A gumbo stew of good articles...

The Mother of All Messes

The trade and budget deficits have exploded. The US trade deficit is larger than the combined trade deficits of every deficit country in the world.

The US can no longer finance its wars or its own government and relies on foreign loans to function day to day. To pay for its consumption, the US sells its existing assets--companies, real estate, toll roads, whatever it can offer--to foreigners.

Republicans have run roughshod over the US Constitution, Congress, the courts and civil liberties. Republicans have made it perfectly clear that they believe that our civil liberties make us unsafe--precisely the opposite view of our Founding Fathers. Yet, Republicans regard themselves as the Patriotic Party.

The Republicans have violated the Nuremberg prohibitions against war crimes, and they have violated the Geneva Conventions against torture and abuse of prisoners. Republican disregard for human rights ranks with that of history’s great tyrants.

The Republicans have put in place the foundation for a police state.

I am confident that the Democrats, too, will make a mess. But can they beat this record?

There were no surprises on Barak Obama's trip to Israel. Everything went by without a hitch. Obama met with all the heads of state and party bosses and raced from one event to another without incident. He skillfully tip-toed through a political minefield that could have ended his presidential bid in a blinding-flash. But he never stumbled. There were no gaffes, no miscues, and no slips of the tongue suggesting that US policy under President Obama would be any more "evenhanded" than it has been under George Bush. Instead, the Illinois Senator made his way from one landmark to the next professing his "unshakable" commitment to Israel, just as expected.

"The way you know where somebody's going is where have they been. And I've been with Israel for many, many years now," Obama proclaimed.

Indeed.

A total of 64 civilians were bombed to death while The Times man was discomforted. Most were guests at the wedding party. Wedding parties are a "coalition" speciality. At least four of them have been obliterated – at Mazar and in Khost, Uruzgan and Nangarhar provinces. Many of the details, including the names of victims, have been compiled by a New Hampshire professor, Marc Herold, whose Afghan Victim Memorial Project is a meticulous work of journalism that shames those who are paid to keep the record straight and report almost everything about the Afghan War through the public relations facilities of the British and American military.

The US and its allies are dropping record numbers of bombs on Afghanistan. This is not news. In the first half of this year, 1,853 bombs were dropped: more than all the bombs of 2006 and most of 2007. "The most frequently used bombs," the Air Force Times reports, "are the 500lb and 2,000lb satellite-guided..." Without this one-sided onslaught, the resurgence of the Taliban, it is clear, might not have happened. Even Hamid Karzai, America's and Britain's puppet, has said so. The presence and the aggression of foreigners have all but united a resistance that now includes former warlords once on the CIA's payroll.

The scandal of this would be headline news, were it not for what George W Bush's former spokesman Scott McClellan has called "complicit enablers" – journalists who serve as little more than official amplifiers. Having declared Afghanistan a "good war", the complicit enablers are now anointing Barack Obama as he tours the bloodfests in Afghanistan and Iraq. What they never say is that Obama is a bomber.

In the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear as if he is ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan and, in effect, an invasion of Pakistan. He wants more combat troops, more helicopters, more bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the Republicans have built an ideological machine that transcends the loss of electoral power – because their collaborators are, as the American writer Mike Whitney put it succinctly, "bait-and-switch" Democrats, of whom Obama is the prince.

Mullen’s comments have been foreshadowed by a series of increasingly assertive statements from top officers, going back to the extraordinary October 2004 op-ed column written by General Petraeus—then a relatively junior figure—defending the Iraq war against criticisms by the Democratic presidential candidate of that year, John Kerry.

This culminated last year in the declaration by the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Peter Pace, Mullen’s predecessor, in response to antiwar protesters, that there were limits to the right of free speech and that “this dialogue is not about ‘can we vote our way out of a war.’” Pace continued: “We have an enemy who has declared war on us. We are in a war. They want to stop us from living the way we want to live our lives. So the dialogue is not about ‘are we in a war,’ but how and where and when to best fight that war.”

Such is the decay of American democracy that Mullen’s comments evoked no criticism, let alone condemnation, in official media and political circles. It is now taken for granted that top officers may challenge the primacy of civilian authority over the military with impunity.

This erosion of the constitutional principle of the subordination of the military to civilian authority and increasingly open intervention of the military in the political life of the US is the outcome of a protracted process, which has seen an immense growth in the size and self-assertiveness of the military apparatus, which rests on a professional army. In the 2000 presidential election, military officers played a critical role in tipping the disputed Florida vote to George W. Bush by forwarding illegal military absentee ballots, many of which may have been cast after Election Day.

 show trials: election counterpoint...

Hamdan Case Tests Military Tribunals

Even if Hamdan is acquitted of conspiracy and material support of terrorism charges — an unlikely outcome — he probably would not be released because he has been designated an “enemy combatant” by the military. The military contends that prosecutors would be unchanged by an acquittal even if international pressure mounts for his release.

Such international pressure came last week, when hundreds of European legislators filed a court motion to postpone Hamdan’s trial while he challenges the legality of military commissions.

In a new legal brief, the Europeans said they were “concerned that (Hamdan’s) imminent military commission trial will not exclude evidence that contravenes international standards of fair trial, due process and the protection of human rights.”

Arbour said international human rights law permitted the death penalty for the most serious crimes if trials are fair.

"There has to be impeccable due process, the process has to meet the highest standards of fairness," she said. "Frankly, I think the military commissions... fall short in many respects."

Shortcomings at Guantanamo included insufficient access to evidence by the defence. "I think the process is not adequate to justify recourse to the death penalty."...

Five accused al Qaeda prisoners who could be executed if convicted of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, appeared in court there for the first time last week after spending about three years in secret CIA prisons.

After a two-hour hearing, U.S. District Judge James Robertson declined Yemeni Salim Hamdan's request to delay the trial. Hamdan had challenged the trial, claiming that he was being treated unconstitutionally.

''His claims of unlawfulness are all claims that should first be decided by the military commission and then raised on appeal,'' Robertson declared from the bench.

So what is the meaning of the Geneva Order?

Clearly, everything at OMC and Gitmo is subject to that order, since it applies to all detainees. "Consistent with Geneva" is clear enough, so the question goes to military necessity, which is a term of art with a precise meaning in military law:

military necessity
"(DOD, NATO) The principle whereby a belligerent has the right to apply any measures which are required to bring about the successful conclusion of a military operation and which are not forbidden by the laws of war."

Any trial can potentially inflict inhumane treatment -- the panel might be ordered to find a defendant guilty without regard for the evidence for instance -- and the detention for trial can as well, obviously.

So the difficulty is this: how is military necessity per se applicable to a prisoner who is "hors de combat" (out of action)?

The laws of war forbid attacks on places which are undefended, and equally, all intentional abuse of detainees. It's difficult to see how ANY consideration of military necessity would apply to a detainee, and if that's the case, then the order essentially reduces to "we will obey Geneva unless we violate it".

Which brings a third premise:

3. An order which fails to state a definite object is 'void for vagueness'.

The Geneva Order fails to state any concrete object, while at the same time it presupposes an understanding of what "humane treatment" and "military necessity" mean. It ordered nothing, it was just a fraudulent smokescreen for committing war crimes against prisoners. If Mr. Feith (or Mr. Bush for that matter) want us to believe the order actually meant something, they could prove it easily simply by telling us what it means in plain English. Instead, they've spent six years trying to cover up their crimes and their lies.

 How elections are won and lost...

(Key words: can't believe, you morons, buy, that shit)

Election Fraud & Tyranny(1)

Mark Crispin Miller's new book, "Loser Take All," identifies and analyzes election fraud, the foundation of extremist power in the United States since 2000. Manipulated elections have enabled everything we've experienced from the Iraq war to the current economic meltdown. None of that would have been possible without the ongoing series of "surprise" wins for extremists and their enablers following the outright theft of the 2000 presidential election.

Miller illustrates his overarching analysis with a collection of carefully chosen essays. They map the rise of what key figures on the right and left refer to as tyrannical rule by the Bush - Cheney administration. Through a sequence of critical elections from 2000 on, Miller shows the particular outrages in each that enabled the retention and expansion of power. In doing so, he defines the basis for our current trouble.

"Loser Take All" is organized sequentially beginning with the critical election of 2000 through 2006. In addition, we're given predictions of anticipated problems in 2008. Just part of what we learn is how: Gore lost Florida 2000 even before election day; key Georgia voting machines were modified before the stunning losses by Gov. Barnes and Sen. Cleland in 2002; and, Bush won 2004 in the big cities, if you believe the national exit poll. Part 1 of this series covers the 2000, 2002, and 2004 federal elections.

The 2006 election resulted in major pickups for the Democratic Party in the House, enough to return them to power with a significant but not overwhelming margin. Senate seats were a tougher fight but the Democrats managed to gain a one seat majority in the Senate with surprise wins in Virginia and Montana. But that's wasn't the whole story.

Election Defense Alliance researchers Jonathan Simon and Bruce O'Dell studied the 2006 results and found that there was a net shift of at least three million votes away from the Democratic candidates in the 2006 elections for the House of Representatives. The Democratic victory margin was shaved by 4% according this highly persuasive analysis.

Simon and O'Dell conclude:

"there was gross vote count manipulation [that] had a great impact on the results of E2006, significantly decreasing the magnitude of what would have been, accurately tabulated, a [Democratic] landslide of epic proportions." (emphasis added).

 show trials v. due process...

Detainees, as Lawyers, Test Tribunal System

Col. Lawrence J. Morris, the chief prosecutor, said his lawyers were working to get the detainees what they need to handle their cases. But Colonel Morris argued that questions about nitty-gritty items like typewriters for detainees should not be seen as a setback.

“Sure it complicates the prosecution’s management of the case,” he said, “but not every complication is a problem.”

But when it came his turn on Thursday, Mr. Mohammed, known as K.S.M., dwelled on the challenges. He said he had asked the guards for paper so that he could begin to draw up legal motions. The answer, he told the judge, was that paper was not authorized.

Judge Kohlmann seemed to acknowledge the challenge of writing a motion without paper. Nevertheless, he told Mr. Mohammed, even such a small thing as a request for a pad of paper had to follow procedure.

“There’s going to have to be a motion,” the judge said, “in accordance with our rules.”

"First, the government suggests that several of the assertions in the intelligence documents are reliable because they are made in at least three different documents. We are not persuaded. Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has "said it thrice" does not make an allegation true.... In fact, we have no basis for concluding that there are independent sources for the documents' thrice-made assertions." Parhat v. Gates (CAD 2008), at 28.

In separate hearings, Mohammed and Walid bin Attash and their legal advisors ticked off one example after another of a pretrial system they say is barely operating. "We are not in normal situation. We are in hell," Mohammed told the military judge, Marine Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann.

Some of the defendants' claims were confirmed by government prosecutors, a Pentagon official and Kohlmann, who said he would look into them.

Last month, Kohlmann granted requests by Mohammed, a Pakistani, and Attash, a Yemeni, to act as their own lawyers in the case, in which they and three other men face a variety of charges in connection with the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. That means they are entitled to file legal motions and have access to much of the evidence -- like the Justice Department and military prosecutors seeking to convict them -- according to officials from the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions, which is overseeing the controversial and unprecedented trials.

Kohlmann acknowledged to both men that he never received motions each of them had written in their detention cells, nor other communications the men wanted the judge to see.

Three letters from Mohammed to his backup legal counsel, written more than a month ago, also were not delivered, according to Mohammed and the three lawyers. Recent court filings and other communications by prosecutors and the judge himself either were never delivered to Mohammed and Attash or were sent in English, not Arabic.

Attash, accused of training some of the hijackers at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, said he received one important six-page filing by prosecutors that had been translated into Arabic -- but not until Thursday morning, nine days after it was filed, as he was walking into the high-security court for his hearing. "I was handcuffed, and I didn't read it," he added, prompting the judge to call a recess so that Attash could read it.

Kohlmann appeared taken aback by the assertions and promised to look into them if the two suspects filed court motions requesting that he do so. He said he would consider ordering a mass translation of potentially thousands of court documents.

 habeas resuscitated?

Federal judge says US Department of Justice must give priority to Guantánamo cases

Attorneys with the Center For Constitutional Rights (CCR), arguing on behalf of detainees, said the delays proposed by the Justice Department would be a violation of their clients’ habeas corpus rights. The CCR’s Gitanjali Gutierrez told the court, “Our clients have been sitting in Guantánamo for years. After all this, the writ of habeas corpus will be rendered meaningless.” The CCR requested Judge Hogan order the Justice Department to turn over evidence within two weeks.

Following the hearing, another CCR attorney, Shayana Kadidal, expressed doubts, and not without some justification, that many detainee cases would ever reach the courts, saying that once they are ordered to make evidence available, the Bush administration would likely try to release detainees to keep evidence of Guantánamo criminality from coming to light in the courts.

The suppression of evidence regarding the systematic torture of those imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay has long been a major concern of the Bush administration. Just days prior to last month’s Supreme Court ruling upholding the habeas corpus rights of detainees, a “Standard Operating Procedure” manual in which Guantánamo officials were instructed to destroy interrogation records was made public by the defense team of Omar Khadr, a Canadian national held for six years at the notorious prison camp. Should evidence of the torture and abuse inflicted on Khadr and his fellow detainees not be destroyed, it would leave top officials in the Bush administration vulnerable to prosecution for war crimes.

Last week’s landmark Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush was a nail in Guantanamo’s coffin. For the third time in four years, the Supreme Court sent a strong message that it disagrees with the Bush Administration’s detainee policies.

The Court’s 70-page opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, holds that prisoners in US custody at Guantanamo have the right to challenge their detention via a fair process in federal court. Specifically, the decision says that the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which stripped the detainees of their right of access to the courts, represents an unconstitutional suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. The ruling overturned a lower court decision that found that the 2006 law was constitutional.

Like the Court’s previous Guantanamo decisions, the ruling is a victory for individual rights. But viewed as a whole, along with the laws and executive orders that they address, the decisions also provide an interesting case study in the checks and balances, highlighting the complex power relationships among, and decision-making processes of, the three branches of government.

The principle of separation of powers says that each branch of government should be confined to its own role: the legislature makes the laws; the executive executes the laws; and the judiciary interprets the laws. Although the Constitution does not contain an express “separation of powers clause,” the principle can fairly be inferred from the Constitution’s overall structure and language: Separate articles vest the legislative, executive, and judicial powers in distinct branches. Furthermore, particular clauses prevent legislative trials (the Bill of Attainder Clause) and parliamentary rule (the Incompatibility Clause).

The principle of checks and balances says that the Constitution prevents overreaching by any one branch through the checking function of the others. Here too, there is no express “checks and balances clause,” but the principle can be inferred from what the Constitution does express. The President can veto legislation; Congress can, in turn, override the President’s veto; the Senate must confirm principal officers nominated by the President; and the courts ensure that the other branches act within the Constitution, exercising a power readily inferred from the Supremacy Clause and Article III.

A moment’s reflection will reveal the tension between separation of powers and checks and balances. In order to check legislative excesses through the veto power, the President must in fact take part in making law; in order to constrain the President, Congress can hold oversight hearings and withhold funding when it disapproves of his execution of the law; and in order to keep the judiciary within bounds, the President and Senate may opt to only confirm judges whose approach broadly fits the elected officials’ conception of the role. In each of these and other instances of checks and balances, the very idea of checking entails some interference by one branch with the actions of another.

The Constitution contains no master rule for deciding when powers must be separated and when they can be shared so as to facilitate checking. That presents no difficulties where the Constitution’s language is pellucid. For example, no one doubts that the President can veto acts of Congress. But such cases do not give rise to litigation, much less Supreme Court litigation. How the Court resolves hard structural cases will thus typically depend on which principle—separation of powers, or checks and balances—the Justices consider stronger in any given context.

 Post-collapse thinking runs the gamut...

Dreams of a Better World

This has spared all sides the daunting challenge of coming up with constructive proposals for the future, but the downside is that those who sense the necessity for change are left with nothing but fantasies of a perfect world after an apocalyptic collapse to feed their hopes. In the process, it has been all too easy for many people to forget that in every other example in history, the decline and fall of a civilization leads not to utopia, but to a long and difficult age of warfare, mass migration, population decline, impoverishment, and the loss of priceless cultural treasures. Just as revolutionaries who insist that nothing can be worse than the status quo are often unpleasantly surprised to find just how much worse things can get, those who insist that today’s industrial societies comprise the worst of all possible worlds may find themselves pining for the good old days of suburbs and freeways if they get the collapse they think they want.

RC (ed: Ruling Class) Objectives for Collapse
What we do about the collapse has to be left for the most part, as the textbooks say, as an exercise for the reader. But to get you thinking about what we will have to cope with let me start with hypothetical RC objectives which we will then discuss.

- Preserve the power and perks of the RC as long as possible;
- Slow the depletion of resources radically [general obj.];
- Reduce the resource cost of the serfs radically [general obj.];
- Preserve the infrastructure for high tech – gadgets for the rich life and for control of the serfs;
- Reduce world population radically;
- Reduce the standard of living radically for the serfs who remain.

Discussion of the RC Objectives

It is clear that the RC has known about oil depletion since the Hubbert prediction of US supply peaking came true in '71 and verified a few years later. To my mind it was the Thatcher and Reagan Revolutions (they were mere front-men) that were the beginnings of the engineering of collapse. Hmmmm. That was less than 8 years later.

A few months ago, on the day following the most recent "Peak Oil and Community Solutions" conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio, some of the speakers and organizers gathered to compare notes and strategize. At some point during the lively conversation, Faith Morgan, the Director of the film The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, reminded us how, early in Cuba's crisis period, organic farming advocates had provided crucial advice that helped quickly transform the nation's food system; without the input of these previously marginalized alternatives advocates, the nation probably would not have survived. I was certainly familiar with the story: I have recounted it in print and in lectures on many occasions. Nevertheless, as Faith spoke, a (compact-fluorescent) light bulb flickered somewhere in my murky skull. Perhaps something similar could happen in other nations or communities—and not just with regard to food, but all the other aspects of modern existence. There are plenty of marginalized "alternatives" advocates who for decades have been researching and promoting low-energy ways of doing things that will make perfect sense in a post-petroleum environment. What if these folks could be mobilized and coordinated, their knowledge made readily available to local officials and the public at large, in preparation for the imminent period when existing systems start to fail in ever more obvious ways?

 empire via biochemistry...

The Calmative Before the Storm

While “mind control” as a weapon of war has proven chimerical, the Pentagon has hardly neglected its search for biochemical agents as mechanisms for repressive domination. Under the broad heading “calmatives,” such research continues to this day. The now-defunct Sunshine Project offered a preliminary assessment and defined calmatives as,

chemical or biological agents with sedative, sleep-inducing or similar psychoactive effects. Chemical calmative weapons such as BZ (3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, a compound related to scopolamine) were developed during the Cold War. Proponents of calmatives are creating a new and alarming legal ambiguity surrounding their use. …

The US Department of Defense (DoD) arguments imply the creation of two loopholes in the Chemical Weapons Convention: the possible definition of psychoactive substances as riot control agents, and a distinction between “military operations other than war” [MOOTW] and armed conflicts. In the latter, DoD argues that even toxic chemicals would be of operational utility. (”Non-Lethal Weapons Research in the U.S.: Calmatives and Malodorants,” The Sunshine Project, Backgrounder Series #8, July 2001)

In other words, while deploying these agents in the “battlespace” is prohibited under the Chemical Weapons Convention, their use on civilian populations during MOOTW, “if classified as riot control agents, can be acceptable.”

Broadly speaking agents were colloquially divided into “off the rocker” agents having psychotropic effects and “on the floor” agents causing incapacitation through effects on other physiological processes. “Off the rocker” agents prevailed since the safety margins for other agents, including anaesthetic agents, sedatives, and opiate analgesics, were not considered sufficiently wide for them to perform as ‘safe’ military incapacitating agents. Writing in 1971, Perry-Robinson noted:

“The psychomimetics in fact seem to be one of the very few classes of incapacitating drug which have sufficient selectivity to give a wide enough margin of safety. Some of them are sufficiently potent for CW purposes.”

In fact, it looks like the military are all set to start deploying a new generation of – well, as the report points out, they carefully avoid calling them chemical weapons. The preferred terms are nonlethal techniques, riot control agents, or, more commonly, calmatives.

The longstanding military definition of an incapacitating agent is:
…a chemical agent which produces a temporary disabling condition that persists for hours to days after exposure to the agent (unlike that produced by riot control agents).

From a military perspective, specific characteristics of such agents have been seen as follows:
(1) Highly potent (an extremely low dose is effective) and logistically feasible.
(2) Able to produce their effects by altering the higher regulatory activity of the central nervous system.
(3) Of a duration of action lasting hours or days, rather than of a momentary or fleeting action.
(4) Not seriously dangerous to life except at doses many times the effective dose.
(5) Not likely to produce permanent injury in concentrations which are militarily effective.

However, contemporary definitions emphasise rapid onset of action and short duration of effects, characteristics which reflect the current preoccupation with counter-terrorism and the associated convergence of military and policing requirements. Generally for reasons of politics and public relations rather than accuracy these weapons have also been referred to as “calmatives” and “advanced riot control agents”. Particularly in the light of this intentionally cloudy terminology it is important to note that incapacitating agents are distinct from irritant chemical agents, often called riot control agents (RCAs), both in terms of their mechanism of action and their effects. Riot control agents act peripherally on the eyes, mucous membranes and skin, to produce local sensory irritant effects, whereas incapacitating agents act on receptors in the nervous system to produce central effects on cognition, perception and consciousness.

Whilst incapacitating agents have commonly been viewed as chemical weapons, the term ‘biochemical weapon’ is also used to reflect the confluence of chemistry and biology in this area. As Dando and others have argued, greater understanding of biochemical processes in the body at the molecular level mean that it is now more appropriate to think of a biochemical threat spectrum rather than distinct chemical and biological weapons.

 habeas remains in jeopardy...

Court Backs Bush on Military Detention

President Bush has the legal power to order the indefinite military detentions of civilians captured in the United States, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled on Tuesday in a fractured 5-to-4 decision.

But a second, overlapping 5-to-4 majority of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, ruled that Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar now in military custody in Charleston, S.C., must be given an additional opportunity to challenge his detention in federal court there. An earlier court proceeding, in which the government had presented only a sworn statement from a defense intelligence official, was inadequate, the second majority ruled.

The decision was a victory for the Bush administration, which had maintained that a 2001 Congressional authorization to use military force after the Sept. 11 attacks granted the president the power to detain people living in the United States.

The majority opinion written by Judge William Traxler, who was appointed to the bench by President Clinton, acknowledged that the US Constitution “affords all persons detained by the government the right to be charged and tried in a criminal proceeding” and bars “the government from subjecting individuals arrested inside the United States to military detention unless they fall within certain narrow exceptions.” Such an exception exists, Traxler contended, if an individual is “properly designated an enemy combatant pursuant to legal authority of the President.”

Traxler’s decision further spelled out that such power extends not just to foreign residents of the US, but to US citizens as well. He wrote, “The constitutional rights our court determines exist, or do not exist, for al-Marri will apply equally to our own citizens under like circumstances. This means simply protections we declare to be unavailable under the Constitution to al-Marri might likewise be unavailable to American citizens.”

In other words, all a US president has to do is sign his name to a sheet of paper and any American citizen can be thrown into a military prison and detained indefinitely without being charged with a crime or given the right to a trial.

Ali al-Marri was due to stand trial on these charges in a federal court in Peoria, Illinois on 21 July 2003. However, on 23 June 2003, the prosecution told the court it was dropping the charges and that he had been classified as an "enemy combatant". On the same day, he was removed from the jurisdiction of the Justice Department and transferred to the military prison, under the control of the Department of Defense where he remains to this day.

The presidential order which labelled Ali al-Marri an ‘enemy combatant’ stated that he was closely associated with al-Qa’ida and presented "a continuing, present, and grave danger to the national security of the United States". He was held incommunicado for over a year before his first visit from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in August 2004 and was not granted access to a lawyer until October 2004.

Only two other people have been held as ‘enemy combatants’ on the US mainland to date. Unlike Ali al-Marri, both were US nationals. Yaser Esam Hamdi was released without charge in October 2004, more than three months after the Supreme Court ruled that a US citizen held in the USA as an ‘enemy combatant’ had the constitutional right to contest his detention before a “neutral decisionmaker”. He was made to renounce his US citizenship and transferred to Saudi Arabia. In November 2005, Jose Padilla, was indicted on criminal charges unrelated to the alleged terrorist plot for which he had been held in untried military custody for more than two years. The government’s announcement of Padilla’s imminent transfer to Justice Department custody came shortly before the Supreme Court was due to review the legality of his detention.