Saudi once held by U.S. returns home
Hamdi released after 'enemy combatant' case went to high court
From Phil Hirschkorn
CNN
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Yaser Hamdi, a Saudi once held by the United States as an "enemy combatant," returned to Saudi Arabia on Monday, a day after his release from the U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, his attorney said.
Hamdi, 24, arrived in Riyadh after a 15-hour flight on a military plane.
Attorney Frank Dunham said he spoke with his client just as he stepped off the plane. Dunham said Hamdi told him he felt "awesome" to be back in Saudi Arabia.
Hamdi was the first detainee whom the Bush administration designated as an enemy combatant as it sought more restrictive treatment of terrorist suspects in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
A Saudi national born in the United States, Hamdi became the central figure in a landmark terrorism case that went before the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year and dealt a setback to the administration's legal approach to the war on terror.
The U.S.-allied Northern Alliance captured Hamdi in Afghanistan in December 2001, turned him over to U.S. forces who then transferred him to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a month later. Once there, officials determined he was a U.S. citizen and brought him to the Navy brig in Norfolk, Virginia. Authorities transferred Hamdi to Charleston in August 2003.
Facing no criminal charges in the United States, Hamdi was barred from seeing an attorney until after two years in captivity and kept in solitary confinement.
Dunham, a federal public defender, challenged Hamdi's detention as unlawful, taking the case to the Supreme Court.
The U.S. government maintained that at his capture Hamdi had a Kalashnikov assault rifle and was traveling with a military unit of the Taliban, the deposed regime that gave al Qaeda safe harbor in Afghanistan.
Government officials argued his confinement was necessary to obtain all possible intelligence during wartime, including information about the enemy to help prevent possible attacks.
Dunham argued that Hamdi was "a civilian unaffiliated with any military force" who tried unsuccessfully to leave Afghanistan within days of the September 11 attacks and that he "never engaged in, nor did he intend to engage in, an armed conflict against the United States in Afghanistan or anywhere else."
The Supreme Court affirmed the right of the president to detain citizens as "enemy combatants" during a military conflict but held that such prisoners could challenge the merits of his captivity before a neutral fact-finder.
The majority opinion said that war was not "a blank check" for the executive branch and that "an unchecked system of detention carries the potential to become a means for oppression and abuse of others who do not present that sort of threat."
The agreement to release Hamdi, negotiated over the last four months, precluded any such hearing.
Discussions between U.S. and Saudi officials delayed Hamdi's scheduled September 30 release.
The agreement for Hamdi to leave U.S. custody also called for him to renounce his American citizenship; never travel to Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, Syria, the West Bank or Gaza; and for 15 years to report any intent to travel outside Saudi Arabia.
Dunham said Hamdi did not know until attorneys told him that he was an American citizen by virtue of being born in the United States. (Hamdi was born in Louisiana, but his family moved back to Saudi Arabia when he was a child.)
In the end, the attorney said, that was little to surrender. "When you've been in solitary confinement for three years and somebody puts a piece of paper in front of you that says you can get out of jail free if you sign it, you don't really worry too much about the rest of the fine print," he said.
Dunham said he wasn't sure what Hamdi planned to do after he reunited with his family.
"He may [have] some conversations with the Saudi government about where he's been for the last three years," the attorney said. "Other than that, I assume that he will try to resume his life as a young college student in Saudi Arabia.
"I feel very confident that they will see him as I did -- as a young man who is an engaging person with a good sense of humor who was caught up in a bad situation and that he never intended nor did he engage in any combat against anyone," Dunham said.
Attorneys for two other "enemy combatants" -- "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla and Qatari national Ali Saleh al-Marri -- are challenging their detentions in a federal court in South Carolina. Both are in the Charleston brig.
