants beyond the point that they pose a threat to the U.S. and our allies," Corallo said in a statement.

WASHINGTON -- Four years into the war against terrorism, he hardly merits a footnote. Alongside other enemy captives - names such as Padilla and Moussaoui - he is largely forgotten. But new developments in the case involving Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, a Qatari immigrant arrested in rural Illinois, pose intriguing questions about how the government is handling high-value terror suspects in secret prison locations. The case also is shaping up as the first major test of the broad enemy combatant authority granted the president, which has drawn the ire of civil libertarians because it allows the government to hold people indefinitely without trial.

LONDON -- The British government's chief legal adviser said yesterday that Guantanamo Bay had become a symbol of injustice and called for the U.S. base to be closed. "The historic tradition of the United States as a beacon of freedom, of liberty and of justice deserves the removal of this symbol," Attorney General Peter Goldsmith told the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies, an independent policy forum. The comments were the strongest criticism of the U.S. detention camp by a senior British official.

The arrest on Christmas day of a Nigerian man suspected of trying to blow up a commercial airliner en route from Amsterdam to Detroit with nearly 300 people aboard was a stark reminder that the nation can't afford to let down its guard in the struggle against Islamic extremism. The suspect, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, allegedly tried to detonate explosives concealed in his underwear shortly before the plane landed, but the device fizzled and started a fire instead, allowing alert fellow passengers to tackle him and douse the flames.

Enhanced interrogation techniques" is the euphemism used by the Bush administration for the treatment of "enemy combatants" (another euphemism) - which included sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and, of course, water-boarding. I don't think it takes a big leap of the imagination to label EITs for what they are: torture. Time will tell if these "techniques" were justified, necessary or successful, but for now let's put an end to the name game. After review by the Justice Department, President Barack Obama has begun to release "secret" memos concerning the legal rationalization for the use of torture - mainly by the CIA - in gaining information.

The federal judge who this week ordered the release of 17 Chinese Muslims held for seven years at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo without charges struck a major blow for the rule of law amid the ongoing war on terror. In doing so, he delivered a major rebuke to the Bush administration's handling of those it describes as enemy combatants at the U.S. detention facility in Cuba. The men were ethnic Uighurs from Western China who had fled their homes for Afghanistan because they feared persecution by Chinese authorities.

GARMSIR, AfghanistanIn -- In the dying sunlight, the day's heat radiates from a farm compound's baked adobe walls, which enclose Marines slumped wearily against their rucksacks. Here in southern Afghanistan, where the men of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit are battling Taliban insurgents, life comes in a simple equation: There are men out there who will kill you, unless you kill them first. Out here, you've got to figure out how to handle the stress of that exhilarating and awful equation.

After the United States won its independence from Britain, some soldiers had the idea that America should have a king of its own - namely George Washington, their commander. Washington promptly scotched the idea. But if he were to see some of the powers asserted by his successors, he might wonder why he bothered. Few presidents have interpreted their authority more broadly than George W. Bush. He has claimed the right to defy a federal wiretapping law, used "signing statements" to nullify provisions of law that he dislikes, and ordered Americans arrested on U.S. soil to be held as enemy combatants without access to the courts.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will consider whether the Constitution protects the right of Guantanamo detainees to file writs of habeas corpus in federal court. President Bush says no - because judges should not question decisions about whom the United States chooses to detain in the "war on terrorism." But the history of Guantanamo itself provides the most compelling reason for rejecting such unbridled claims of executive power. In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush that detainees at Guantanamo were entitled to file habeas corpus petitions under a federal statute that dates to the nation's founding.

WASHINGTON -- Several Supreme Court justices questioned yesterday whether President Bush has the unbridled authority he has claimed to detain two U.S. citizens indefinitely as enemy combatants in the war on terrorism. The two cases, which the court heard back-to-back yesterday, are of Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was seized in Afghanistan, and Jose Padilla, who was arrested at an airport in Chicago. Both are American citizens who have been held for more than two years without charges and, until recently, had been denied access to lawyers.