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Yaser Esam Hamdi was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and then detained by the United States for almost three years.
He was a Saudi Arabian-U.S. citizen accused of terrorist involvement. Critics say his civil rights have been abridged, that he has not had due process of law. Examples are lack of formal charges and limited access to a lawyer.
According to his Saudi Arabian parents in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on September 26, 1980. As a child, he left the United States with his parents to live in Saudi Arabia.
In late November, 2001, after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Hamdi was captured by Afghan Northern Alliance forces in Konduz, Afghanistan, along with hundreds of surrendering Taliban fighters who were then sent to the Qala-e-Jangi prison complex near Mazar-e Sharif.
Among the surrendering Taliban forces, some non-Afghan fighters, known as Afghan Arabs, instigated a prison riot among the 600 prisoners by detonating grenades they had concealed in their clothing, attacking Northern Alliance guards and seizing weapons. An American CIA operative interviewing prisoners, Mike Spann, was killed, becoming the first U.S. combat fatality during the invasion. The prison uprising was quashed after a three-day barrage of rockets and heavy gunfire from AC-130 gunships gunships and Black Hawk helicopters. About 50 Northern Alliance soldiers and more than 500 Taliban prisoners were killed during the prison uprising. Two American prisoners, Hamdi and John Walker Lindh, were among the survivors.
Northern Alliance forces were reportedly paid a bounty for turning Hamdi, Lindh and other Taliban prisoners over to U.S. military authorites.
After interrogating Hamdi, the United States designated him an “enemy combatant” for his alleged support of the Taliban government of Afghanistan and flew him to Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In April 2002, after U.S. prison camp officials accepted his claims of U.S. citizenship, Hamdi was sent to the Naval Station Norfolk brig where he was imprisoned and held incommunicado without being charged and without a trial. After one month, Hamdi was transferred to Charleston, South Carolina, Consolidated Naval Brig where he he remained imprisoned until September 2004.
Hamdi’s case entered the U.S. legal system after federal public defender Frank W. Dunham Jr. read about his confinement in the news and filed petitions on his behalf. After a series of lower-court rulings, the government convinced a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, that the executive branch and U.S. military had sole authority to wage war and that courts must defer to military decisions in time of war. More than 100 law professors and other legal experts filed amici curiæ (friend of the court) brief on Hamdi's behalf, arguing that U.S. citizens can not be imprisoned without legal representation.
Armed with the federal appeals court finding, the Bush administration refused Hamdi a lawyer. In December 2003, the Pentagon announced that Hamdi would be allowed access to counsel because his intelligence value had been exhausted and that giving him a lawyer would not harm national security. The announcement said the decision "should not be treated as a precedent" for other cases in which the government had designated U.S. citizens as enemy combatants. Dunham was allowed to meet with his client for the first time in more than two years. Under guidelines drafted by Pentagon lawyers, military observers attended and recorded the meetings between Dunham and Hamdi, and Dunham was not allowed to discuss with Hamdi about the conditions of his confinement.
Hamdi's father petitioned a federal court for Hamdi’s rights to know the crime(s) he is accused of, and to receive a fair trial before imprisonment. In April 2004, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed to hear Hamdi's case, embracing the basic rights of U.S. citizens to due process and rejected the administration's claim that its war-making powers overrode constitutional liberties.
"An interrogation by one's captor, however effective an intelligence-gathering tool, hardly constitutes a constitutionally adequate fact-finding before a neutral decision-maker," Justice O'Connor wrote.
The U.S. Supreme Court opinion reasserted the rule of law in American society: "It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad."
Justice O’Connor added, "We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."
The Hamdi case supports an unprecedented separation of powers between the executive branch and the judiciary. During the American Civil War, the Supreme Court prohibited military detention of noncombatant Americans without appeal or writ of habeas corpus, as long as the courts were functioning. A 1971 law condemned the detention of Japanese-Americans without legal recourse during World War II and prohibited the imprisonment of American citizens except pursuant to an act of Congress.
The Bush administration claims that U.S. law does not apply to "enemy combatants" and, furthermore, the Bush administration asserts the right to decide which U.S. citizens are enemy combatants, ineligible for protection of their rights as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
Legal scholars hailed the Supreme Court decision as the most important civil rights opinion in a half-century and a dramatic reversal of the sweeping authority asserted by the White House after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In September 2004, Hamdi was released and deported to Saudi Arabia after agreeing to renounce his U.S. citizenship and promising to comply by strict travel restrictions preventing him from travel to the United States, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Hamdi is also required to notify Saudi Arabian officials if he ever plans to leave the kingdom.
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