WASHINGTON, 11 July 2003 — A US appeals court Wednesday again backed the government’s decision to detain a US citizen suspected of aiding the Taleban as an enemy combatant and said he is not entitled to the assistance of a lawyer.
The Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals refused Yaser Esam Hamdi’s request for a rehearing of a three-judge panel’s decision denying him the right to consult a lawyer and claim he is being illegally detained.
“Hamdi is being held according to the time-honored laws and customs of war. There is nothing illegal about that,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in an opinion accompanying the decision.
Hamdi is one of two US nationals the government has fought to keep in indefinite detention, arguing they are enemy combatants whose cases are not subject to judicial review — a position that has drawn fire from Amnesty International, civil libertarians and the American Bar Association.
Hamdi, 22, a US-born Saudi, was captured with Taleban and Al-Qaeda fighters after a prison uprising in November 2001 in Afghanistan.
