Enemy Combatant, Rest in Peace?

Harpers Magazine

March, 2009
Among George W. Bush’s controversial legal maneuvers was a repackaging of the notion of “enemy combatant.” If the President determined a person was an “enemy combatant,” the Bush Justice lawyers reasoned, he could be seized and imprisoned indefinitely with no right to a lawyer, to be confronted with charges or to present his case to a court. The President’s determination was the beginning and the end, and the rule first adopted at Runnymede in 1215, under which a person could only be deprived of his freedom by operation of law, was thus declared quaint and obsolete. During the campaign, Barack Obama pledged to overturn this abuse. Has he?..