US acting like Star Chamber, says judge
By David Rennie in Washington

The Daily Telegraph-UK
(Filed: 15/08/2002)

A judge has compared the Bush administration's actions over the
detention of an alleged Taliban fighter with those of medieval monarchs.

Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was in custody at the Guantanamo Bay naval base
in Cuba, was transferred to a military prison in Virginia after he
told authorities he was born in America. He has been held incommunicado
ever since.

The government has ruled that Hamdi has no right to see a lawyer, but
Robert Doumar, a US district judge, said he could find no precedent
"of any kind in any court" for the decision, and compared the
government's behaviour to that of 15th century English monarchs,
laying down the law through the secret hearings of the Star Chamber.

The case of Hamdi, thought to be an American citizen because he was
born in Louisiana, is becoming a high-profile test of the government's
aggressive approach to captured Taliban suspects.

Hundreds of non-American detainees remain at the Guantanamo Bay base.

Hamdi, 21, has been declared an "enemy combatant" who has neither the
constitutional rights of a US citizen, nor those of a foreign prisoner
of war. But the government has refused to release evidence supporting
the description.

Instead, government lawyers handed Judge Doumar a two-page affadavit
written by Michael Mobbs, a senior Pentagon official, stating that
Hamdi had told US interrogators that he went to Afghanistan last
summer to train with, and if necessary fight for, the Taliban.

"I do think that due process requires something other than a basic
assertion by someone named Mobbs that they have looked at some papers
and therefore they have determined he should be held incommunicado,"
the judge said at a hearing in Norfolk, Virginia.

"Just think of the impact of that. Is that what we're fighting for?"

Judge Doumar is expected to rule within days on whether the government
should surrender its interrogators' notes and other evidence.