A chilling decision.

Byline: The Register-Guard

In a ruling that shreds due process protections guaranteed by the Constitution, a federal appeals court last week said a wartime president can indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen who was captured as an enemy combatant and can deny him access to a lawyer.

It's an unacceptable decision that relegates the courts to the role of impotent observers in the hazy, ill-defined war on terrorism. If allowed to stand by the U.S. Supreme Court, the ruling represents a chilling expansion of the power of the presidency and a weakening of the essential oversight role that the founding fathers intended the courts to fill.

The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit came in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, who the government claims was captured in 2001 with Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Hamdi was secreted to a Navy brig in Virginia after the military learned that, having been born in Louisiana to Saudi parents, he is an American citizen. Since then, the government has held him as an ``enemy combatant,'' filing no charges against him and denying him access to a lawyer or even anyone from his family.

Last August, U.S. District Judge Robert Doumar, a Reagan appointee, ordered the government to expand its cursory, two-page explanation of why it has deemed Hamdi an "enemy combatant." The three-judge panel in the 4th District in Richmond, Va., overturned Doumar's sensible order, declaring that the president's warmaking powers under the Constitution allow the chief executive to make such decisions without court review - and apparently without regard to the Bill of Rights.

By all appearances, Hamdi probably was just what the government declares him to be - an enemy combatant who was bearing arms against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But what if the government is wrong and Hamdi was, as his father insists, a volunteer who went to Afghanistan to do charity work, not to wage war? Under the 4th District's ruling, Hamdi will never be allowed to ask a court to determine if the military's claims against him are accurate before he is confined for the duration of a war that may have no end.

The government insists its case against Hamdi is airtight, and that may true. But Americans have no way of knowing whether Hamdi is an enemy combatant or a wronged U.S. citizen. And in this country, that's something that should not remain a secret.

The 4th District panel also failed to explain why Hamdi should have fewer rights than the government intends to provide for foreigners who go before future military tribunals. Or Zacarias Moussaoui, whom the government accuses of being involved in the Sept. 11 hijackings. Or Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber." Neither Moussaoui nor Reid are U.S. citizens.

If there was a glimmer of hope, it was that the court took care to limit its ruling to Americans who are captured as combatants on foreign soil. By doing so, the court may have signaled that it does not intend to grant the government such unchecked authority in the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was secretly arrested by civil law enforcement authorities in Chicago last year and who is also being held without charges as an enemy combatant.

During times of war, Americans understand that there must be some shifting in the balance between civil liberties and government control. As commanders in chief, presidents must be afforded some additional leeway in making decisions that are related to national security.

But it is not - and never will be - acceptable for this country's citizens to be held incommunicado and without charges at the whim of a president. That's not the way things are done in this country.