Following up on my post from last week, Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri is now a criminal in the civilian justice system:

The Supreme Court on Friday wiped out a lower court ruling that gave the President the authority to detain indefinitely as terrorism suspects individuals who are living legally in the United States. The order also approved transfer of Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri from military custody to civilian custody for a trial on criminal charges in a regular federal court, presumably in Illinois.

The 1-page SCOTUS order is linked from that article. This decision is interesting, in that the SCOTUS not only remanded the case back to the appellate court for dismissal on mootness grounds, it also vacated the appellate court’s opinion that the President had the right to hold enemy combatants indefinitely inside the US. Since the SCOTUS issued no opinion, this has the effect of removing that decision as precedent, without providing a new precedent. In other words, there is now no Federal court opinion on the issue of whether the President, as Commander in Chief, can hold enemy combatants indefinitely.

On the one hand, the Al-Marri team got its wish to move the case to the civilian courts, but on the other, did not get the desired ruling that the President had overstepped his authority.

I have a hard time distinguishing the treatment of Al-Marri from the treatment of the original WTC bombers from 1993, or, for that matter, Moussaoui post 9/11. To me, this matter is completely different from the issue of detaining foreign combatants capture on foreign soil for foreign acts. I never bought the argument that the whole world is the battlefield of the GWoT, which was used to justify the detention of both Padilla and Al-Marri. This is the right outcome.