Hamdi Ruling - CBS comment actually covers the implications

Hamdi Ruling A Big Fed Win
January 8, 2003
 (CBS/AP)
Andrew Cohen (CBS)
(CBS) Attorney Andrew Cohen analyzes legal issues for CBS News and CBSNews.com.
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If Attorney General John Ashcroft himself had sat down to write a legal opinion that supported President Bush's immense power to strip a U.S. citizen of his constitutional rights he probably could not have penned one more powerful and sweeping than the 54-page ruling offered Wednesday by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The unanimous decision by the three-judge panel of federal appeals judges supports from soup to nuts the government's controversial position on the issue of "enemy combatants." In particular, the court agreed with the Administration that Yaser Esam Hamdi, the Louisiana-born, Saudi-raised man captured fighting in Afghanistan about one year ago has virtually no recognizable constitutional rights.

No right to visit with his own attorney. No right to substantively challenge the evidence against him. No right, even, to be charged with a crime as opposed to being kept in a military brig, cut off, indefinitely, from the rest of the world.

Over the objections of some 139 law professors who participated in the case as "friends of the court" on behalf of Hamdi (only seven law professors signed on in support of the government's position, if that tells you anything), the appellate panel declared that federal judges must defer greatly to the executive branch when it comes to matters arising "in the arena of combat."