Deal frees US 'enemy combatant'

WASHINGTON -- Yaser Esam Hamdi, the US citizen and ''enemy combatant" whose imprisonment without charges by the Bush administration for nearly three years led to a historic Supreme Court decision this summer, will be freed under an agreement with the Justice Department.

Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan while allegedly serving with the Taliban in November 2001, has signed an agreement that will allow him to return to Saudi Arabia as soon as transportation can be arranged, officials said yesterday.

In return for his freedom, Hamdi, who was born in Louisiana but raised in Saudi Arabia, will renounce his US citizenship and face strict travel restrictions for the rest of his life, the Justice Department said.

The accused Taliban fighter's case led to a Supreme Court decision in June limiting the president's wartime powers. Because the Bush administration is releasing Hamdi, it will not have to comply with the court's order that it give Hamdi and his attorney a chance to view and rebut any evidence against him before a neutral decision maker.

The release of Hamdi -- a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who the Bush administration once contended was too dangerous to be allowed a lawyer -- is the latest in a series of highly touted terrorism cases that have ended without convictions in recent months.

Also yesterday, the military dropped all spying charges against Senior Airman Ahmad al Halabi, a 25-year-old Syrian-American who worked as a translator at Guantanamo and had faced the death penalty. Halabi pled guilty to four minor offenses, including photographing a guard tower and taking a classified document to his living quarters.

That followed the collapse of all charges this spring against Army Captain James Yee, also known as Yusef, a Muslim chaplain who also had been threatened with execution after his arrest on suspicion of espionage at the base a year ago.

Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman, released a statement yesterday saying Hamdi's release would be under conditions that would ''ensure the interests of the United States and our national security."

''As we have repeatedly stated, the United States has no interest in detaining enemy combatants beyond the point that they pose a threat to the US and our allies," Corallo said.

Attorney Kevin J. Barry, a retired military judge who is cofounder of the National Institute of Military Justice, blamed the government for holding Hamdi so long when it apparently did not have evidence to sustain criminal charges.

''There seems to be an initial pulling of the trigger in cases like Chaplain Yee and Halabi and Hamdi that, once the dust settles, cannot be borne out," Barry said.

Among other high-profile legal setbacks in the Bush administration's war on terrorism:

None of the hundreds of Muslims detained in federal sweeps after the Sept. 11 attacks ended up facing terrorism charges, though most were deported on minor immigrations charges.

A federal judge in Detroit threw out two men's convictions for supporting terrorism after finding that a prosecutor withheld evidence that supported their claim of innocence.

An Oregon attorney and Muslim convert who was arrested and held for days after the FBI matched his fingerprint to the March Madrid bombings was released when Spanish authorities proved he was not involved.

A Saudi graduate student in Idaho was acquitted of charges that he supported terrorism because he ran websites for Islamic groups advocating holy war in Israel and Chechnya.

Two Muslim men arrested in upstate New York in a sting operation involving money laundering from a fake terrorist weapons sale were released after the Justice Department admitted it had mistranslated some key evidence.

Harold Koh, dean of Yale Law School and a State Department official in the Clinton administration, said the release of Hamdi calls into question the value of the Bush administration's detention policies.

''Three years after Sept. 11, it's worth asking how much safer we have been as a result of the government's detention efforts," he said. ''We see the cost in terms of civil liberties, but where is the protection to our country from all of this detention?"

Hamdi was born to Saudi parents living in Louisiana in 1980, which made him a US citizen. However, his family returned to Saudi Arabia when he was still a child.

As an adult, he traveled to Afghanistan, where he was captured by soldiers for the US-backed Northern Alliance in November 2001 and turned over to the US military during its invasion. The military brought him to its interrogation prison at Guantanamo Bay in January 2002, but transferred him to a naval brig in Norfolk, Va., when it realized he was a US citizen.

In June 2002, Hamdi's father filed a petition in federal court challenging his son's detention, beginning a long court battle over the Bush administration's contention that it could indefinitely hold him without charges or access to a lawyer because the president had determined that he was an ''enemy combatant."

The government refused to allow Hamdi's lawyer to meet with his client, contending that to do so would interfere with Hamdi's interrogations and jeopardize national security. After the Supreme Court agreed to hear Hamdi's appeal, the government reversed course last December and allowed the two to meet.

However, the Bush administration contended that it had allowed Hamdi to meet with his lawyer as a discretionary matter because his interrogation was complete, and military observers recorded the meeting.

The Supreme Court rejected that argument in its decision, saying citizens held as enemy combatants must be given access to lawyers as a matter of right.

Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch contends that Hamdi should have been released in 2002, after the fall of the Taliban regime ended the Afghanistan war.

She said the decision to release him now, while welcome, demonstrates that the Bush administration is making detention decisions based on politics rather than procedural justice.

''It is surely not a coincidence that a man who in early June was too dangerous to be released, now following the Supreme Court's decision that the government has to prove the legality of his detention, suddenly can be released," Fellner said.

The Justice Department did not specify the release agreement, but Hamdi agreed to stay away from the United States, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, Syria, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and to notify Saudi officials whenever he planned to travel anywhere else.

''They told him he can't go to places where basically he'd be crazy to want to go anyway," said Frank Dunham, Hamdi's lawyer.

Dunham said his client also agreed not to sue the United States, and the United States agreed to ask the Saudi government not to detain him further. He said that there was no gag order placed on his client and that the final agreement will be filed in court sometime in the next week, though it is already binding.