JUSTICES ERASE RULING THAT ALLOWED A DETENTION

March 7, 2009 Sandy G.

By ADAM LIPTAK

The Supreme Court on Friday erased a lower-court ruling on perhaps the most fundamental national security question of all: Does the president have the power to order the indefinite military detention of legal residents of the United States?

The court’s action, which had been urged by the Obama administration, wiped away one of the Bush administration’s greatest victories in the lower courts, a 2008 ruling that expanded the limits of executive authority to combat terrorism by allowing such detentions.

But the one-paragraph Supreme Court ruling leaves open the question of whether the military detention of legal residents as enemy combatants can ever be constitutional. The ruling came in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar who was lawfully in the United States as a student when he was arrested in 2001. The court, which had agreed to hear Mr. Marri’s challenge to his detention in December, said it would not hear the case after all in light of his indictment last week on criminal charges in federal court.

More significantly, the court erased the lower-court ruling in the case, al-Marri v. Spagone, 08-368. Last year, in a fractured decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., said the president had the legal authority to detain Mr. Marri, subject to a court hearing on whether he was properly designated an enemy combatant.

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~Sandy G.

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