Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[seabass]

Court Rebuffs Bush On Enemy Combatants


Gets confusing with all the court rulings against Bush's little dictator experiment but didn't they tell him to stop this once already? But then........would someone with real dictator material obey the courts?



RICHMOND, Va. , June 11, 2007

Court Rebuffs Bush On Enemy Combatants

(CBS/AP) The Bush administration cannot legally detain a U.S. resident it deems an al Qaeda sleeper agent without charge and must allow him to be released from military detention, a divided federal appeals court ruled Monday.

The court said sanctioning the indefinite detention of civilians would have "disastrous consequences for the constitution and the country."

In the 2-1 decision, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel also ruled that the federal Military Commissions Act does not strip Qatari national Ali al-Marri of his constitutional rights to challenge his accusers in court. He is the only person being held as an enemy combatant on U.S. soil.

"To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the President calls them 'enemy combatants,' would have disastrous consequences for the constitution — and the country," the court said in its opinion.

Al-Marri has been held in solitary confinement in the Navy jail in Charleston, South Carolina, since June 2003. He has been detained since his December 2001 arrest at his home in Peoria, Illinois, where he moved with his wife and five children a day before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to study for a master's degree.

His lawyers argued that the Military Commissions Act, passed last fall, does not repeal the writ of habeas corpus — defendants' traditional right to challenge their detention.

"This ruling actually could – emphasis on could – do to the new Military Commissions Act what the Democratically controlled Congress has been thinking about doing for a few months now," says CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen, "which is to change the impact of the law to preclude it from taking away from resident aliens here in this country the right to challenge their detention or confinement in court."

Cohen added that the ruling doesn't mean the suspect will be freed.

"Like former enemy combatant Jose Padilla, al-Marri now likely is to be charged in federal court with various terror related charges and then we'll likely see a replay of the sorts of issues that only now are coming to light at Padilla's trial in Miami, mainly the difficultly in transferring a military case into a civilian one," said Cohen.

Federal investigators first charged him with credit card fraud, but the U.S. government says agents later found evidence al-Marri had links to al Qaeda terrorists and he posed a threat to national security.

They claimed he trained at an al Qaeda camp and met with Osama bin Laden and suspected Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/06/11/terror/main2913398.shtml