U.S. Signals End to Legal Fight Over an ‘Enemy Combatant’. Follow-up to a story that is a few years old. It is easy to revile Bush for trashing one of the core values of the Constitution, but perhaps a more interesting issue is, will executive policy be any different with Kerry as President?
The Justice Department’s announcement that it may soon free Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen captured in Afghanistan and held as an enemy combatant for nearly three years, signals an end to one of the longest and most important legal struggles to result from the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, administration officials acknowledged Thursday.
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Officials at the Justice Department, which failed to convince the Supreme Court that the government had the right to hold an American citizen as an enemy combatant indefinitely and without counsel, said that a decision to free Mr. Hamdi would not suggest any failure by the Bush administration.
Out of Spotlight, Bush Overhauls U.S. Regulations. “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” -President Bush (Aug 5, 2004)..
On the same day, deep within the turgid pages of the Federal Register, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published a regulation that would forbid the public release of some data relating to unsafe motor vehicles, saying that publicizing the information would cause “substantial competitive harm” to manufacturers.
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Allies and critics of the Bush administration agree that the Sept. 11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq have preoccupied the public, overshadowing an important element of the president’s agenda: new regulatory initiatives. Health rules, environmental regulations, energy initiatives, worker-safety standards and product-safety disclosure policies have been modified in ways that often please business and industry leaders while dismaying interest groups representing consumers, workers, drivers, medical patients, the elderly and many others.[snip]
Some leaders of advocacy groups argue that the public preoccupation with war and terrorism has allowed the administration to push through changes that otherwise would have provoked an outcry. Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, says he does not think the administration could have succeeded in rewriting so many environmental rules, for example, if the public’s attention had not been focused on national security issues.[snip]
Bush administration officials and their allies say they use regulations because new laws are not needed for many of the changes they have made and going to Congress every time would be needlessly complicated.