Richmond, Va. – A divided panel from a conservative federal appeals court delivered a harsh rebuke to the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism strategy Monday, ruling that U.S. residents cannot be locked up indefinitely as “enemy combatants” without being charged.
The three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the government should charge Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident and the only suspected enemy combatant on American soil, or release him from military custody.
The federal Military Commissions Act doesn’t strip al-Marri of his constitutional right to challenge his accusers in court, the judges found in Monday’s 2-1 decision.
“Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the president to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them ‘enemy combatants,”‘ the court said.
Such detention “would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution – and the country,” Judge Diana G. Motz wrote in the majority opinion, which was joined by Judge Roger Gregory. Judge Henry E. Hudson, a federal judge in Richmond, dissented.
The government intends to ask the full 4th Circuit to hear the case, Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said.
Al-Marri has been held in solitary confinement in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., since June 2003. The Qatar native has been detained since his December 2001 arrest at his home in Peoria, Ill., where he moved with his wife and five children to study for a master’s degree.
The government said that federal investigators found evidence that al-Marri had links to al-Qaeda terrorists and was a national security threat. Al-Marri has denied the allegations and is seeking to challenge the government’s evidence and cross- examine its witnesses in court.
