Yaser Esam Hamdi

After the decision, Frank Dunham, Hamdi’s lawyer, was finally able to meet with him in February 2004, more than two years after he was incarcerated. Under Pentagon guidelines, military observers attended and recorded their meetings. Dunham was not allowed to discuss with Hamdi the conditions of his confinement. By this time, he had been transferred to the Navy Brig in Charleston, South Carolina. After the initial meeting, Hamdi was allowed to have confidential discussions with his attorneys without military observers, or video or audio taping in the room.

Assessing the Hamdi decision, Habeas Corpus scholar Jared Perkins noted "By ratifying in part and ‘fixing’ (as Justice Scalia put it) in part the executive's action against Hamdi, the plurality participated with the executive in the usurpation of Congress's power to define the curtailment of the public's liberties. Removing this power (and, more importantly, this responsibility) from the representatives of the people seriously undermines those structural protections that Madison and others saw as the fundamental barrier to tyranny. "

Twelve U.S. Supreme Court amici curiæ briefs were filed in the Hamdi case, including nine on behalf of Hamdi and three in support of the government. Supporters of the U.S. government's position included the American Center for Law and Justice; Citizens for the Common Defence; filing jointly, the Washington Legal Foundation, U.S. Representatives Joe Barton (R–Tex.), Walter Jones (R–N.C.), and Lamar Smith (R–Tex.), and Allied Educational Foundation [1]; and, also filing jointly, the Center for American Unity, Friends of Immigration Law Enforcement, National Center on Citizenship and Immigration, and U.S. Representatives Dana Rohrabacher (R–Calif.), Lamar Smith, Tom Tancredo (R–Colo.), Roscoe Bartlett (R–Md.), Mac Collins (R–Ga.), Joe Barton, and Jimmy Duncan (R–Tenn.).

In 2008, 91 pages of memos drafted in 2002 by officers at the Naval Consolidated Brig, Charleston, were made public under an FOIA petition. As reported by news outlets, the emails and memos described the officers' concerns for the sanity of the detainees due to the conditions of their confinements at the time, which included extended solitary confinement. The memos indicate that officers were concerned at the time that the isolation and lack of stimuli was severely affecting the mental health of Hamdi, Padilla and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, another U.S. detainee.

On June 28, 2004, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the United States Supreme Court upheld the U.S. government's ability to detain him indefinitely as an enemy combatant, but granted him some due process rights and the ability to contest his enemy combatant status. It said he had the right as a U.S. citizen to due process under habeas corpus: to confront his accusers and contest the grounds of detention in an impartial forum.

Hamdi's father petitioned a federal court for Hamdi's rights to know the crime(s) he is accused of, and to receive a fair trial before imprisonment. In January 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Hamdi's case (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld). It ruled that U.S. citizens were entitled to the basic rights of due process protections, and rejected the administration's claim that its war-making powers overrode constitutional liberties.

On June 28, 2004, the Supreme Court issued a decision repudiating the U.S. government's unilateral assertion of executive authority to suspend constitutional protections of individual liberty.

After agreeing to renounce his U.S. citizenship, Hamdi was released on October 9, 2004, without being charged and was deported to Saudi Arabia. He had to promise to comply with strict travel restrictions, which prohibited him from traveling to the United States, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Hamdi was required to notify Saudi Arabian officials if he ever plans to leave the kingdom. He had to promise not to sue the U.S. government over his captivity.

Armed with a federal appeals court finding, the Bush administration refused Hamdi a lawyer until December 2003. The Pentagon announced then that Hamdi would be allowed access to legal counsel because his "intelligence value" had been exhausted and that giving him a lawyer would not harm national security. The announcement said the decision "should not be treated as a precedent" for other cases in which the government had designated U.S. citizens as "illegal enemy combatants". (José Padilla was then the only other U.S. citizen known to be imprisoned by the U.S. government as an "illegal enemy combatant").

The United States transported Hamdi to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and detained him there starting February 11, 2002. On April 5, the government transferred Hamdi to a jail at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia.

On August 1, 2002, the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice issued a memo signed by Jay S. Bybee to John A. Rizzo, Acting General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency regarding authorized interrogation and detention techniques for the detainees in the war on terror. It approved ten "enhanced interrogation" techniques including waterboarding.

Shortly after September 26, 2002, numerous senior government political appointees of the Bush Administration flew to see the conditions of detention for Mohammed al-Kahtani and two United States citizens then held as enemy combatants: Jose Padilla and Hamdi, as a result of legal challenges to the government's detention policy. The officials included the following:

In late November 2001, after the United States invasion of Afghanistan, Hamdi was captured by Afghan Northern Alliance forces in Kunduz, Afghanistan, along with hundreds of surrendering Taliban fighters. All the men were sent to the Qala-e-Jangi prison complex near Mazar-i-Sharif.

Some legal scholars hailed the Supreme Court decision as the most important civil rights opinion in a half-century. They said that it was a dramatic reversal of the sweeping authority asserted by President Bush since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Yaser Esam Hamdi (born September 26, 1980) is a former American citizen who was captured in Afghanistan in 2001. The United States government claims that he was fighting with the Taliban against U.S. and Afghan Northern Alliance forces. He was declared an "illegal enemy combatant" by the Bush administration and detained for almost three years without charge. Born in Louisiana, he was a U.S. citizen. On October 9, 2004, on the condition that he renounce his U.S. citizenship and commit to travel prohibitions and other conditions, the government released him and deported him to Saudi Arabia, where he had been raised.

According to his birth certificate, Hamdi was born to immigrant parents from Saudi Arabia in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on September 26, 1980. As a child, he moved with his parents from the United States back to Saudi Arabia, where he grew up. The Charleston Post and Courier reported that Hamdi ran away from home during the summer of 2001, when he was 20 years old, and trained at a Taliban camp. His family said that he spent only a few weeks at the camp, "where he quickly became disillusioned". He was caught up in the fighting and chaos after the United States invaded Afghanistan.

The Hamdi decision reaffirmed the importance of separation of powers among the branches of the government, and, in particular, the role of the judiciary in reviewing actions of the executive branch infringing the rights of citizens even in emergencies. After the American Civil War, the Supreme Court prohibited military detention of noncombatant Americans without appeal or writ of habeas corpus as long as courts were functioning; the difference with this case being that the Supreme Court waited until the war was over to decide the case. A 1948 federal law condemned the detention of Japanese-Americans without legal recourse during World War II; it prohibited the imprisonment of American citizens except pursuant to an act of Congress.