Yaser Hamdi-No lawyer for enemy combatants

[sfc_darrel]

No Sir, Yaser
The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has overruled a federal district judge's decision that Yaser Hamdi, a Louisiana-born Saudi-American captured in Afghanistan and being held as an enemy combatant in Norfolk, Va., is entitled to a lawyer. The Fourth Circuit hasn't resolved the matter definitively, only ordering the district court to reconsider the issue:

Our Constitution's commitment of the conduct of war to the political branches of American government requires the court's respect at every step. Because the district court appointed counsel and ordered access to the detainee without adequately considering the implications of its actions an before allowing the United States even to respond, we reverse the court's June 11 order mandating access to counsel and remand the case for proceedings consistent with this opinion.

The court endorses the principle that the federal government may hold enemy combatants without charge or counsel, but seems to leave open the possibility that judges can review the designation of a prisoner as a combatant: "It has long been established that if Hamdi is indeed an 'enemy combatant' who was captured during hostilities in Afghanistan, the government's present detention of him is a lawful one," Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson writes for a unanimous three-judge panel (emphasis ours). That italicized qualification ought to silence the civil-liberties hysterics who are worried that the government will be able to detain American citizens for no reason.

A Seattle Times report illustrates why it's important that the government have the ability to keep enemy
combatants out of the criminal-justice system:

A British Taliban fighter in custody in Guantanamo Bay provided U.S. investigators a crucial link between a group of Seattle militant Muslims and members of a radical mosque in London, federal sources say.

The prisoner, Feroz Abbassi, told CIA interrogators earlier this year that he had traveled to Afghanistan from London in 2000 with an American--a Muslim convert now suspected of being a key figure in the Seattle group suspected of supporting the al-Qaida terrorist network.

Would the CIA have been able to extract this information if Abbassi had a lawyer advising him to invoke the Fifth amendment? Another Times report says that the cell used a ranch in Bly, Ore., "as a possible training camp for jihad fighters":

For about six months beginning in September 1999, Semi Osman--a cleric at a small Seattle mosque named Dar-us-Salaam--lived on the ranch, a few miles outside town. Osman is now in federal custody in Seattle, charged with immigration and weapons violations and under investigation for terror-related activities. . . .

Among the men at the ranch in December 1999 were two men who federal investigators believe were sent by al-Qaida leaders to check out the ranch as a potential training camp. . . .

The two men were followers of Abu Hamza, leader of the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park, the heart of militant Islam in Europe.

Abu Hamza applauded the Sept. 11 attacks. His mosque had been attended by Zacarias Moussaoui, the only man charged in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, and by Richard Reid, the man accused of trying to blow up an American Airlines jetliner with explosives in his shoes.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/