Enemy Combatants

LET'S PLAY "Who's an enemy combatant?" A little old lady in Switzerland who sent a check to a charity to help an orphanage in Afghanistan -- but instead the money was passed to al-Qaida operatives? Enemy combatant. A man in London who thinks his cousin might be a member of al-Qaida but doesn't report him to authorities? Yes again. A teacher in Ireland who gave English lessons to an al-Qaida hit man -- or one of his relatives? You guessed it. What do they win? An open-ended ticket to prison, probably at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

WASHINGTON - The first military commission trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was halted Monday after a federal judge here ruled the proceedings invalid under U.S. and international law - dealing a blow to the legal process set up by the Bush administration to handle accused terrorists. The case against Salim Ahmed Hamdan was suspended after U.S. District Judge James Robertson ruled that the Yemeni man had been denied due process. The ruling affects all of the nearly 500 detainees from Afghanistan now at Guantanamo.

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.

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.

WASHINGTON - A federal judge yesterday ordered the government to explain why a Libyan detained at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should not be released immediately - setting up a showdown next week between the court and the Bush administration over the fate of alleged enemy combatants locked up on the island. Also yesterday, the Pentagon announced that preliminary hearings will be held next month for four other detainees, marking the first steps toward military tribunals that will be conducted in a newly built courtroom at Guantanamo Bay. Military authorities also said they were beginning annual reviews for many of the 600 detainees in Cuba to determine whether some should be sent home, a process the Pentagon established in response to criticism that the detainees lack due process.

The World A U.S. Marine who was reported to have been executed by Islamic militants in Iraq, Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, turned up alive and well at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. A car bomb exploded in the town of Khalis about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, killing 13 people attending a wake for the victims of a previous attack. U.S forces dropped 2 tons of bombs on a purported militant safe house in Fallujah, killing at least 10 people, according to officials, and turning the building into a 30-foot-deep pit of sand and rubble.

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba - As the United States freed the first detainee since last week's Supreme Court ruling that such individuals have a right to take their cases to court, the Navy secretary arrived here yesterday to oversee a process that could result in the release of dozens more prisoners in coming weeks. Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali, a 25-year-old Swede, was whisked away under heavy security by a Swedish charter plane in the middle of the night. He was captured in Pakistan in the company of Taliban fighters in 2001 and had been held in secret since January 2002.

The Supreme Court delivered a strong check to the president's wartime powers yesterday, ruling in two closely watched cases that U.S. citizens and foreign nationals imprisoned as suspected terrorists can challenge their detention in American courts. "We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the majority opinion in one case. The Constitution, she said, "most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake."

THE CAUTIONARY TALE of Jose Padilla and the new world of enemy combatants grew even stranger last week, as the Bush administration cynically used its Justice Department as a PR machine for tearing up the rule of law. After government officials argued for two years that Mr. Padilla's case was too sensitive to be handled in public via the court system, the Justice Department called a very public press conference to spill its beans. Deputy Attorney General James Comey Jr. gave what amounted to the opening statement of an imaginary trial.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court heads into the final month of its term today, set to render its first verdict on President Bush's handling of the war on terrorism. The court will hand down more than two dozen decisions in June, including whether the words "under God" should remain in the Pledge of Allegiance and whether pedestrians must identify themselves when police officers ask them to. But most legal scholars were focused on the series of cases that test the president's powers to hold suspected terrorists.