In another harsh rebuke to the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism strategy, a divided federal appeals panel ruled Monday that the government cannot detain U.S. residents indefinitely without charging them by declaring them enemy combatants. The three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the nation’s most conservative, also ruled that the government should charge Ali al-Marri or release him from military custody. ‘Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them ‘enemy combatants,” the court said. Such detention ‘would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution - and the country,’ Judge Diana G. Motz wrote in the majority opinion. The court also found that the federal Military Commissions Act doesn’t strip Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident and the only alleged enemy combatant held on American soil, of his constitutional right to challenge his accusers in court. Al-Marri’s lawyer, Jonathan Hafetz, of the Brennan Center for Justice, said the decision protects both U.S. citizens and legal aliens and shows that the Bush administration ‘can’t […]