Nat Hentoff wants this issue on the table. Is there a candidate will put it there?
Judge Diane Motz's dissenting opinion:
For more than a year, a United States citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi, has been labeled an enemy combatant and held in solitary confinement in a Norfolk, Virginia, naval brig. He has not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one. The Executive [the president] will not state when, if ever, he will be released. Nor has the Executive allowed Hamdi to appear in court, consult with counsel, or communicate in any way with the outside world.
I fear that [this court] may also have opened the door to the indefinite detention, without access to a lawyer or the courts, of any American citizen, even one captured on American soil, who the Executive designates an 'enemy combatant,' as long as the Executive asserts that the area in which the citizen was detained was an 'active combat zone,' and the detainee, deprived of access to the courts and counsel, cannot dispute this fact.
Hamdi was picked up in Afghanistan but Nat's point is that defining a war zone in a war on terror is a very flexible thing.
You can call me JaySupposedly, he's moving toward John as part of a VP bid.