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Male: John Hafetz is going to be talking about the Al-Marri case, which raises the critically
important question about who may properly be designated as an enemy combatant and held
in military detention and who has to be tried within the criminal courts of the United States.
Mr. Al-Marri is the only person now being held as an enemy combatant within the United
States. He's being held in South Carolina and he was, as John will explain, arrested
and detained in Illinois. He was on his way to a criminal trial when the government chose
to re-designate him as an enemy combatant. Male: The import of this question is really
I think is really self-evident. If someone like Al-Marri can be detained as an enemy
combatant, though the allegations him are severe, there's really no limit to who can
be subjected to indefinite military detention within the United States. The case is effectively
a crossing of what I would call a constitutional Rubicon. Once you've allowed the executive
to detain people indefinitely because he labels them suspected enemies affiliated with terrorist
organizations, perhaps plotting terrorist acts, there's really no limiting principle.
The whole tradition of civilian supremacy and the principle of the right to criminal
process for those accused of wrong doing becomes swallowed up by the specter of military detention
power. Male: That's a different question than what
you do with people who are carrying rifles and shooting at U.S. forces on an active battlefield.
We have never had a system of criminal preventive detention in this country, and I don't think
that this is the occasion to begin.