Constitutional victory
Toolbox
Published: September 24, 2004
ne of the most alarming abuses in President Bush's war on terrorism has come to a peculiar resolution. On Wednesday the government announced it would release Yaser Hamdi from custody.
Hamdi is an American citizen, born in Louisiana, and an Arab whose family lives in Saudi Arabia. U.S. forces gained custody of Hamdi when Northern Alliance officials handed him over during the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. military was rounding up Taliban fighters, and Hamdi ended up in Guantanamo, Cuba.
Hamdi said he was wrongfully captured by the Northern Alliance in northern Afghanistan and was wrongfully imprisoned by the U.S. military. But the Bush administration viewed him as an "enemy combatant," a designation that led to the government's asserted claim that it had the power to rob Hamdi of all his rights.
It is unknown whether Hamdi is telling the truth when he says he had nothing to do with the Taliban and was not involved in the Afghan war. In America that is what trials are for. Until found guilty of a crime, suspects are presumed innocent and are protected by an array of constitutional rights.
These rights ought to be cherished by every American. Otherwise each person is vulnerable to governmental abuse. These include the right to legal representation, the right to know the charges one is facing, the right to bail, and the right to a speedy and fair trial. Unrestrained by these rights, the government could jail any one of us on the flimsiest of excuses — or with no excuses.
It was a shocking event when the Bush administration claimed it had the power to deny Hamdi all of those rights. The claim was not made on the basis of any evidence or charge. Bush was asserting he had the right to declare anyone he saw fit to be an enemy combatant and to lock him or her up with no trial, no charges, no legal representation.
Hamdi was just one man; there is one other, Jose Padilla, who is being held on similar charges. But the power arrayed against him was the power of a police state — until the Supreme Court stepped in.
In June, the court ruled, 8-1 mind you, that Buh did not have the power to discard the Constitution and that Hamdi had the right to contest his detention. It was a victory celebrated by civil libertarians of the left and the right. Then on Wednesday the government announced it would release Hamdi to Saudi Arabia, where he would rejoin his family, and he would renounce his U.S. citizenship.
So for nearly three years the U.S. government, on the say of President Bush, held a U.S. citizen in solitary confinement on no charges. The Supreme Court has shown that, in our constitutional system, the judiciary remains an essential line to protect us against governmental abuse. Authoritarian regimes frequently cite dangers to civil order as an excuse to round up and jail people who are out of favor. In Bush's hands the war on terrorism had become a war on the Constitution. It appears that, fortunately, this time the Constitution has won.
37