By now you probably know that the Supreme Court has dismissed the case of Mr. Al-Marri, which is a bad thing of course. Mr. Al-Marri was arrested on charges of credit card fraud by the FBI in December of 2001. He was in this country with his wife and five children to attend college in Peoria, IL. So far nothing really that out of the ordinary, but in June of 2003, 18 months later on the eve of a hearing to suppress illegally sized evidence in his criminal trail, he was declared an “enemy combatant” by the criminal President Bush.
He was then taken not to Guantanamo Bay like most so-called enemy combatants, but to a military brig in South Carolina. There he sat for nearly six years without any further charges against him. He filed suit to in Al-Marri v. Spagone to under the theory that a legal US resident could not be held indefinitely by the government without charges. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals found that based on the facts of this case, the President could indeed name anyone, citizen or not, as an “enemy combatant” and then hold him or her without charge for as long as the President felt.