Today, the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal by Ali al-Marri, who has been in federal custody in South Carolina since January 2002 when Bush designated him as an enemy combatant, claiming that he was an al-Qaeda sleeper agent. The order was in response to the Obama administration’s important move last week in filing criminal charges against al-Marri after 9 long years of detention without review by Bush, a move which transformed al-Marri’s detention to a criminal matter that will be heard in the normal course through the federal courts. He’ll now have the right to a speedy trial, be able to confront his accusers, the right to the effective assistance of counsel – the whole shebang.

The Obama administration’s decision to take this bold step shouldn’t go unnoticed to those of us who have been staring in paralytic shock over the last 8 years during which the Bush administration did whatever it wanted to foreign nationals and citizens alike in its “war against terror”. Bush even deemed as unpatriotic the notion that a federal court could ever review what the president does or why during a time of war – however, unconventional that war may be – thereby delivering a one-two punch to the constitutional principles of freedom of speech and separation of powers. Both of these, by the way, were swiftly decimated by Bush lawyers as revealed in the recently disclosed OLC memos.

In this case, the new administration correctly did what some have been saying all along – if there is evidence of wrongdoing, charge the individual with a crime and allow him to be tried in a civilian criminal court. The government has the tools to prosecute suspected terrorists and has done so in the past. It is clear that our courts can address the real concerns of national security, even during times of war, without reversing decades of due process jurisprudence.