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Court Rules U.S. Can Hold Citizens as 'Enemy Combatants'
(Neil A. Lewis, truthout.org, 8 January 2003)
A federal appeals court handed the Bush administration a major victory today in ruling that a wartime president has the authority to detain indefinitely a United States citizen captured as an enemy combatant on the battlefield and deny that person access to a lawyer. . . . The closely watched case that set up a stark clash between the nation's security interests and its citizens' civil liberties, resulted in an expansion of the power of the presidency as the three-judge panel ruled unanimously that Mr. Bush was due great deference in conducting the war against terrorism. . . . The Hamdi case appears to be the first in modern American legal history in which a citizen has been detained without being charged and without being given access to a lawyer. . . . "The constitutional allocation of war powers affords the president extraordinarily broad authority as commander in chief and compels courts to assume a deferential posture in reviewing exercises of this authority," the court said. While courts are entitled to review detentions when asked, the court said that, "courts are ill-positioned to police the military's distinction between those in the arena of combat who should be detained and those who should not."

[Comment: And thus ends our judiciary branch of government. We have officially become a military state.]

posted by LoZo 1:18 PM