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U.S. is ordered to release U.S. citizen held as an enemy combatant
By Neil A. Lewis
The New York Times
03/01/05 "IHT" - - WASHINGTON A federal district judge in South Carolina has ruled that President George W. Bush greatly overstepped his authority by detaining a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant for nearly three years without filing criminal charges.
The judge, Henry Floyd, said Monday that the government must release the American, Jose Padilla, within 45 days from the military brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where he has been held since June 2002. That left the Bush administration time to appeal, and a Justice Department spokesman, John Nowacki, said officials immediately decided to do so.
In his opinion, Floyd sharply criticized the administration's use of the designation of enemy combatant in Padilla's case.
"The court finds that the president has no power, neither express nor implied, neither constitutional nor statutory, to hold petitioner as an enemy combatant," Floyd wrote.
The judge said he had no choice but to reject the president's claim that he had the power to detain Padilla, who was arrested in May 2002 at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago and was later accused of having planned to detonate a radiation-spewing bomb in the United States as part of a plot by Al Qaeda.
"To do otherwise would not only offend the rule of law and violate this country's constitutional tradition," Floyd wrote, "but it would also be a betrayal of this nation's commitment to the separation of powers that safeguards our democratic values and individual liberties."
Floyd, who was nominated to the court by Bush in May 2003, said that to agree with the president would "be to engage in judicial activism," a phrase often used by the White House to criticize rulings with which it disagrees.
Although Floyd's opinion was notable for its sweeping language, its substance was not a surprise because it reflected a Supreme Court ruling last June in a related case involving Yaser Esam Hamdi. Hamdi, a Saudi who was a U.S. citizen by virtue of his birth in the United States, was arrested on the battlefield in Afghanistan and held as an enemy combatant in the same brig in Charleston.
The justices ruled that Hamdi was entitled to have his case heard in court, saying that "a state of war is not a blank check for the president." But they declined to rule on the Padilla case at the same time, saying his lawyers had wrongly filed their claims in New York instead of South Carolina, where Padilla was being held.
If the government loses on appeal, it will have to release Padilla or charge him with criminal acts.
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