Yaser Esam Hamdi (Arabic: ياسر عصام حمدي; born September 26, 1980) is a former American citizen who was captured in Afghanistan in 2001.

It said he had the right as a U.S. citizen to due process under habeas corpus: to confront his accusers and contest the grounds of detention in an impartial forum.

According to his birth certificate, Hamdi was born to immigrant parents from Saudi Arabia in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on September 26, 1980.

[2] The Charleston Post and Courier reported that Hamdi ran away from home during the summer of 2001, when he was 20 years old, and trained at a Taliban camp.

[2] Among the surrendering Taliban forces, Afghan Arabs instigated a prison riot by detonating grenades they had concealed in their clothing, attacking Northern Alliance guards and seizing weapons.

The United States officer Matthew Campbell approached him, demanding to know his origin, to which Hamdi replied "I was born in America... Baton Rouge, Louisiana, you know it, yeah?

"[3] The United States transported Hamdi to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and detained him there starting February 11, 2002.

The Pentagon announced then that Hamdi would be allowed access to legal counsel because his "intelligence value" had been exhausted and that giving him a lawyer would not harm national security.

After the initial meeting, Hamdi was allowed to have confidential discussions with his attorneys without military observers, or video or audio taping in the room.

It ruled that U.S. citizens were entitled to the basic rights of due process protections, and rejected the administration's claim that its war-making powers overrode constitutional liberties.

[6] Shortly after September 26, 2002, numerous senior government political appointees of the Bush administration flew to see the conditions of detention for Mohammed al-Kahtani and two United States citizens then held as enemy combatants: Jose Padilla and Hamdi, as a result of legal challenges to the government's detention policy.

[12][13] The memos indicate that officers were concerned at the time that the isolation and lack of stimuli was severely affecting the mental health of Hamdi, Padilla and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, another U.S. detainee.

Supporters of the U.S. government's position included the American Center for Law and Justice; Citizens for the Common Defence; filing jointly, the Washington Legal Foundation, U.S.

[15] Opponents of the U.S. government's detention without trial of U.S. citizens argued that the practice violated numerous constitutional safeguards and protections, as well as international conventions to which the United States is a signatory.

On June 28, 2004, the Supreme Court issued a decision repudiating the U.S. government's unilateral assertion of executive authority to suspend constitutional protections of individual liberty.

She added that the Court had "long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens".

A 1948 federal law condemned the detention of Japanese-Americans without legal recourse during World War II; it prohibited the imprisonment of American citizens except pursuant to an act of Congress.

Assessing the Hamdi decision, Habeas Corpus scholar Jared Perkins noted "By ratifying in part and 'fixing' (as Justice Scalia put it) in part the executive's action against Hamdi, the plurality participated with the executive in the usurpation of Congress's power to define the curtailment of the public's liberties.

Removing this power (and, more importantly, this responsibility) from the representatives of the people seriously undermines those structural protections that Madison and others saw as the fundamental barrier to tyranny.

[18] Although Hamdi renounced his U.S. citizenship, it is unclear whether the renunciation counts as "voluntary", as required by the Supreme Court's decisions in Afroyim v. Rusk and Vance v.