Ethics

Supreme Court Accepts Another Detainee Case

By Ed Brayton

The Supreme Court has granted cert in another case involving the indefinite detention of what the Bush administration has labeled "enemy combatants." The plaintiff is Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari national living legally in the United States who was arrested shortly after 9/11 and held for the last five years in a Navy prison without being charged with anything.

As the Washington Post notes, the authority to detain people living legally in the United States indefinitely without filing any charges against them is "one of the broadest claims of executive power the Bush administration has asserted in the nation's anti-terrorism efforts" (though not the broadest; in the Jose Padilla case, the administration claimed the unilateral authority to do this even to American citizens).

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on December 10, 2008 (boomark / email).