Detainee wins his freedom, but little has changed

It was clear to anyone who had an appreciation of the U.S. Constitution that the Bush administration was overreaching in its claim that it has the power to hold people indefinitely and without filing criminal charges on nothing more than an unsubstantiated claim that a person was an enemy combatant.
Eventually, the Supreme Court of the United States had to educate the administration on that issue, and now one of those combatants is being sent back to Saudi Arabia.
The administration agreed Wednesday to release Yaser Esam Hamdi , an American-born Saudi Arabian who was captured by U.S. soldiers on a battlefield in Afghanistan in late 2001 and shipped to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After officials realized he was a U.S. citizen, he was transferred to a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., where he remains -- but not for long.
After insisting for years that Hamdi's incarceration was essential to national security, government attorneys have agreed to put him on a plane to Saudi Arabia in a matter of days. In exchange, Hamdi will renounce his U.S. citizenship. He has agreed not to return to the United States or to go to such terrorist theaters as Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And he will not sue the United States for any injuries he sustained during his confinement in military brigs in Virginia and South Carolina.
A nation of laws
We are not arguing that Hamdi is a friend of the United States. And he may well be an enemy. But if the United States is to remain a nation of laws and if Americans are to be able to continue to claim that this country is a beacon of freedom, certain standards must be maintained.
If the government is going to put a person in jail, it has an obligation to tell that person what he or she is accused of doing. It has an obligation to allow that person to offer a defense against the accusations.
This is no more or less than the United States has historically demanded of other nations when U.S. citizens were incarcerated. For the sake of all U.S. citizens who travel abroad, it is a standard that must be recognized and maintained.
Though Hamdi has negotiated his freedom, the administration clings to its rubric about the Guantanamo detainees that Hamdi is being released because he's no longer a danger to the United States and no longer has any useful intelligence.
Thus, even in giving Hamdi his freedom, the administration is acknowledging no wrongdoing, and, in effect, continues to refuse to accept the wisdom of an 8-1 Supreme Court ruling in Hamdi's favor. That level of arrogance is frightening.